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

by Michael Moss

All they had to do was to change up their products in some small way to make them a little different, or even just seem different, and we would stay hungry longer. They gave this new stratagem on their part a name: variety. Variety is the potato chip that they turned into ten flavors. It’s the two hundred kinds of breakfast cereal found in the larger supermarkets. It’s Banana Peanut Butter Chip Häagen-Dazs ice cream, jostling for space in the freezer next to Brown Butter Bourbon Truffle. Investors saw what this did to our appetite, and applauded. Goldman Sachs in a 1995 report on how cereal sales had reached $8 billion cited the “constant flow of new products that added variety and stimulated consumption.”