Advertising in These United States

The contemporary American diet is largely a result of the advertising and marketing that has nurtured it since the last decade of the nineteenth century. Our gulp-and-go lifestyle may have originated long before the advent of cornflakes and Gatorade, but it cannot be denied that the hundreds of billions spent each year on advertising have influenced our eating habits as in no other culture. In its earlier years advertising had a unifying effect, cobbling together a common culture out of a multitude of displaced migrants and immigrants, all eating Campbell’s soup and drinking Coke. Today, the homogenizing effect of advertising has weakened as each subgroup gets its own culturally specific product. Indeed, advertising may be one of the main contributors to the new multicultural society. Nevertheless, the unstated ideology of the United States, the creed of consumption, will continue to unite us, even if one chooses to fill his bowl with vanilla Häagen Dazs, and another, with dulce de leche.