Our ability to describe America's obesity epidemic has outpaced our ability to solve it. If you want the seminal description, read Marc Ambinder's Atlantic cover story. If you want the single solution ... well, keep looking. In the last few decades, our evolutionary instinct to maximize caloric intake has married our economic instinct to buy cheap, subsidized, mass-produced fat foods. As a result, four out of ten Americans may be obese before the end of the decade.

Perhaps there is a role for large-scale federal intervention: slashing payments to corn producers; raising taxes on sugary beverages; subsidizing fresh produce in low-income areas that are especially susceptible to the tantalizingly cheap stuff. But there is also a role for smaller-scale innovation that plays on individuals eaters' psychology.

For example: A new study today finds that food in cartooned packages tastes better for children:



Children signiﬁcantly preferred the taste of foods that had popular cartoon characters on the packaging, compared with the same foods without characters. The majority of children selected the food sample with a licensed character on it for their snack, but the effects were weaker for carrots than for gummy fruit snacks and graham crackers.



It's easy to overlook the impact of small visual cues in eating habits. David Just and Brian Wansick have studied the impact of behavioral economics (the space between psychology and econ) on school lunchrooms. Banning chips and paying more for arugula might be smart, they write, but there are subtler ways to nudge kids toward eating healthy without embargoes. Here are some of their ideas: