The Perfect Formula 5the human bag is just another day at the office. Behind the ,000 new
or updated food products rolled out each year, there are techniques
like mapping the “bliss point”—that is, finding the precise amounts
of sugars, fats, and salt that keep consumers coming back for more. Or
tinkering with fat globules to alter rates of absorption, enhancing sugars
to amplify sweetness, and physically altering salt, even pulverizing it,
to trigger a boost in flavor.
All of this is part of the perfect formula that helps explain why so
much fat is used. Why three-quarters of products in the food supply
contain some form of sweeteners. And why three-quarters of dietary
salt comes from processed foods.
The perfect formula also explains why eating a variety of foods today
means something quite different than it once did. Historically, scarcity
of calories in food encouraged greater diversity of diet. Variety could
come from up to 300,000 edible species of plants that existed through-
out the world. In the modern food system, most calories come from four
crops (corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice) and three animals (cattle, pigs,
and chicken). Variety now comes from combining sugars, fats, salts,
chemical flavors, and other additives in endless ways.
Two years before the surgeon general’s report on America’s obe-
sity epidemic, CEOs and presidents from eleven of the largest food
manufacturers and suppliers met in Minneapolis at a rare and secretive
meeting. As Pulitzer Prize–winning author Michael Moss chronicled
in his book Salt, Sugar, Fat, the agenda had one item: how to respond
to the emerging obesity epidemic. Two companies led the discussion,
citing parallels with the tobacco industry’s efforts to obfuscate the dan-
gers of smoking. They urged the other companies to join together and
proactively find ways to improve public health. One CEO strenuously
objected. The others remained silent. In the end, they each went their
separate ways.
Reform efforts by individual companies have wilted under stock-
holder scrutiny. Kraft, which ironically was owned by tobacco giant
Phillip Morris, tweaked product formulations to improve nutrition and
sought permission from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
to amend product labels with more nutrition information. When sales
of its new products faltered and other reliable brands underperformed,
the share price tumbled and the CEO was replaced.