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

by Michael Moss

In 1964, a young psychiatrist named Fred Glaser joined the team for a two-year stint and came away startled by what he saw and heard. By and large, Glaser’s patients defied the government’s one-size-fits-all portrayal of drug abusers. Some were poor and undereducated, and their environment seemed to have as much to do with their use of heroin as did the drug. In his therapy sessions with patients, Glaser would ask what got them started, and one eighteen-year-old girl’s answer was so matter-of-fact in pointing out the inevitability of this that it astonished him. “Well, doctor,” she told him, “when you got to be my age, in my neighborhood—that was what you did.”