{"id":4426,"date":"2023-06-20T16:02:01","date_gmt":"2023-06-20T20:02:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/?p=4426"},"modified":"2023-06-20T16:13:36","modified_gmt":"2023-06-20T20:13:36","slug":"salt-sugar-fat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/?p=4426","title":{"rendered":"Salt, Sugar, Fat"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>Michael Moss\u20142013.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Prologue \u2018The Company Jewels\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The company\u2019s Yoplait brand had already transformed traditional unsweetened breakfast yogurt into a dessert like snack. It now had twice as much sugar per serving as Lucky Charms, the company\u2019s cloyingly sweet, marshmallow-filled cereal.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>They called it Go-Gurt, and rolled it out nationally in the weeks before the CEO meeting. (By year\u2019s end, it would hit $100 million in sales.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Together, the two suppliers had the salt, which was processed in dozens of ways to maximize the jolt that taste buds would feel with the very first bite; they had the fats, which delivered the biggest loads of calories and worked more subtly in inducing people to overeat; and they had the sugar, whose raw power in exciting the brain made it perhaps the most formidable ingredient of all, dictating the formulations of products from one side of the grocery store to the other.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>He and other food scientists took comfort in knowing that the grocery store icons they had invented in a more innocent era\u2014the soda and chips and TV dinners\u2014had been imagined as occasional fare. It was society that had changed, changed so dramatically that these snacks and convenience foods had become a daily\u2014even hourly\u2014habit, a staple of the American diet.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>To make a new soda guaranteed to create a craving requires the high math of regression analysis and intricate charts to plot what industry insiders call the \u201cbliss point,\u201d or the precise amount sugar or fat or salt that will send consumers over the moon. At a laboratory in White Plains, New York, industry scientists who perform this alchemy walked me, step by step, through the process of engineering a new soda so that 1 could see the creation of bliss firsthand.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>To understand how the industry deploys fat in creating allure, I traveled to Madison, Wisconsin, home of Oscar Mayer and of the man who invented the prepackaged whole meals called Lunchables, a colossus among convenience foods that radically changed the eating habits of millions of American kids. He went into his cabinets to pull out the company records that weighed the pros and cons of using real pepperoni versus pepperoni flavor and described the allure of fat-laden meat and cheese in cuddly terms like \u201cproduct delivery cues.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Lunchables, for one, are a marketing powerhouse, specifically designed to exploit the guilt of working moms and the desire of kids for a little empowerment. These ready-to-eat meals typically include pieces of meat, cheese, crackers, and candy, allowing kids to assemble them in whatever combination they desire. Food marketers wield pinpoint psychological targeting, and they didn\u2019t disappoint on the Lunchables ads: The ads stressed that lunch was a time for them, not their parents.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The average American now consumes as much as 33 pounds of cheese a year.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>They\u2019ve discovered that the brain lights up for sugar the same way does for cocaine, and this knowledge is useful, not only in formulating foods. The world\u2019s biggest ice cream maker, Unilever.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Sugar not only sweetens, it replaces more costly ingredients \u2013like tomatoes in ketchup\u2014to add bulk and texture. For little added expense, a variety of fats can be slipped into food formulas to stimulate overeating and improve mouth feel. And salt, barely more expensive than water, has miraculous powers to boost the appeal of processed food.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Part one sugar.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Chapter one \u201cExploiting the Biology of the Child\u2019\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>On average, we consume 71 pounds of calorie sweeteners each year. That\u2019s 22 teaspoons of sugar, per person, per day.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Their yearly consumption has nearly doubled in the past decades to 14 gallons a person (to see sweet drinks).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>A place called the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. It is located a few blocks west of the Amtrak station, in a bland five story brick building easily over looked in the architectural wasteland of tithe district known as University City\u2014except for \u201cEddy,\u201d the giant sculpture that stands guarding the entrance. Eddy is a ten-foot-high fragment of a face, and he perfectly captures the obsessions of those inside: He is all nose and mouth.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The stickiest subject at Monell, however, is not sugar. It\u2019s money. Taxpayers fund about half of the center\u2019s $17.5 million annual budget through federal grants, but much of the rest of its operation comes from the food industry, including the big manufacturers, as well as several tobacco companies. A large golden plaque in the lobby pays homage to PepsiCo, CocaCola, Kraft, Nestle, Philip Morris, among others. It\u2019s an odd arrangement, for sure, one that evokes past efforts by the tobacco industry to buy \u201cresearch\u201d that put cigarettes in a favorable light. At Monell, the industry funding buys companies a privileged access to the center and its labs.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Twice as many kids as adults chose the sweetest and saltiest solutions. (This was the first scientific proof of what parents, watching their kids lunge for the sugar bowl at the breakfast table, ahead knew instinctively.) The difference among adults was less striking but still significant: more African-Americans choose the sweetest and the saltiest solutions.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Tatyana\u2019s bliss point for the pudding was 24 percent sugar, twice the level of sweetness j that most adults can handle in pudding. As far as children go, she was on the lower side; some go as high as 36 percent.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Mennella has become convinced that our bliss point for sugar\u2014and all foods, for that matter\u2014is shaped by our earliest experiences. But as babies grow into youngsters, the opportunity for food companies to influence our taste grows as well. For Mennella, this is troubling. It\u2019s not that food companies are teaching children to like sweetness; rather, they are teaching children what foods should taste like. And increasingly, this curriculum has been all about sugar.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Two thirds of sugar and Americans diet was now coming from processed foods.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Sweetened drinks made his rats more hungry, not less.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The diet soda turned out to be something of a wash, or at best a small help in losing weight. And lost a quarter pound and drinking the diet soda. For women, there was no statistically significant change.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>With regular soda, both sexes gained weight: an average of nearly a pound and a half in just three weeks.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>One of the biggest risks in letting children drink soda is that it leads them to expect \u2013 and want \u2013 more sweetness in all of their drinks.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The United States, however, remains the most obese country in the world. And where the rates of obesity appear to be reaching a plateau among adults at 35 percent, they are still climbing among the group that is most vulnerable to the food industry\u2019s products: children. The most recent data, from 2006 to 2008, shows that obesity among kids aged six to eleven jumped from 15 to 20 percent.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Chapter two \u201cHow Do You Get People to Crave?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>In 2004, Dr Pepper decided to go outside the company for help. It turned to a man named Howard Moskowitz, whose success in delivering mega-sellers had turned him a food industry legend. Trained in mathematics and experimental psychology, Moskowitz runs a consulting firm in White Plains, New York, where he has established a long track record of triumphs in consumer goods, from credit cards to point-and-shoot cameras to computer games. Much of his success stems from his ability to group consumers into segments, with different emotional needs, and target them with precision.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The military has long been in a peculiar bind when it comes to food: how to get soldiers to eat more rations, not less, when they are out in the field, running operations. \u201cThe problem in the military is the same as in nursing homes,\u201d said Herb Meiselman, one of Moskowitz\u2019s former colleagues at the Army labs. \u201cWhen you go into combat, you reduce your eating, and if you do that for too long, you lose body weight.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The biggest hits-be they Coca-Cola or Doritos or Kraft\u2019s Velveeta Cheesy Skillets dinner kits\u2014owe their success to formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don\u2019t have a distinct overriding single flavor that says to the brain: Enough already!<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>This is a novel concept at the time. The American consumer was viewed as a singular target, uncomplicated by variation, and every food company making every grocery product was focused on finding the one perfect formulation. Moskowitz, in a bold stroke, convinced General Foods that it should be selling not one but all three of these roasts\u2014a breakthrough that the executive in charge of fixing Maxwell House at the time, John Ruff, told me saved the brand. \u201cWe actually reversed a loss to a win against Folgers,\u201d He said.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>After\u2026 months and months, he had a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce\u2026. Did he look for the most popular brand, variety of spaghetti sauce? No,\u2026 instead he looked at the data and he said, \u201cLet\u2019s see if we can group all these different data points into clusters. Let\u2019s see if they congregate around certain ideas.\u201d And sure enough, if you sit down and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups. There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain. There are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy. And there are people who like it extra chunky. And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant, because at the time, in the early 1980s, if you went to a supermarket, you would not find extra chunky spaghetti sauce. And Prego turned to Howard, and they said, \u201cAre you telling me that one third of Americans crave extra chunky spaghetti sauce. And yet no one is servicing their needs?\u201d And he said, \u201cYes.\u201d And Prego then went back and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country. And over the next ten years, they made $600 million off their line of extra chunky sauces. And everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done, and they said, \u201cOh my god. We\u2019ve been thinking all wrong.\u201d And that\u2019s when you started to get seven different kinds of vinegar and fourteen different kinds of mustard and seventy-one different kinds of olive oil. And then eventually even Ragu hired Howard,\u2026 and today with Ragu] there are thirty-six in six varieties. Cheese. Light. Robusto. Rich and Hearty. Old World Traditional. Extra Chunky Garden. That\u2019s Howard\u2019s doing. That is Howard\u2019s gift to the American people\u2026. He fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The largest ingredient, after tomatoes, is sugar. A mere half cup of Prego traditional, for instance, has more than 2 teaspoons of sugar, as much as 2+ Oreo cookies, a tube of Go Gurt or some of Pepperidge Farm apple turnovers that Campbell\u2019s also makes.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Because what Moskowitz found is that hunger is a poor driver of cravings. We rarely get in the situation where our body and brain are depleted of nutrients and are actually in need of replenishment. Rather, he discovered, we are driven to eat by other forces in our lives. Some of these are emotional needs, while others reflect the pillars of processed food: first and foremost taste, followed by aroma, appearance, and texture. As disparate as these pillars may seem, one ingredient\u2014sugar\u2014can do it all.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>When I say is, let\u2019s base it on science, he said. \u201cLet\u2019s make twenty or thirty or forty variations. When you do that. You\u2019ll see that we like some of the variations more and like others less. And you can build a mathematical model that shows you exactly the relation between what\u2019s under your control and how consumers respond. Bingo. You engineer the product.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Chapter three \u201cConvenience with a Capital \u2018C\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Some food creations happened in a flash. Most take months. This one took years. From 1947 to 1950 (pudding).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Tang had one other little-known attribute that contributed to its block buster status in the United States, albeit in a peculiar way. NASA, the space program, needed a drink that would add little bulk to the digestion, given the toilet constraints in space. Real orange juice had too much bulky fiber in its pulp. Tang, however, was perfect\u2014what technologists call a low residual food.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Chapter four \u201cIs It Cereal or Candy?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The typical American child in 1979 would watch more than 20,000 commercials between the ages of two and 11 \u2013 and more than half of those ads were pitching sweetened cereals, candies, snacks and soft drinks.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>This followed Kellogg\u2019s earlier move to drop the word sugar from two of its own 50-percent-plus mega-sellers: Sugar Frosted Flakes became Frosted Flakes, and sugar smacks turned into Honey smacks.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Chapter five \u201cI Want to See a Lot of Body Bags\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>It focused on getting Coke into the hands of people, especially kids, when they were most vulnerable to persuasion\u2014those moments when they were happy. That is how Coke came to be partners with America\u2019s favorite pastime. \u201cThe story they always tell at Coke,\u201d Dunn said, \u201cis Mr. Woodruff saying, \u2018When I was a kid, my father took me to my first baseball game, and there was nothing more sacred to me than that moment with my father. And what did I have to drink? I had an ice-cold Coke, which became part of that sacred moment.\u2019 \u201cThe idea was to be in all those places where these special moments of your life took place,\u201d Dunn continued. \u201cCoke wanted to be part of those moments. That was, if not the most brilliant marketing strategy of all time, probably one of the best two or three. You not only had the imagery, it\u2019s like somebody was in their own television commercial. You\u2019re in the moment, you\u2019re drinking the product, you have that emotional context that sets it. And Coke really came to have a very high share of those experiences. It was about having a ubiquitous presence. Inside Coke, it is called tile ubiquity strategy.\u2019 In simple terms, Mr. Woodruff\u2019s words for that were: put the product within an arm\u2019s reach of desire.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>In early 1985, he tried in vain for weeks to land an interview with a Coke executive, Charlie Frenette. Who wouldn\u2019t return his calls? Undeterred, he got a sympathetic secretary to tell him when Frenette was traveling next, and Dunn flew to Atlanta and boarded the same flight. \u201cHe was up in first class,\u201d Dunn said. \u201cI was in coach. When they turned the seat belt lights off, I walked up and said, \u2018Hi Charlie, how are you doing? I\u2019ve been having a hard time getting in to see you, so I thought the best thing would be for us to spend a few minutes on the plane.\u2019 And he looked at with me this kind of look\u2014oh, really\u2014and said, Tm kind of busy. I have a big call. I\u2019ll see if I have any time at the end of the flight.\u2019 \u201cDunn still didn\u2019t get an interview, but he did get a test. Just before landing, Frenette had him come up to first class, where he asked him to critique a presentation he\u2019d prepared for the Denny\u2019s restaurant chain. \u201cNext thing I knew, he had hired me,\u201d Dunn said. \u201cAnd what\u2019s funny about that, we got to be good friends, and he would tell that story to sales people all the time.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>60% of supermarket purchase decisions are completely unplanned.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The snack that Dunn was proposing to sell: carrots. Plain, fresh carrots. No added sugar. No creamy sauce or dips. No salt. Just baby carrots that are peeled, washed, bagged, and then sold into the deadly dull produce aisle. Carrots were the flip side of Coke. They weren\u2019t selling because of the way they were being sold. To fix this, Dunn said, would require unleashing the proven techniques of processed food marketing.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cWe act like a snack, not a vegetable,\u201d he told the investors. \u201cWe exploit the rules of junk food to fuel the baby carrot conversation. We are pro-junk food behavior but anti-junk food establishment.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>In describing this new line of work, Dunn would tell me he was doing penance for his years at Coca-Cola\u2014or, as he put it, \u201cI\u2019m paying my karmic debt.\u201d That day in Santa Monica, however, the men from Madison were thinking about sales. They had come all the way from Chicago to hear this pitch, and they loved it. They had already agreed to buy one of the two biggest farm producers of baby carrots in the country, and they\u2019d hired Dunn to run the whole operation. Now, after his pitch, they were relieved. Dunn had figured out that using the industry\u2019s own marketing ploys would work better than anything else. He drew from the bag of tricks that he mastered in his twenty years at Coca-Cola, where he learned one of the most critical rules in processed food: The selling of food matters as much as the food itself if not more.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Chapter six \u201cA Burst of Fruity Aroma\u2019\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>General Foods was not the first to recognize the marketing potential of fruit concentrate in processed foods, but it used this super-sugar to great effect in one of its biggest moneymakers: a \u201cfruit drink\u201d called Capri Sun, which Philip Morris acquired in 1991 for $155 million. Five years later, in what Geoffrey Bible praised as a \u201cstaggering\u201d achievement, the drink reached $230 million in annual sales, with a volume that was rising a spectacular 26 percent each year. A portion of this success was due to some technical heroics in the factory, where engineers figured out how to retool the manufacturing process to cycle more quickly through the drink\u2019s twenty-one flavors, which greatly enhanced productivity and the bottom line. But there was more to it than that. Like Kool-Aid and Tang, Capri Sun was sweetened mainly by high-fructose corn syrup, but it also now contained juice concentrate, which allowed the drink\u2019s label to boast, for the first time, \u201cNatural fruit drink. No artificial ingredients.\u201d This was a huge selling point for moms who, as a result, felt more comfortable adding the drink to their kids\u2019 school lunches and snacks. I asked Capri Sun\u2019s former brand manager, Paul Halladay, whether the drink\u2019s formula could have been altered to avoid using the fruit concentrate without changing the taste. \u201cYes, you could do that,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt was not a major part of the sweetener. But Capri Sun has always had some fruit concentrate. It helps with the validity of the \u2018natural\u2019 in the advertising to have the natural in there.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cKraft has always taken pride in labeling its products clearly and accurately and in a manner that is not misleading to consumers,\u201d a company spokeswoman told me. \u201cThe nutritional information resulting from the addition of real fruit juice and use of the natural claim was in keeping with the labeling regulations.\u201d But Capri Sun\u2019s use of \u201cnatural\u201d in its marketing would come under fire in 2007, when a Florida grandmother named Linda Rex picked up a case for a young relative visiting from Ireland. \u201cWhen I saw \u2018All Natural\u2019 on the label, that sounded healthier than soda,\u201d she said. \u201cBut when I got home and got out my glasses, I threw it in the garbage, when I realized it contained high-fructose corn syrup and was nearly identical to soda.\u201d Some of Capri Sun\u2019s flavors, in fact, were higher in sugar than soda. Wild Cherry, for instance, had 28 grams of sugar\u2014more than six teaspoons\u2014in each 6.76-ounce pouch. Coke, in its larger 12-ounce can, has 39 grams\u201428 percent less per ounce. Working with an attorney for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Rex sued Kraft for deceptive marketing.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Part two Fat.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Chapter seven \u201cThat Gooey, Sticky Mouthfeel\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>A hunk of cheddar cheese is one third fat, along with protein, salt and a little sugar, and even that statistic understates the force that fat brings to food. Two thirds of calories in that cheese are delivered by the fact.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>At the same time, however, the dairy industry figured out a way to soften this blow to their business by putting the phrases \u201clow-fat\u201d and \u201c2 percent\u201d on milk in which a little of the fat had been removed. The popularity of this defatted milk grew so fast that it now outsells all other types of milk, including skim, which has no fat at all. But there is a marketing scheme at work in this: The \u201c2 percent\u201d labeling may lead to you to believe that 98 percent of the fat is removed, but in truth the fat content of whole milk is only a tad higher, at 3 percent. Consumer groups who urge people to drink 1 percent or nonfat milk have fought unsuccessfully over the years to have the 2 percent claim barred as deceptive.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>My point, back when I did my studies, was that in these mixtures of sugar and fat you find in so many products, most of the calories come from fat. I had this disagreement years ago with researchers who were working on the hypothesis that obesity is caused by carbohydrates, which is what sugar is. They were using things like Snickers bars and chocolate M&amp;Ms and thinking, \u2018A-ha, sweet foods, carbohydrates.\u2019 And my point was, yes, they are sweet, and there is sugar in them. But they are not carbohydrate foods\u201460 to 70 to 80 percent of their calories was coming from fat. The fat was invisible, even to the investigators themselves.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Chapter eight \u201cLiquid Gold\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Americans now eat as much as 33 pounds or more of cheese and pseudo-cheese products a year, triple the amount we consumed in the early 1970s.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The nutritional math, when it comes to cheese, is staggering too. Depending on the specific product, 33 pounds of cheese delivers as many as 60,000 calories, which is enough energy, on its own, to sustain an adult for a month. Those 33 pounds also have as many as 3,100 grams of saturated fat, or more than half a year\u2019s recommended maximum intake. Cheese has become the single largest source of saturated fat in the American diet. Though it is hardly the only culprit. Day in and day out, Americans on average are exceeding the recommended maximum of fat by more than 50 percent.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>1 pound of cheese takes a gallon of milk off the dairy industry\u2019s hands.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The storage fees alone were running upwards of $1 million a day. It grew so large, in fact, that the government began secreting it away in caverns and a vast, abandoned limestone mine near Kansas City, where the Washington Post\u2019s agriculture reporter described an astonishing scene: deep beneath the ground here, in more bags, barrels and boxes than the mind can imagine, the awesome triumphs of the prestigious American milk cow breast enshrined in a dark, cool and costly comfort.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>And yet, the food industry\u2019s rush to embrace cheese \u2013 the fattiest of all fat-based products.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Chapter nine \u201cLunchtime Is All Yours\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>14,000 newly hatched products show up every year in the grocery store.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>(Lunchables) They would help turn the trays into a processed food colossus, one that would break industry records by soaring to nearly $1 billion in annual sales. The little trays, by transforming bologna into a product kids were suddenly clamoring for, would also accomplish one of Drane\u2019s own goals, which was to save the jobs of the Oscar Mayer workers who made the fat-laden meats that were running afoul of the public concern for its health.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The trays created an entirely new category of food, one that exposed Americans, especially young kids, to the thrills of fast food that heretofore were the purview of restaurant chains like McDonald\u2019s and Burger King.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>A single slice of beef bologna, for instance, has 3.5 grams of saturated fat, along with 330 milligrams of sodium, nearly a quarter of a day\u2019s recommended maximum for most American adults.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>As they talked, he realized the most pressing issue was not fat, it was time. Working moms and busy moms strove to provide healthy food, of course, and thus sales of lower-fat turkey were rising. But day in and day out, finding time to prepare any sort of food for their kids was increasingly difficult. The mothers spoke at length about the morning crush, that nightmarish dash to get breakfast on the table and lunch packed and shoes tied and kids out the door. He summed up their remarks for me like this: \u201cIt\u2019s awful. I am scrambling around. My kids are asking me for stuff. I\u2019m trying to get myself ready to go to the office. I go to pack these lunches, and I don\u2019t know what I\u2019ve got. They want them to b special, and I want to take care of them and, by the way, I like to take care of myself, but I might not have stuff in inventory.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>There was no way bread could stay fresh for the two months their product need to sit in warehouses or grocery coolers.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Then the question became. What shape should the cheese be? Through tests on consumers, they discovered that cheese sliced into little rounds was a bit more exciting than squares. In their likability matrix, the rounds came in at 80 on a scale of 100, while the squares mustered only a 70. But they also needed to keep their production costs as low as possible, or the retail price would have to be set beyond what people would be willing to pay. Square cheese was easier to cut than round, so they went with that. They looked at everything through the matrix of shrinking the production costs any way they could without hurting the flavor or texture too much. They could use the processed cheese made by Kraft, which was already cheaper than regular cheese, or they could knock another two cents off the per unit price by using a lesser product called \u201ccheese food,\u201d which had scored poorly in the taste tests. Likewise, they compared things like real pepperoni to pepperoni flavoring, a cardboard tray cover to a printed, clear film.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The testing, which went on for months, surpassed Oscar Mayer\u2019s highest hopes. Not only did the people in the experiment go for the trays after being exposed to the advertising, the familiarity of the contents, however plain they were, proved to a foundational theorem in processed foods. Which Drane calls \u201cthe weirdness factor\u201d: If a new product is too unusual. Shoppers get scared. \u201cI use the term, \u201980 percent familiar,\u2019 \u201cDrane told me. \u2018If you\u2019ve got a new thing, it better be 80 percent familiar, or you\u2019ll have people scratching their heads wondering what the hell it is.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Projected to lose $6 million in 1991, the trays instead broke even, in the next year, they earned $8 million.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cShe added five \u201creasons to avoid\u201d the new Lunchable: The sugar, at 37 grams, nearly matched that in a 12-ounce can of Coke; the $3 price tag far exceeded the cost of her homemade PB&amp;J and fresh fruit; the packaging was not reusable; the bread was not 100 percent whole-grain; and the ingredients included \u201cartificial colors, flavors and something called \u2018carauba wax\u2019\u2014I use wax on my floors and car\u2014not for food for my children.\u2019<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cThis disconnect between moms hating the idea of cold raw pizza and the kids loving it had to do with their distinct approaches to eating in general. Adults use their mouths when they eat, tasting whatever it is they are eating. By contrast, kids tend to use their eyes, judging the food\u2014initially at least\u2014by how it looks. In a Lunchables with cold raw pizza, they say nothing but fun. And to amp up the fun quotient, Drane\u2019s team didn\u2019t la out the pizza in slices, as if it had been cut from a pie. They put it into the trays unassembled, in order to maximize the fun. The crust went into or compartment, the cheese, pepperoni, and sauce into others. That way, the kids got to make their own pizza right at school, while their schoolmates looked in envy.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Chapter ten \u2018\u2019The Message the Government Conveys\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>In fact, the biggest deliverers of saturated fat \u2013 the type of fat doctors worry about \u2013 I cheese and red meats.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Together, cheese and pizza contributed more than 14% of the saturated fat being consumed. Second on the list was red meat in its various forms, which accounted for more than 13% of the fat in our diet. In third place \u2013 and a bit less than 6% \u2013 were all those grain-based dessert like chocolate cake and cookies.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The dollars for marketing beef added up to more than $80 million a year, and over the years, the total money raised has topped $2 billion. That is, essentially, $2 billion for selling America on more beef, compared with the $6.5 million the USDA\u2019s nutrition center gets each year to nudge Americans in the other direction\u2014of cutting back, not only on fat but on sugar and salt as well. It hasn\u2019t been a fair fight.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Every 1.7 ounces of processed meats consumed per day increases the risk of colon cancer by 21%.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Chapter eleven \u201cNo Sugar, No Fat, No Sales\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Obesity was setting all sorts of records in 2003. The average adult was 24 pounds heavier than the 1960.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Part three: salt.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Chapter twelve \u2018People Love Salt\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Chapter thirteen \u201cThe Same Great Salty Taste Your Customers Crave\u2019\u2019.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Chapter fourteen \u201cI Feel So Sorry for the Public\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Epilogue \u201cWe\u2019re Hooked on Inexpensive Food\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>On my last day at Nestl\u00e9, I had lunch with the president of the company\u2019s new health science unit, Luis Cantarell.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>He envisions\u2014quite excitedly\u2014the prospect of drug-like foods, or food-like drugs that could upend the traditional approach to medical care, in which expensive drugs are used to treat the scourges of overeating: diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>One of the most promising experiments in resisting the sirens of overeating is taking place in Philadelphia, where a professor of clinical psychology at Drexel University, Michael Lowe, is trying to overcome another root cause of obesity. Besides the influence of Wall Street and the aggressive marketing by soda companies, he points to a tear in the social fabric that first appeared in the early 1980s, as the obesity rates started to surge. \u201cWhen a lot of us grew up,\u201d he told me, \u201cthere were three meals a day, and maybe a planned snack at bedtime\u2014and that was it. You never ate outside of those times because you would spoil your appetite. That changed. People began eating everywhere, in meetings or walking down the street. There\u2019s no place where food isn\u2019t acceptable now, and people are so busy they don\u2019t make time to sit down for meals. We have to work to encourage families to get together, and that used to be automatic.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Moss\u20142013. Prologue \u2018The Company Jewels\u201d Part one sugar. Chapter one \u201cExploiting the Biology of the Child\u2019\u2019 Chapter two \u201cHow Do You Get People to Crave?\u201d Chapter three \u201cConvenience with a Capital \u2018C\u2019 Chapter four \u201cIs It Cereal or Candy?\u201d Chapter five \u201cI Want to See a Lot of Body Bags\u201d Chapter six \u201cA Burst [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4427,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[238,241,239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-booknotes","category-business","category-health-and-wellness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4426"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4428,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426\/revisions\/4428"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}