I’m not sure anyone who loves to eat as much as I do can properly call herself a health nut. I did, after all, write a wistful tribute to Dairy Queen Blizzards on this blog just a couple of weeks ago. And I do have a deep belief in free will and the necessity of people taking responsibility for their own actions. (When I got called for jury duty on a personal injury lawsuit, the corporate defense attorney found me delightfully amusing before the plaintiff’s lawyer dismissed me.) Those two facts combined mean that I often have mixed feelings in the junk food debate. Yes, I like Cheez-Its, but I don’t eat them every day, and that kind of restraint doesn’t feel all that difficult. So should we really be able to hold food companies responsible for the obesity epidemic?

Well…actually, maybe we should, at least partly. A recent article in the New York Times magazine by Michael Moss makes a compelling case that the public doesn’t stand much of a chance against the unhealthy foods that the junk food kings are pushing. Really, you should just go read the actual article right now. But for the record, here are the tidbits that I found most interesting…and disturbing:

The Bliss Point
Any Malcolm Gladwell fans out there will already know about Howard Moskowitz, the guy who revolutionized the food market by testing in excruciating detail every possible permutation of a product (61 versions of Vanilla Cherry Dr. Pepper, say, to find the perfect balance of vanilla and cherry and, um, pepper-ness). He calls that balance the “bliss point,” and he finds it through surveying thousands of taste testers and crunching the numbers across dozens of factors. Which is all rather fascinating, but here’s the nagging thought I couldn’t get out of my head as I read about his process: can you think of anything that sounds less like cooking? Continue reading →