Sugar Salt Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
17th March 2013
There is a certain enlightened segment of America that relishes a good gastro-scolding, whether delivered gently by a Michael Pollan (“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”) or more vituperatively by a Mark Bittman (“In the time it takes to go into a McDonald’s, stand in line, order, wait, pay and leave, you could make oatmeal for four while taking your vitamins, brushing your teeth and half-unloading the dishwasher”). But there is a much larger segment of America whose members heedlessly eat processed foods that make them overweight and unwell. Michael Moss, a dogged investigative reporter who neither scolds nor proselytizes, is here for them.
And that’s about as close to good sense as a review in the New York Times can stand to get; not all that close. A more intelligent person, without an ax to grind, would hesitate to use the phrase ‘who neither scolds nor proselytizes’, about a book with a subtitle that suggests that unhealthy eating (by the finger-pointer’s definition, of course) is a sudden calamity visited upon the innocent consumer by the big bad corporate giants, without any individual choice or responsibility involved.
Moss’s gift to posterity is the phrase “pink slime,” which he popularized in a 2009 New York Times article as part of a series on beef safety that won him a Pulitzer Prize.
Oh, yeah, ‘pink slime’ doesn’t scold or proselytize, not a bit. (Where are these people when it’s big bad government doing the nasty on taxpayers? In the box with the ambiguity, I suppose.)