Why, then, is the book a bit wearying? Partly it’s because this is not a new story, not surprising to anyone who has contemplated the list of 31 ingredients on a tiny packet of Cheez-It Gripz. This is inside stuff, and the book is all the stronger for it. “Salt Sugar Fat” is not a polemic, nor a raised platform for food purists to fire broadsides at evil empires. Moss reports deeply from inside the food companies: researchers, marketers, strategists, C.E.O.’s and many who have left their work, some with regrets about how good they were at leveraging the bliss point. Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration director, called “conditioned hypereating” in a 2009 book that covered some of the same ground. If not addiction, the love of hyper-processed foods may be what Dr.

Moss dives extensively into food-industry and academic research into the brain’s pleasure centers, where sugar and fat sing their siren songs. Is that place a state of addiction? The book uses the language of addiction liberally - soldiers returned from World War II “hooked on Coke,” kids “lunge” for the sugar bowl, a typical salt lover is a “hapless junkie” - and it’s a metaphorical usage that must drive some research purists bananas.īut there is science too. Moss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times who put the phrase “pink slime” into high rotation with a 2009 article on beef safety, deftly lays out the complicated marriage of science and marketing that got us where we are. Moss is particularly fascinated by Kraft’s near-billion-dollar line of Lunchables snack trays), as processors bent the American appetite to Wall Street’s will. Entire food categories were invented to support this strategy (Mr. Moss’s case: By concentrating fat, salt and sugar in products formulated for maximum “bliss,” Big Food has spent almost a century distorting the American diet in favor of calorie-dense products whose consumption pattern has been mirrored by the calamitous rise in obesity rates. From a fat-consumption point of view, he says, “trading cheese for milk has been a poor bargain indeed.”Īnd that is the nub of Mr. Cheese and its processed derivatives were deployed across a gazillion new products and line extensions during decades when Americans, as a fat-avoidance tactic, were actually cutting their milk consumption by 75 percent.

Thus we have cheese-injected pizza crusts and cheese-draped frozen entrees, cheesy chips and cheezy crackers. “In the hands of food manufacturers, cheese has become an ingredient,” Mr. Fans of Humboldt Fog and Cabot Clothbound Cheddar may hope this signals the return of the artisan producer, but Michael Moss gives all credit to mighty Kraft and the other food giants. Americans eat 33 pounds of cheese and cheese products per year, per person, which is triple the consumption rate of the 1970s.

Salt sugar fat moss