There is a certain enlightened segment of America that relishes a good gastro-scolding, whether delivered gently by a Michael Pollan ("Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants") or more vituperatively by a Mark Bittman ("In the time it takes to go into a McDonald's, stand in line, order, wait, pay and leave, you could make oatmeal for four while taking your vitamins, brushing your teeth and half-unloading the dishwasher"). But there is a much larger segment of America whose members heedlessly eat processed foods that make them overweight and unwell. Michael Moss, a dogged investigative reporter who neither scolds nor proselytises, is here for them.
Mr Moss' gift to posterity is the phrase "pink slime", which he popularised in a 2009 New York Times article as part of a series on beef safety that won him a Pulitzer Prize. Pink slime is a hamburger-meat extender produced by taking the trimmings from the outermost part of a cow - once thought to be too fatty and too prone to contamination for human consumption, better suited to making pet food and candles - and whirling these trimmings in a centrifuge to separate the protein from the fat. The resultant gunk is treated with gaseous ammonia to ensure that it's not a habitat for E coli and other pathogens.
Mr Moss' revelation that pink slime was a component of America's most commonly eaten ground beef - with a clientele ranging from McDonald's and Taco Bell to the United States Department of Agriculture's National School Lunch Programme - set off a countrywide furor, not to mention a lot of ex post facto retching by everyone who had ever eaten a burger at an Interstate rest stop. In reaction, McDonald's and such supermarket chains as Kroger and Safeway announced that they would no longer traffic in slime-augmented meat. By dint of good old-fashioned reporting, Mr Moss effected real change, a big win for the consumer.
Salt Sugar Fat is not "Pink Slime: The Book", in that it is not a shocking exposé. We already know that its title subjects exist and are bad for us. As Jeffrey Dunn, a former Coca-Cola executive, tells Mr Moss of the highly sugared beverage he used to sell: "It's not like there's a smoking gun. The gun is right there. It's not hidden."
But Salt Sugar Fat continues Mr Moss' hot streak of ace reportage, chronicling the insidious ways in which big food companies, over time, have sneaked more and more of the bad stuff into our diets, to the point where we now consume 22 teaspoons of sugar a day and three times as much cheese as our forebears did in 1970. Supersizing, the bête noire of Morgan Spurlock and Michael Bloomberg, is only part of it. Mr Moss visits with neuroscientists whose MRIs of test subjects demonstrate how the brain's so-called pleasure centres light up when the subjects are dosed with solutions of sugar or fat. He then describes how consultants and food scientists calibrate products - "optimise" them, in industry-speak - to maximise cravings.
Virtually everything you can buy in a supermarket that's not an outer-aisle pure food like milk or kohlrabi has been fiddled with to make you shiver with bliss - which will in turn make you buy the product again and again. The term "bliss point", in fact, is used in the soft drink business to denote the optimal level of sugar at which the beverage is most pleasing to the consumer.
The "Fat" section of Salt Sugar Fat is the most disquieting, for, as Mr Moss learns from Adam Drewnowski, an epidemiologist who runs the Centre for Obesity Research at the University of Washington, there is no known bliss point for fat - his test subjects, plied with a drinkable concoction of milk, cream and sugar, kept on chugging ever fattier samples without crying uncle. This realisation has had huge implications in the food industry. For example, Mr Moss reports, the big companies have come to understand that "cheese could be added to other food products without any worries that people would walk away".
As a feat of reporting and public service, Salt Sugar Fat is a remarkable accomplishment. What it isn't always is a ripsnorting read - it doesn't offer the sustained storytelling oomph of, say, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, bogging down a bit too often in dissertational data storms. Mr Moss is on his surest footing when he tethers his narrative to some convenience food innovator like Al Clausi, the chemist-visionary behind Tang, Alpha-Bits and Jell-O instant pudding; or Howard Moskowitz, a consultant who helped reboot Dr Pepper in a time of brand struggle; or Bob Drane, the Oscar Mayer executive whose team invented Lunchables, those prepackaged grab-'n'-go plastic trays.
Healthful eating, in this cheesy-crust nation, is too often perceived as the province of those with the "resources". "But most of us can't simply stop eating processed foods," Mr Moss writes sympathetically. "We are still scrambling to get out the door in the morning in one piece, or to please picky eaters, or to put a decent dinner on the table without getting fired for leaving the office early." By methodically laying out all he's learned in Salt Sugar Fat, though, Mr Moss has provided a resource available to anyone who cares to crack its pages.
©2013 The New York Times News Service
SALT SUGAR FAT
How the Food Giants Hooked Us
Michael Moss
Random House; 446 pages; $28
