Hooked: How Processed Food Became Addictive

by Michael Moss

The genesis for having more information on food packages was a 1969 White House conference on food where a panel led by a vice president of Monsanto, the food ingredients manufacturer, made nutrition labeling part of its recommendations. The panel also included a food industry lawyer named Peter Hutt,29 who went on, in 1971, to become the chief counsel for the FDA, where he oversaw the advent of nutrition labeling. The FDA didn’t actually require this disclosure for another two decades, but it didn’t even have to. By the 1990s, the food manufacturers were voluntarily putting loads of information about the nutrition of their products on a majority of the packaged food they sold. In comments to the FDA in 1990, the snacks giant Frito-Lay affirmed the whole industry’s enthusiasm by saying the company “has a demonstrated record of sensitivity to the needs and concerns of its consumers and has a direct interest in,30 and responsibility for, the informative and meaningful labeling of food products relative to the nutritional interests and needs of consumers. We support a policy of providing sound nutrition information to the American public.” Why such gusto for revealing corporate secrets? For starters, the processed food industry had won lots of concessions.31 In return for its cooperation on the new labeling, the FDA agreed to stop making food manufacturers put the word imitation on their package fronts, which had been a real threat to sales. The agency had been doing this to ...