The Hidden Costs of a High-Calorie Recession

This persistent recession is taking its human toll. I saw a man with a “Will Work For Food” sign the other day, and it was wrenching. The sign wasn’t a shred of cardboard with unruly scrawl. It was a neat sign, the kind you’d have done a Kinko’s, and the man was neatly dressed. His plea brought to mind the chapter in my book called “The Calorie Heuristic”—which I’m excerpting a bit of here:

“These words are always painful to read, because they remind us of life’s fragility. They also pluck a deep chord in our psyche, because they reduce life to our most fundamental needs. After all, the sentiment behind those poignant words can be traced all the way back to a time when our earliest ancestors did indeed work for food. In the eons before minimum wages and credit cards and 401-Ks and stock market crashes, the closest thing to earnings and savings was bounty from the hunt. Food was more than nourishment. It was an asset.

So how are all our basic needs and behaviors—hunger and gluttony and frugality and charity and stinginess—connected in the brain? Put simply: Could comfort food translate into feelings of financial security? Might there be a link between satiety and generosity? Can we literally be hungry for money? Psychologists at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium have been exploring this dynamic. Barbara Briers and her colleagues did a series of three experiments designed to tease apart the connections between nourishment and personal finances. In the first, they deprived some people of food for four hours, long enough that they wouldn’t be starving but they would almost certainly have food on their mind. Others ate as usual. Then they put all of them in a real-life simulation where they were asked to donate to one of several causes. Those with the growling stomachs consistently gave less money to charity, suggesting that when people sense scarcity in one domain, they conserve resources in another. Put another way, people with physical cravings are in no mood to be magnanimous.

In the second study, Briers actually let the participants eat as usual, but with some she triggered their appetites by wafting the scent of baked brownies into the lab. Then they played a computer game that, like the earlier simulation, tested their generosity. Again, those with food on their minds were less willing to part with their cash. Interestingly, in this study none of the participants was actually hungry, meaning that the desire for brownies alone was powerful enough to make them into tightwads.

That’s pretty convincing evidence. But the psychologists decided to look at it the other way around. That is, they wanted to see if a heightened desire for money affected how much people ate. They had participants fantasize about winning the lottery, but some imagined winning big (the equivalent of about $25,000) while the rest thought about a much more modest prize (about 25 bucks). The researchers wanted the more outlandish fantasy to increase desire for money, so they had the winners further fantasize about what this imaginary windfall would buy them—sports cars, stereos, and so forth. They basically made some of the participants greedy and not others.

Then they had all the participants participate in a taste test of two kinds of M&Ms, although unbeknownst to them the scientists were actually measuring how much they ate. And yes, the greedy people scarfed down significantly more candy. It appears that the desire to accumulate money (and stuff) is a modern version of the ancient adaptation to accumulate calories. (Significantly, however, people who were watching their weight did not break their diets, even if they were salivating for a large-screen TV: evidence that we can indeed trump our automatic thinking if we’re motivated and thoughtful.)

That last experiment echoes a classic study from the 1940s. In that study, poor kids consistently overestimated the size of coins, while rich kids did not. The new findings are also consistent with cross-cultural studies showing that men’s preference for the curviness of women’s figures varies directly with the men’s economic status. Psychologists Leif Nelson and Evan Morrison demonstrated this intriguing connection in the lab: In one experiment, they recruited a large group of students from campus and asked them how much money they had in their wallets. They figured that those with no cash would be less satisfied, financially, than those with spending money.

Then they asked them about their preferences for body weight in a dating partner. When they analyzed all the information, they found that men without money desired women who were significantly heavier than did men with bulging wallets. This was the first laboratory evidence that thinking about one’s financial situation affects dating preferences.

The psychologists decided to take another look at these initial findings, in a slightly different way. Instead of asking about ready cash, they asked the volunteers how much money they had socked away in the bank. But they asked some of them to place themselves on a scale of $0 to $500, while others placed themselves on a scale from $0 to $400,000. The idea was to manipulate their sense of relative scarcity: Some would feel kind of rich compared to others, while others would feel somewhat deprived. Then they again asked them about their preferences in partners, and again they found that those feeling flush wanted skinnier women. The men with a sense of life’s scarcity wanted their women to carry some extra pounds, almost as if their partner’s fat could protect them against starvation.

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What’s the dynamic here? What explains this odd mental link? Nelson and Morrison think it has to do with actual hunger; that is, lack of cash or savings triggers the physiological state we all associate with too little food, and that sense of want triggers a basic need for more calories, more fat. To test this idea, the researchers parked themselves at the door of the Stanford dining hall and handed out questionnaires about dating to diners, some as they entered and others as they left. The idea was that some would be satiated when they thought about dating, while others would have food on their minds. And indeed the hungry men preferred more full-figured women.

The calorie heuristic is the brain’s ancient link among food and money and fairness. Both food and money are rewards, they give pleasure, and it’s possible that both (and perhaps other rewards as well) are processed in the same clusters of neurons devoted to savoring rewards. Whatever the underlying neurology, the findings could help explain a phenomenon that has long perplexed public health officials: the high prevalence of life-threatening obesity among society’s most disadvantaged. It seems counterintuitive that those with the least money should be consuming more calories. But it may be, Briers suggests, that material success has become so important that when people fail in their quest for money, they get frustrated and their brains switch between two intertwined rewards. In effect, they're reverting back to a primitive state, when high-calorie food was the common currency. So those living hand to mouth do indeed work for food, but unhappily just not nutritious food.