Potato Chips - © Healthline.com

Hooked: Food, Free Will, And Our Addictions…

I’ve come across a new book about how consumers are manipulated by Processed Food manufacturers, who exploit our ‘natural addictions’ to increase our consumption and capture larger shares of the food market. It makes me wonder who else in our world is exploiting us in the same ways…

BK Whopper Meal - © Burger KingA typical Fast Food Meal: Jammed with Salt, Fat and Sugar, it’s
coldly calculated to appeal to our baser, weaker natures.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Moss’s latest book is titled, clearly and unequivocally, Hooked: Free Will And How The Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions. It might just as effectively been titled something like: Hooked: How the Food Giants Exploited The Pandemic. It seems the two go together like Peanut Butter and Jelly.

Addiction model behind the whole thing

In a previous best-seller, Moss looked at how Big Food exploits humans’ natural physical and mental addictions to Salt, Sugar and Fat. That contention is simple to explain: Salt, Sugar and Fat are in the Dietary Dog House these days, but they have always been among the most essential food components we need to survive. Evolution ensured that the early humans with the strongest preferences for these food were the str0ongest and, therefore, the most likely to survive and multiply.

You may recall reading here about how some Sugary, Salty and/or Fatty foods can be as addictive as Drugs, Tobacco or Alcohol. The central example was OREO Cookies. A study whose results were published in the Christian Science Monitor clearly showed that OEROs were just as chemically addictive as drugs. Sure, it was a mouse-based study, but it’s been declared valid by a small army of researchers and scientists since.

Latest premise more insidious

Moss’s latest premise is very similar but much more complex and insidious – because it’s all in the mind. More to the point, it’s central premise is not that Big Food is manipulating our fundamental corporeal addictive predisposition, but that it’s exploiting our fundamental tendencies and weaknesses, on an unconscious level, to make us more likely to buy more, and eat more of their products.

According to a digest of the principles behind the Moss book from Brooklyn Neustaeter of CTV.ca, published yesterday, Moss says: “[…] Food companies can manipulate consumers’ eating habits by increasing variety, leaving ingredients off labels, adding chemicals to reduce product cost, and packing products [in ways that will hide] empty calories. […] [T]he human brain ‘gets excited’ when it sees variety or inexpensive food at the grocery store, which increases the chances of purchasing the product. […] They have chemical labs reformulating their ingredients to bring the cost down. Even 10 cents excites the brain. They know we get really excited about variety, so that’s why you walk into a cereal aisle and there’s 200 varieties. […] Moss says the ingredients and marketing around processed foods may even make the products more addictive than drugs or alcohol in some cases.”

Pandemic should share its fair part of the blame

Moss and the article’s author say the current COVID-19 should be charged as a co-conspirator in the whole crime story, since it has made bored, stressed, locked-down folks by the millions more susceptible to their cravings for ‘comfort. As I mentioned the other day, that’s probably why many folks have responded so strongly to Junk Food makers’ recent moves to bring back legacy and retro favourites from their repertoires. And why sales of junk foods of all kinds have soared during the pandemic crisis. Moss agrees.

An abstract of a digest of the new Moss book published on Amazon adds: “We’ve evolved to prefer convenient meals, so three-fourths of the calories we get from groceries come from ready-to-eat foods. Moss goes on to show how the processed food industry has not only tried to deny this troubling discovery, but exploit it to its advantage.”

Targeting some of today’s biggest issues

Moss also examines how the Junk Food industry has wormed its way into our addiction to dieting by manipulating its products took healthier and expanding the whole notion that Junk Food is becoming healthier: “For instance, in a 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. With more people unable to make dieting work for them, manufacturers are now claiming to add ingredients that can effortlessly cure our compulsive eating habits.”

And, because they are manipulating some of our strongest tendencies at a subconscious level, we’re virtually powerless to defend ourselves against the onslaught. Let me amend that slightly: we are more likely to be manipulated without counter-influences like Moss’ book to make us consciously aware of what’s happening.

My take

I don’t doubt that Moss’ take on the issue of the Junk Food Industry’s subtle manipulation of the masses is taking place. I just wonder what government and the medical establishment can do to counter the industry’s vice-like hold on our preferences. If folks could be convinced (or, dare I say, counter-manipulated?) to replace even a portion of the Junk Food they consume with healthier foods like fresh fruits and veggies, we could have a much healthier world with much lower health system costs – a key change in our lifestyles that we must make at some point if we’re to survive the onslaught of global warming and the food security crisis that is looming the world over.

~ Maggie J.