San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Big Food taken to task in ‘Hooked’
With “Hooked,“Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Michael Moss dives back into the processed food industry, continuing an inquiry that began in 2014’s “Salt Sugar Fat.”
That James Beard Awardwinning best seller exposes Big Food’s complicity in our country’s obesity epidemic. Moss brings the same keeneyed, lucid reporting to “Hooked,” illuminating the science of addiction to show that processed food is a drug.
To define the term “addiction,” Moss quotes a nowretired Philip Morris CEO who called it “a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit.” Drawing parallels between Big Food and Big Tobacco, Moss relates how both industries manipulate our cravings for profit.
“Hooked” leads us into
laboratories and courtrooms, kitchens and legislatures, and threads the complex and contentious arguments at the intersection of personal responsibility and corporate liability. The story opens with a Brooklyn teenager who, because of a daily diet of Big Macs, sodas, shakes and fries, is morbidly obese. She’s one of the first plaintiffs in what would become a series of lawsuits holding fastfood companies responsible for personal injury through the design of their products.
Moss reviews MRI scans that show how cheeseburgers light up the same area of our brain as heroin and tobacco. He provides a sweeping history of how our appetites have evolved over 4 million years, then explains how processed foods target the primeval neurochemical and digestive receptors where instinct supersedes judgement.
He looks at advertisements that prey on memory with misleading images and those that convince us, given the our work and family lives, that easytoheatandserve foods trump the time and tedium of homecooked meals.
Finally, Moss details how, after denying and delaying the evidence stacked against it, the industry has turned our increased resistance to processed food to its advantage by securing ownership of the diet trade. Take the weightloss programs that serve as conduits for processed foods and frozen meals — Nestle’s acquisition of Jenny Craig and Lean Cuisine; ConAgra’s Healthy Choice line; and Unilever’s SlimFast and diet foods. These products are hardly distinguishable from the junk that created havoc with our bodies in the first place.
If knowledge is power, then “Hooked” provides the facts we need to free ourselves from remaining unwitting conspirators in Big Food’s ruse. For too long we’ve allowed this industry to exploit all the ways we’re drawn to their healthdamaging products.
“Wrestling free of an addiction requires us to give up something that came to define our lives,” Moss writes. This is hard, he admits. “Enticement is the calculated business of those who make and sell processed food. They have nearly endless resources in knowing our vulnerabilities.”