Hooked: How Processed Food Became Addictive

by Michael Moss

Most of all, perhaps, we felt beaten by the biology of our attraction to food. Try as we might, we just couldn’t escape how we felt about certain sensations, especially the taste of sugar. We gave artificial sweeteners a try only to grow disillusioned with them; after decades of growth, the sales of Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi were down by a third from their peak in the mid-2000s. Our body kept pulling us back to sugar in ways that strangled our free will. All this anxiety about processed food was changing our eating habits, Morrison said. We were drawn more and more to the produce aisle, where Campbell’s, like its peers, had little to sell. Indeed, we were spending larger sums of our money on the whole perimeter of the store—for fresh vegetables and fruit and meats and fish and yogurt—and avoiding the center aisles where the heavily processed packaged goods dwelled. More of us, too, were ditching the store altogether to shop online, where we abandoned the brands that we and our parents and their parents had grown up with. That wasn’t the worst of it, Morrison told the crowd. We were starting to question whether those once-beloved brands would, or could, play any meaningful role in our lives going forward. These doubts were there when we ate out, too. McDonald’s tried to sell salads, but we flocked to new fast-food chains that sold nothing but. Let there be no mistaking the significance of our losing faith in food that was fast and convenient, Morrison said. The industry that...