Quotes from Michael Moss

On average, we consume 71 pounds of caloric sweeteners each year. That's 22 teaspoons of sugar, per person, per day.

The remarkable rise of 'convenience' or processed foods—heralded by slogans 'instant,' 'ready to cook' and 'heat and serve'—has set off a revolution in U.S. eating habits, brought a bit of magic into the U.S. kitchen.

In any given cereal aisle, two hundred cereal brands—and their spinoffs—compete for the shopper's attention, so food manufacturers now spend nearly twice as much money on advertising their cereals as they do on the ingredients that go into them.

there were links between sugar and addiction to opiates;

Center for Science in the Public Interest, simply because it was so ruthlessly effective. Founded in 1971, this group of activists would grow to have nine hundred thousand subscribers to its

Some of the largest companies are now using brain scans to study how we react neurologically to certain foods, especially to sugar. They've discovered that the brain lights up for sugar the same way it does for cocaine.

They may have salt, sugar, and fat on their side, but we, ultimately, have the power to make choices. After all, we decide what to buy. We decide how much to eat.

Many of the Prego sauces—whether cheesy, chunky, or light—have one feature in common: The largest ingredient, after tomatoes, is sugar. A mere half cup of Prego Traditional, for instance, has more than two teaspoons of sugar, as much as two-plus Oreo cookies, a tube of Go-Gurt, or some of the Pepperidge Farm Apple Turnovers that Campbell also makes.

Each year, food companies use an amount of salt that is every bit as staggering as it sounds: 5 billion pounds.

Inevitably, the manufacturers of processed food argue that they have allowed us to become the people we want to be, fast and busy, no longer slaves to the stove. But in their hands, the salt, sugar, and fat they have used to propel this social transformation are not nutrients as much as weapons—weapons they deploy, certainly, to defeat their competitors but also to keep us coming back for more.

If sugar is the methamphetamine of processed food ingredients, with its high-speed, blunt assault on our brains, then fat is the opiate, a smooth operator whose effects are less obvious but no less powerful. A

Thus, the sweetened breakfast was born, as was a core industry strategy that food processors would deploy forevermore...Just swap out the problem component for another that wasn't, at the moment, as high on the list of concerns.

the sweeter the industry made its food, the sweeter kids liked their food to be.

When consumers tried to improve their health by shifting to skim milk, Congress set up a scheme for the powerful dairy industry through which it has quietly turned all that unwanted, surplus fat into huge sales of cheese—not cheese to be eaten before or after dinner as a delicacy, but cheese that is slipped into our food as an alluring but unnecessary extra ingredient. The toll, thirty years later: The average American now consumes as much as thirty-three pounds of cheese a year.

If she [Mrs. Homemaker] didn't know how much she needed convenience, it was up to inventors like Clausi to show her the way.

Using high math and computations, he engineers them, with one goal in mind: to create the biggest crave. "People say, 'I crave chocolate,' " Moskowitz told me. "But why do we crave chocolate, or chips? And how do you get people to crave these and other foods?

In a key--but commonly overlooked--aspect of obesity, weight gain can be caused by the slightest increases in consumption, if it continues day in and day out.

proponent of the view that the processed food industry should be seen as a public health menace: "As a culture, we've become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco.

Well, that's what the consumer wants, and we're not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That's what they want. If we give them less, they'll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you're sort of trapped.

The notion that some foods behave like narcotics goes back at least twenty years in scientific circles.

If you mapped categories of food advertising, especially advertising to kids, against the Food Guide Pyramid, it would turn the pyramid on its head," he

Many of the Prego sauces—whether cheesy, chunky, or light—have one feature in common: The largest ingredient, after tomatoes, is sugar.

Some candy bars had more protein than many cereals. [Jean] Mayer dubbed them "sugar-coated vitamin pills" and wrote, "I contend that these cereals containing over 50% sugar should be labeled imitation cereal or cereal confections, and they should be sold in the candy section rather than in the cereal section.

the inventors and company executives don't generally partake in their own creations. Thus the heavy reliance on focus groups with the targeted consumer.