An Urban's Rural View

Imagine you're a food company. You want to make food people will buy at a price that makes you a profit. You figure the best way to do that is to make products that taste good and don't spoil before the buyer uses them up.

Nothing unusual or objectionable about that, is there? The public wants its food to taste good and have reasonable shelf life, right?

Let's say, furthermore, that to develop good-tasting and long-lasting products, you employ some well-trained professionals. Chemists and food scientists proficient at manipulating flavors and preservatives. Marketers adept at consumer research and advertising. Maybe even neuroscientists skilled at determining which ingredients light up which pleasure centers in the brain.

Doesn't sound nefarious, does it? Just better ways to give people what they want, don't you think?

But what if, after doing their thing, your experts tell you the secret to good-tasting food is lots of salt and sugar and fat, and the secret to long-lasting food is lots of chemicals. Does accepting this advice render you the equivalent of a drug dealer, preying on human weakness, luring innocent victims into salt, sugar and fat addictions?

New York Times reporter Michael Moss thinks so. In a lengthy article (http://tiny.cc/…) adapted from his new book, "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us," he argues the food industry is promoting products that taste good but aren't good for us -- and, indeed, "hook" us.

He quotes former food-industry executives who've had guilty second thoughts about what they used to do. One is a former Oscar Mayer executive who was involved in the creation of "Lunchables," which have been criticized for offering a day's worth of saturated fat in a single meal. The executive told medical students at the University of Wisconsin that their counterparts in the school's MBA program are taught:

"Discover what consumers want to buy and give it to them with both barrels. Sell more, keep your job! How do marketers often translate these 'rules' into action on food? Our limbic brains love sugar, fat, salt. ... So formulate products to deliver these. Perhaps add low-cost ingredients to boost profit margins. Then 'supersize' to sell more. ... And advertise/promote to lock in 'heavy users.' Plenty of guilt to go around here!"

I should stipulate at this point that I started minimizing my intake of processed foods three decades ago, long before critiques of them became trendy. It wasn't fear of "addiction" that motivated me -- I think Moss stretches that point -- but the amount of salt and sugar in processed foods has long appalled me, as it does Moss.

Moreover, I have always preferred the taste of home-cooked food. I'm not religious about this -- I allow myself the occasional cheat -- but for the most part what my wife and I eat is prepared fresh.

That said, I find myself in the odd position of feeling a little sorry for the food industry. It is, after all, giving consumers what they want. Is it the industry's fault that what consumers want isn't good for them? If what they decided they wanted was healthier food, wouldn't the industry give it to them?

Maybe if enough of those consumers read Michael Moss and other critics of processed food, what they seek from the industry would change.

In case you were wondering, Moss says the "perfect addictive food" is the potato chip, thanks to "the coating of salt, the fat content that rewards the brain with instant feelings of pleasure, the sugar that exists not as an additive but in the starch of the potato itself."

I confess. Potato chips are among my occasional cheats.

Urban Lehner

urbanity@hotmail.com

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