From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Salt Sugar Fat comes a “gripping” (The Wall Street Journal)
exposé of how the processed food industry exploits our evolutionary
instincts, the emotions we associate with food, and legal loopholes in
their pursuit of profit over public health.
“The
processed food industry has managed to avoid being lumped in with Big
Tobacco—which is why Michael Moss’s new book is so important.”—Charles
Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit
Everyone
knows how hard it can be to maintain a healthy diet. But what if some of
the decisions we make about what to eat are beyond our control? Is it
possible that food is addictive, like drugs or alcohol? And to what
extent does the food industry know, or care, about these
vulnerabilities? In Hooked, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative
reporter Michael Moss sets out to answer these questions—and to find the
true peril in our food.
Moss uses the latest research on
addiction to uncover what the scientific and medical communities—as well
as food manufacturers—already know: that food, in some cases, is even
more addictive than alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. Our bodies are
hardwired for sweets, so food giants have developed fifty-six types of
sugar to add to their products, creating in us the expectation that
everything should be cloying; we’ve evolved to prefer fast, convenient
meals, hence our modern-day preference for ready-to-eat foods. Moss goes
on to show how the processed food industry—including major companies
like Nestlé, Mars, and Kellogg’s—has tried not only to evade this
troubling discovery about the addictiveness of food but to actually
exploit it. For instance, in response to recent dieting trends, food
manufacturers have simply turned junk food into junk diets, filling
grocery stores with “diet” foods that are hardly distinguishable from
the products that got us into trouble in the first place. As obesity
rates continue to climb, manufacturers are now claiming to add
ingredients that can effortlessly cure our compulsive eating habits.
A
gripping account of the legal battles, insidious marketing campaigns,
and cutting-edge food science that have brought us to our current public
health crisis, Hooked lays out all that the food industry is
doing to exploit and deepen our addictions, and shows us why what we eat
has never mattered more.
