Hooked Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions

NATIONAL BESTSELLER The troubling story of how food companies have exploited our most fundamental evolutionary instincts to get us hooked on processed foods, from the #1 bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Salt Sugar Fat. Motivated by these questions such as Is it possible that processed food is addictive, like drugs or alcohol? and Are the decisions we make about food beyond our control?, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Michael Moss began searching for answers. In Hooked, Moss explores the science of addiction and uncovers what the scientific and medical communities—as well as food manufacturers—already know, which is that food can, in some cases, be even more addictive than alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs. Our bodies are hard-wired for sweets, so food manufacturers have deployed fifty-six types of sugar to add to their products, creating in us the expectation that everything should be cloying; we've evolved to prefer convenient meals, so three-fourths of the calories we get from groceries come from ready-to-eat foods. Moss goes on to show how the processed food industry has not only tried to deny this troubling discovery, but exploit it to its advantage. A gripping account of the legal battles, insidious marketing campaigns, and cutting-edge food science that have brought us to our current public health crisis, Hooked lays out all that the food industry is doing to exploit and deepen our addictions, and shows us what we can do so that we can once again seize control.