Salt Sugar Fat

Moss introduces the book with a story about a meeting of food industry leaders to discuss obesity. In 1999, obesity was becoming a more prominent social issue. These large food corporations worried about their role in producing the problem. Executives represented the manufacturers of common industrial food, including Kraft and Coca-Cola.

All of these industrial food producers rely on three key ingredients to hook consumers: salt, sugar, and fat. These lure eaters to give companies more “stomach share.”

James Behnke held a senior technical position at Pillsbury, and was the host of the meeting. Despite his company loyalty, he and other food scientists felt concern over health crises created by their products. Moss writes:

The grocery store icons they had invented in a more innocent era–the soda and chips and TV dinners–had been imagined as occasional fare. It was society that had changed, changed so dramatically that these snacks and convenience foods had become a daily–even hourly–habit, a staple of the American diet (8).

The three pillars of the food industry include “taste, convenience, and cost” (9). Cost drove the industry to use unhealthy ingredients.

Michael Mudd, a vice president at Kraft, spoke months prior to the aforementioned meeting to a group of food scientists.