Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
To begin with my by-now rote preamble, I received this book from a GoodReads drawing. Despite that kind and generous and typical consideration I give my candid opinions below.
The premise of this book can be summed up very simply. Food companies are creating products that while not intended to kills us, nevertheless are doing so. By using science and marketing (in some cases derived from research done by that purest of evils, cigarette companies) big foods can manipulate us into eating more and more of their products until we drop dead. While we think the government is trying to protect us from such evils, in fact most of the time the feds are helping and subsidizing the efforts of food companies to shove more and unhealthier food down our throats to line their pockets. I’d say that about covers it.
Michael Moss’s definitive tome on food marketing is exhaustive, at times daunting and the best book on this topic I’ve read since “Fast Food Nation” so many years ago. Moss has covered the basics with a wealth of detail and reasoning that should be abundantly terrifying to those who find themselves putting frozen pizzas and Hot Pockets into their cart at the grocery store. He paints a picture that is stark and, sadly, a bit hopeless. While our author does spend a tiny bit of time on the efforts of food companies to stop killing us softly with salt, sugar and fat, he doesn’t really seem to hold out much hope. He closes with a chunk on liquid foods designed for people after they have bariatric surgery. The image of people tube-feeding themselves from a plastic container is pretty haunting but that seems to be what we’re coming to.
This book is wonderfully researched, eruditely and well written and I hope against hope that it’s somehow unbalanced. Moss’s picture is grim indeed but his arguments are so well constructed that one doesn’t really have the heart to argue with them. As a book it can sometimes be a bit daunting and is best taken, I think, in 1-hour chunks. On one level this lets the argument settle in over the course of several days and make you subconsciously examine what YOU’RE eating. The book is very helpful and specific in the foods and products it chooses to excoriate. A conscientious reader will find themselves at least slightly changed for the better. On another level, taking the book in small pieces dampens a bit the somewhat repetitive cadence of the whole thing. Here’s a type of food. Here’s why it’s bad. Here’s the history of it. Here’s who I talked to about it and what they had to say. Lather, rinse, repeat. Taken in long sittings this is probably much less effective. I stretched this one out over a week and felt myself well served and well-educated.
In summary, this is the sort of book that leaves you changed at a fundamental level. Like books before it, you never quite see the world the same way again. On the whole, I feel pretty good about my diet even before, relative to how Moss describes the typical American diet but there’s always room for improvement and this book is one that gives a not so gentle nudge in the right direction. It’s also the sort of book you want to pass around to everyone you know; it should be subtitled, “Read this before the next time you open your mouth.”
