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emeraldgarnet's review against another edition
4.0
A key insight into the activities of the American processed food industry during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
mkragelj's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
4.0
A super interesting read, if a bit disorganized and repetitive at times
bookph1le's review against another edition
5.0
There will be a rave review of this book up shortly. Oh, yes, there will be. I feel like I highlighted every other sentence, there was so much shocking and just plain helpful information in here. I had already begun migrating toward healthy food, but this book utterly convinced me to work hard to give up added sugar.
Full review:
I am the type of person who hates highlighting in books. Even in college, it pained me to take a highlighter and mark up a page, no matter how brilliant the passage. It was a sort of sacrilege, a desecration of the book. So for me to mark up passage after passage of this book (albeit the Kindle version, but still), that has to say something about how shocking I found much of what this book has to say. It always strikes me as sort of pretentious and presumptuous to call a book "important", but this is an important book. It's a stellar example of the true power of excellent investigative journalism, and is great evidence for the argument that we need to be willing to pay for journalism if we want quality and depth.
I think it is fair to criticize this book a bit by saying there are some sections that feel a little hasty. There's a bit of sloppiness here and there, and the book is repetitive at times. Still, this didn't detract from the importance of its message.
Divided into three sections: salt, sugar, and fat, Moss goes into great detail in analyzing why the processed food industry is so reliant on these three ingredients, even when it knows that these ingredients aren't good for us and may well be contributing to obesity and other diseases, such as diabetes. The bottom line is this book exposes the ugly side of capitalism: when you are so intent on selling a product and providing a high profit margin for the pleasure of Wall Street and your investors, you tend to lose sight of the fact that the product you're producing is meant to nourish people. I felt almost like I was looking at this book from opposite sides of the looking glass. On one hand, I could understand the industry drive to increase profits and lower costs, and to not only meet but beat the competition. From the other side, this is food we're talking about here, food that has become a huge part of the American diet and that may well be killing us. Are profits worth this? If ever there was a reason for government regulation, it is the food industry--this book proves exactly why that intervention is sometimes necessary. The market isn't self-regulating when all that matters is profit, not what the product is doing to the people who are using it.
Parts of this book are downright revolting, such as when Moss has the opportunity to taste some products without the added salts, sugars, and fats on which they reply. He describes things like Cheez-Its and canned soup as tasting bitter and metallic, and this was enough to put me off those products for good. Moss argues that the food industry uses inferior ingredients not because those ingredients are acceptable, but because they generate more profit and cost the company less. The ingredients are the very definition of inferior precisely because they taste terrible. In order to mask the horrible taste, the industry, you guessed it, loads the products up with salt, sugar, and fat. Time after time, I couldn't help but wonder why we eat these things when they sound like the sort of nourishment we wouldn't give to our dogs.
Ah, but there's an answer for that. It's not enough for food companies to sell us a product, they must hook us on it and instill a sense of brand loyalty. It should go without saying that we can only eat so much food, which means there are only so many food dollars to be won. In a perfect world, we'd eat just enough to sustain us and keep us healthy but, in that world, the food companies wouldn't make the obscene profits they make. So, what they do is scientifically formulate their foods to make them so addictive we eat more than we should--and they do this not only knowingly, but on purpose. Let that sink in for a while: food companies are actively trying to ensure that Americans overeat because the more we eat, the more money they make. They invest a lot of time, effort, and research into figuring out what makes us like the taste of something and using that information to create recipes that we literally find irresistible. It's mind boggling to imagine what we could create if that sort of devotion, time, and money was applied not to making us eat food that wrecks havoc on our health but, say, to something like figuring out a cheap way to provide clean water for all, or to find a cure for cancer.
This is one of the most striking elements of the book, the way it exposes how science can be monstrously twisted into a discipline that's used not for good (developing medicines, explaining how the world works), but for bad (tricking us into eating unhealthy quantities of processed foods). It's important for savvy consumers to know that studies and experiments can be structured in such a way as to try to determine their outcome before they even begin, and food companies are notorious for doing just this--sometimes because they've taken a page from the tobacco industry, which has owned some of the largest food companies. Whenever there's an outcry over a particular public health concern, the food companies fund studies that either try to downplay the risks or that help them continue to pump us full of terrible food by swapping out one risk for another. One need look no further than the high sugar content of the foods that were churned out during the fat free craze. The food companies prayed on consumer fears by creating a product that helped us assuage our worries about fat by getting us hooked on sugar.
Most pernicious of all, though, is how the food industry has turned to preying on the most vulnerable in our society--children, lower income families, and people in developing nations--in order to continue to pad their profits. Through clever marketing and a concerted effort to ensure that prime shelf space is given to nutrient-deficient, calorically dense foods, the food industry ensures that those most in need of good nutrition are the least likely to get it. What's perhaps even more disturbing is how they've convinced the public that any attempts to level the playing field and make healthier foods more readily available is a violation of our "choice"--as if any of us would choose to be slowly poisoned by what we eat. One need look no further than New York's attempts at banning supersize sugary beverages. Yes, perhaps people should have the choice to ingest as much sugary soda as they want, but at what cost? At what point do we understand that we're being deprived of our choice to live a health lifestyle and to protect our children from the predatory marketing in which companies engage to make sure they make our children customers for life? And what about the costs to public health, don't they count for something?
This book was such a wake up call. I'd already begun to look at processed foods with a dubious eye and have worked hard to eliminate them from my home and to prepare fresh meals from scratch using more fruits and vegetables, but this book finally helped tip the scale--pun intended--and made me determined to avoid added sugars wherever possible. I was so disgusting and upset by what I read that I found myself frantically cleaning out both my fridge and my pantry, throwing away things like salad dressing and mayonnaise because they both had added sugars. Why do we need sugar in mayonnaise anyway? That, I think, is the sort of question all Americans need to ask themselves. Maybe then we can end up with some semblance of sanity in our food policies.
Full review:
I am the type of person who hates highlighting in books. Even in college, it pained me to take a highlighter and mark up a page, no matter how brilliant the passage. It was a sort of sacrilege, a desecration of the book. So for me to mark up passage after passage of this book (albeit the Kindle version, but still), that has to say something about how shocking I found much of what this book has to say. It always strikes me as sort of pretentious and presumptuous to call a book "important", but this is an important book. It's a stellar example of the true power of excellent investigative journalism, and is great evidence for the argument that we need to be willing to pay for journalism if we want quality and depth.
I think it is fair to criticize this book a bit by saying there are some sections that feel a little hasty. There's a bit of sloppiness here and there, and the book is repetitive at times. Still, this didn't detract from the importance of its message.
Divided into three sections: salt, sugar, and fat, Moss goes into great detail in analyzing why the processed food industry is so reliant on these three ingredients, even when it knows that these ingredients aren't good for us and may well be contributing to obesity and other diseases, such as diabetes. The bottom line is this book exposes the ugly side of capitalism: when you are so intent on selling a product and providing a high profit margin for the pleasure of Wall Street and your investors, you tend to lose sight of the fact that the product you're producing is meant to nourish people. I felt almost like I was looking at this book from opposite sides of the looking glass. On one hand, I could understand the industry drive to increase profits and lower costs, and to not only meet but beat the competition. From the other side, this is food we're talking about here, food that has become a huge part of the American diet and that may well be killing us. Are profits worth this? If ever there was a reason for government regulation, it is the food industry--this book proves exactly why that intervention is sometimes necessary. The market isn't self-regulating when all that matters is profit, not what the product is doing to the people who are using it.
Parts of this book are downright revolting, such as when Moss has the opportunity to taste some products without the added salts, sugars, and fats on which they reply. He describes things like Cheez-Its and canned soup as tasting bitter and metallic, and this was enough to put me off those products for good. Moss argues that the food industry uses inferior ingredients not because those ingredients are acceptable, but because they generate more profit and cost the company less. The ingredients are the very definition of inferior precisely because they taste terrible. In order to mask the horrible taste, the industry, you guessed it, loads the products up with salt, sugar, and fat. Time after time, I couldn't help but wonder why we eat these things when they sound like the sort of nourishment we wouldn't give to our dogs.
Ah, but there's an answer for that. It's not enough for food companies to sell us a product, they must hook us on it and instill a sense of brand loyalty. It should go without saying that we can only eat so much food, which means there are only so many food dollars to be won. In a perfect world, we'd eat just enough to sustain us and keep us healthy but, in that world, the food companies wouldn't make the obscene profits they make. So, what they do is scientifically formulate their foods to make them so addictive we eat more than we should--and they do this not only knowingly, but on purpose. Let that sink in for a while: food companies are actively trying to ensure that Americans overeat because the more we eat, the more money they make. They invest a lot of time, effort, and research into figuring out what makes us like the taste of something and using that information to create recipes that we literally find irresistible. It's mind boggling to imagine what we could create if that sort of devotion, time, and money was applied not to making us eat food that wrecks havoc on our health but, say, to something like figuring out a cheap way to provide clean water for all, or to find a cure for cancer.
This is one of the most striking elements of the book, the way it exposes how science can be monstrously twisted into a discipline that's used not for good (developing medicines, explaining how the world works), but for bad (tricking us into eating unhealthy quantities of processed foods). It's important for savvy consumers to know that studies and experiments can be structured in such a way as to try to determine their outcome before they even begin, and food companies are notorious for doing just this--sometimes because they've taken a page from the tobacco industry, which has owned some of the largest food companies. Whenever there's an outcry over a particular public health concern, the food companies fund studies that either try to downplay the risks or that help them continue to pump us full of terrible food by swapping out one risk for another. One need look no further than the high sugar content of the foods that were churned out during the fat free craze. The food companies prayed on consumer fears by creating a product that helped us assuage our worries about fat by getting us hooked on sugar.
Most pernicious of all, though, is how the food industry has turned to preying on the most vulnerable in our society--children, lower income families, and people in developing nations--in order to continue to pad their profits. Through clever marketing and a concerted effort to ensure that prime shelf space is given to nutrient-deficient, calorically dense foods, the food industry ensures that those most in need of good nutrition are the least likely to get it. What's perhaps even more disturbing is how they've convinced the public that any attempts to level the playing field and make healthier foods more readily available is a violation of our "choice"--as if any of us would choose to be slowly poisoned by what we eat. One need look no further than New York's attempts at banning supersize sugary beverages. Yes, perhaps people should have the choice to ingest as much sugary soda as they want, but at what cost? At what point do we understand that we're being deprived of our choice to live a health lifestyle and to protect our children from the predatory marketing in which companies engage to make sure they make our children customers for life? And what about the costs to public health, don't they count for something?
This book was such a wake up call. I'd already begun to look at processed foods with a dubious eye and have worked hard to eliminate them from my home and to prepare fresh meals from scratch using more fruits and vegetables, but this book finally helped tip the scale--pun intended--and made me determined to avoid added sugars wherever possible. I was so disgusting and upset by what I read that I found myself frantically cleaning out both my fridge and my pantry, throwing away things like salad dressing and mayonnaise because they both had added sugars. Why do we need sugar in mayonnaise anyway? That, I think, is the sort of question all Americans need to ask themselves. Maybe then we can end up with some semblance of sanity in our food policies.
mini_babybutterflys's review against another edition
it was not interesting, i got kinda bored
jgraydee's review against another edition
4.0
Well organized and easy to read. Enjoyed the historical aspect of the book.
chelseatm's review against another edition
4.0
What a great and enlightening book. Totally made me rethink food and the grocery store.
My favourite thing was how Moss approached the material. Especially when he was interviewing executives of the processed food industry. He gave them a solid even keel to state their case. He could have portrayed them in a number of other ways but he portrayed them honestly and fairly and I appreciate that.
The book is not a health book as my friend mistakenly assumed. It is an enlightening expose on the processed food companies, the public's consumption, and how it's progressed through the years.
Another aspect that chilled me was the marketing side. Being that a good chunk of the advertisements mentioned were from the nineties, they were the ones aimed at me as a kid. I remember the ads they talked about and I remember how they affected me. I plan to be critical of advertisements and claims from now on.
This book is an easy read with nice understandable language for those outside the nutrition field. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a compelling non-fiction read.
My favourite thing was how Moss approached the material. Especially when he was interviewing executives of the processed food industry. He gave them a solid even keel to state their case. He could have portrayed them in a number of other ways but he portrayed them honestly and fairly and I appreciate that.
The book is not a health book as my friend mistakenly assumed. It is an enlightening expose on the processed food companies, the public's consumption, and how it's progressed through the years.
Another aspect that chilled me was the marketing side. Being that a good chunk of the advertisements mentioned were from the nineties, they were the ones aimed at me as a kid. I remember the ads they talked about and I remember how they affected me. I plan to be critical of advertisements and claims from now on.
This book is an easy read with nice understandable language for those outside the nutrition field. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a compelling non-fiction read.