We need a super-size order of education

Have you read the latest anti-processed-food manifesto, Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, by Michael Moss? Or what about David Kessler’s The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite? Or the growing and massively influential oeuvre of “liberal foodie intellectual” (as The New

York Times describes him) Michael Pollan?

What’s that? No time for reading? Too busy hand-grating Parmigiano-Reggiano for your Melanzane alla Parmigiana?

OK, well then let me give you the one-sentence hard-truth cocktail-party précis of this whole literary genre: We’re eating too much crap.

And I am using the term “crap” here in its narrow, scientific sense: salt, sugar and fat.

For ages, we have known that excessive gorging on these substances can threaten our health and lifespan. But modern research goes further: Moss and Kessler, in particular, demonstrate how the cocktail of salt, sugar and fat — think French fries and ketchup, ribs and sauce at Swiss Chalet, General Tao chicken served at a cheap Chinatown buffet, or just about anything on the menu at Applebee’s — hits our body like a mind-bending drug: The unholy trinity makes us keep eating even when we’re no longer hungry.

We still feel hungry even when the quantity of food we’ve ingested threatens to breach the engineering-design limits of the human stomach. That’s why you feel full after a 4 oz chicken breast, but have no problem wolfing down two McDonald’s quarter-pounders.

So enough with the fiction — peddled by my colleague Jesse Kline and other naturally slim

Even my educated friend thought he was eating ‘naturally’ when he switched to banana nut-flavoured cereal junk-food apologists — that mandatory food labelling is an unjustified measure aimed at stigmatizing the various naturally occurring flavours of nature’s bounty. That sort of thinking is a vestige from the days when food writers penned novels about silly women finding their souls amid overflowing luncheon tables in Provence and Tuscany. Thanks to the more scientific approach of modern food writers, we now know that the modern “quick-service” processed food industry is based on the principle of hooking us on hideously gargantuan portions of what is essentially a toxic product.

Mr. K line derides my thinking as an example of nanny-statism: “The huddled masses aren’t competent enough to make their own decisions,” he writes satirically, so “fat-cat” types need “to show them the way.”

To which I say: guilty as charged. The dark science of processed-food technology (as well as the modes by which the body gains fat and alters its blood chemistry in response to toxic inputs) is complicated. And the only people who even pretend to understand it are scientists, and the sort of laymen who have the luxury of dedicating their lives to reading foodie literature and buying $1,500 pasta-makers. To take Mr. Kline’s example of New York City: It typically is not the city’s carb-counting elites who are buying 64 oz. Big Gulps and high-sodium Big Macs. It is the folks who shine their shoes and do their dry cleaning.

Yes, it’s true that few of these people will pause to read the nutritional information on restaurant menus — even if it’s right in their face at the cash register. But shouldn’t we at least encourage them to take a gander at the contents of what they’re wolfing down their gullets?

The real out-of-touch folks in this debate are those such as Mr. Kline, who haughtily imagine that ordinary Joes and Janes share his knowledge of the sodium and caloric content in their restaurant meals. They don’t. In fact, knowledge of nutritional science among the general population is scandalously low. I have one friend, for instance, who several years ago decided to embark on a well-intentioned but vaguely conceived project to eat more “natural” foods. His first order of business? Switching from ordinary Cheerios to the “Banana Nut” variety — on the theory that bananas grow on trees.

But you know what? Even upscale types could do with a dose of foodie education — which is why I would support mandatory nutritional-information listings at all restaurants, not just chain franchises. I think a lot of black-turtleneck types would be shocked by how much sodium in particular goes into the salads, quiches and cheese plates they order at Maisøn de Spàgü.

Chefs might object, of course: They don’t want the public to know that the “secret ingredient” in their signature dishes often is just a crapload of salt, or an extra stick of butter, or a block of brown sugar — or all three. Mandatory disclosure might therefore serve to shame them into practicing what should be properly regarded as the true culinary art, at every point on the economic restaurant food chain: producing delicious food that won’t kill us.