You don’t know Howard Moskowitz. But Howard
Moskowitz knows you.
At
least he knows what kind of food will make you—and especially your children—happy
and craving more, and more, and more. That is tremendously important knowledge.
As applied, it has much to do with the nation’s current obesity problem.
A
fellow you might know because of his reporting and writing is Michael Moss.
Mr. Moss, a Pulitzer Prize winning New York
Times investigative reporter, has mostly recently done Americans the service of
explaining who Mr. Moskowitz is and how he “optimizes” products for such
companies as Campbell Soup, General Food, Kraft and Pepsi Co.
The
explanation comes in an article adapted from Mr. Moss’ book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked
Us. The adaptation ran as the cover story of the New York Times Magazine of
February 24. Random House is scheduled to release the book this month.
Judging from the Time’s adaptation, the book
will be an easy, fascinating—indeed devastating—read. Hopefully it will become
a best seller and, like such books as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, it will awaken the nation to the immense problem the
processed food and grocery-store industry are complicit in causing. Perhaps it
will provoke action against the processed food industry similar to that taken
against the tobacco industry.
Of course, it is not news that
so-called junk food isn’t good for us. Mr. Moss doesn’t break ground here. What
is new is Mr. Moss’ finding that the food industry is well aware of the problem
its manufactured foods are causing, but doesn’t care. The industry has
consciously created and just about perfected the ability to alter products to
make them addictive.
Mr. Moss’ article explains how Mr. Moskowitz and other
scientists, promoters and marketers have engineered techniques that tend to
defeat adults’ will power, prodding them to consume unhealthy quantities of
unhealthy foods. Children, who have yet
to learn restraint, are especially vulnerable to craving the food engineers
create.
Mr.
Moss spent four years researching his book. He spoke to more than 300 former
food industry scientists, marketers, and Chief Operating Officers. He gathered
thousands of pages of secret memos, “from inside the food industry’s operations.”
In his
Times’ adaptation, Mr. Moss presents a group of “small case studies of a
handful of characters whose work then, and perspective now, sheds light on how
the foods are created and sold to people who, while not powerless, are
extremely vulnerable to the intensity of these companies’ industrial
formulations and selling campaigns.”
Take Mr. Moskowitz, for instance. He is a
Harvard-trained experimental psychologist who runs a White Plains, New York
consulting firm. He and his team of researchers pay regular consumers to taste,
smell, feel, touch, and react to whatever product is being tested. The
consumers give their opinions about a food’s “mouth feel,” and other sensations
that range from the item’s “dryness to gumminess to moisture release” and a
host of other qualities.
The consumers’ opinions are fed to computers. Mathematical
models are created. From the resulting graphs, charts, and analyses, the
Moskowitz team arrives at a product’s “bliss point.” That is the point at which
the potato chip, say, has optimum appeal—the point where it is closest to
addicting because it has the maximum amount of “crave.” It is the point that
yields maximum resistance to an individual’s will power.
Sadly, too many of us cave in to a
product’s crave.
As a result, Americans currently
overeat to the extent that one third of the U.S. adult population is clinically
obese. Worse, a fifth of the nation’s youngsters also are clinically obese.
It’s
common knowledge that obesity is a risk factor for Type 2 diabetes. But the
incidence of diabetes is increasing. It now afflicts some 24 million in the
United States. Seventy-nine million have been judged pre-diabetic. Moreover
gout—once fairly rare—is on the rise. The severely painful arthritic condition associated
with eating rich foods and with obesity now affects 8 million.
In common usage we refer to an
obese person as grossly fat. To be clinically obese individuals must weigh at
least 20 percent more than their ideal weight. The trouble with obesity, aside
from the inconvenience and outright hardship of lugging the extra baggage, is
that obesity is a risk factor not only for diabetes but for high blood pressure
and a batch of other unpleasant and threatening diseases.
As long ago as 1999, James Behnke,
an enlightened chemist with a doctorate in food science and a Pillsbury
executive, contrived to stage a meeting with the Chief Executive Officers and
presidents of Kraft, Nabisco, General Mills Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola,
and Mars. He and other ranking food
industry executives wanted to warn the company bigwigs of what was being called
a national obesity epidemic. He pointed out that the processed food industry
was being accused of causing the fattening of America.
As Mr. Moss puts it, Mr. Behnke and his
cohorts wanted to “warn the C.E.O.s that their companies may have gone too far
in creating and marketing products that posed the greatest health concerns.” Sincere efforts “to be part of the solution”
were called for, they said. That way the industry might “defuse the criticism
that’s building against us.”
The C.E.O.s rejected the warning.
Since then the problems Mr. Behnke and other outlined have gotten worse.
And we Americans have seen greed
inspire gluttony.
----Gus Gribbin
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