Michael Moss Quotes

#1. America had yet seen - that is, until the public caught on and the lean, ammonia-processed beef came to be known as "pink slime.

Michael Moss

#2. If she [Mrs. Homemaker] didn't know how much she needed convenience, it was up to inventors like Clausi to show her the way.

Michael Moss

#3. That is the one single word that the food industry hates: 'addiction.' They much prefer words like 'crave-ability' and 'allure.'

Michael Moss

#4. They may have salt, sugar, and fat on their side, but we, ultimately, have the power to make choices. After all, we decide what to buy. We decide how much to eat.

Michael Moss

#5. The biggest hits - be they Coca-Cola or Doritos - owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don't have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating.

Michael Moss

#6. I'm thinking waiters and waitresses are going to be bracing for more customers coming in going, not just kind of where is that beef from, but, like, where is that vanilla from and what's up with that sunflower oil? Is it organic or not and how many pesticides?

Michael Moss

#7. Thus, the sweetened breakfast was born, as was a core industry strategy that food processors would deploy forevermore...Just swap out the problem component for another that wasn't, at the moment, as high on the list of concerns.

Michael Moss

#8. Yet many of the biggest slaughterhouses would sell their meat only to hamburger makers like Cargill if they agreed not to test their meat for E. coli until it was mixed together with shipments from other slaughterhouses.

Michael Moss

#9. You can walk through the grocery store and, while the brightly colored packaging and empty promises are still mesmerizing, you can see the products for what they are.

Michael Moss

#10. the inventors and company executives don't generally partake in their own creations. Thus the heavy reliance on focus groups with the targeted consumer.

Michael Moss

#11. The growing attention Americans are paying to what they put into their mouths has touched off a new scramble by the processed-food companies to address health concerns.

Michael Moss

#12. As a culture, we've become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco.

Michael Moss

#13. One reason that we eat processed foods is the decline of home economics. Restarting home economics classes is one of the key things we could do to get this issue moving.

Michael Moss

#14. Every year, the average American eats as much as 33 pounds of cheese. That's up to 60,000 calories and 3,100 grams of saturated fat. So why do we eat so much cheese? Mainly it's because the government is in cahoots with the processed food industry.

Michael Moss

#15. I think the food giants are realizing that one of the big myths of them is that they can innovate.

Michael Moss

#16. Well, that's what the consumer wants, and we're not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That's what they want. If we give them less, they'll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you're sort of trapped.

Michael Moss

#17. Each year, food companies use an amount of salt that is every bit as staggering as it sounds: 5 billion pounds.

Michael Moss

#18. Companies are experimenting with replacing sodium chloride with potassium chloride, because most of the health problems come from sodium. It works for some products, but if you diminish the amount of sodium, people want sugar and fat instead.

Michael Moss

#19. The playing field is anything but level when you walk into the grocery store. So much government subsidy goes into processed foods. Even when you're well-meaning as a parent or a shopper for yourself, you can't help but be pulled toward the highly processed food.

Michael Moss

#20. Every one of our 10,000 taste buds is wired for sugar. But we aren't born liking salt - we develop a taste for it at about 6 months.

Michael Moss

#21. There are powdered salts, chunked salts, salts shaped in different ways with various additives to work perfectly with processed foods. All of them are geared to increase allure.

Michael Moss

#22. the biggest deliverers of saturated fat - the type of fat doctors worry about - are cheese and red meat,

Michael Moss

#23. ...we eat not so much for pleasure as we do to ward off an awful feeling...The fear of hunger is deeply rooted, and food manufacturers know well how to push the buttons that evoke this fear.

Michael Moss

#24. Every time the good giants try to cut back on salt, sugar, fat calories, inevitably Wall Street raises its hand and is looking at the sales figures and the revenue and saying, 'Thou shalt not result in any loss of profit.' There's huge continuing pressure on the food companies.

Michael Moss

#25. cheese and pizza contributed more than 14 percent of the saturated fat being consumed.

Michael Moss

#26. red meat that has been processed into bacon, bologna, hot dogs, sandwich meats, and other products with added salt is best avoided altogether.

Michael Moss

#27. In a key
but commonly overlooked
aspect of obesity, weight gain can be caused by the slightest increases in consumption, if it continues day in and day out.

Michael Moss

#28. Given these proclivities on the part of food companies - competitive, beholden to Wall Street, and in utter denial about their culpability - an intervention by Washington would certainly seem to be in order.

Michael Moss

#29. Pressed by the Obama administration and consumers, Kraft, Nestle, Pepsi, Campbell and General Mills, among others, have begun to trim the loads of salt, sugar and fat in many products.

Michael Moss

#30. Home economics - kids in school used to be taught how to shop, how to cook from scratch, how to be in control of their diets. Doesn't happen anymore.

Michael Moss

#31. Many of the Prego sauces - whether cheesy, chunky or light - have one feature in common: The largest ingredient, after tomatoes, is sugar. A mere half-cup of Prego Traditional, for instance, has the equivalent of more than two teaspoons of sugar: as much as two-plus Oreo cookies.

Michael Moss

#32. Sugar was an issue in the '80s, so you would see low-sugar products; fat was an issue in the '90s, so you'd see low-fat products.

Michael Moss

#33. The optimum amount of sugar in a product became known as the 'bliss point.' Food inventors and scientists spend a huge amount of time formulating the perfect amount of sugar that will send us over the moon and send products flying off the shelves.

Michael Moss

#34. Using high math and computations, he engineers them, with one goal in mind: to create the biggest crave. "People say, 'I crave chocolate,' " Moskowitz told me. "But why do we crave chocolate, or chips? And how do you get people to crave these and other foods?

Michael Moss

#35. Some of the largest companies are now using brain scans to study how we react neurologically to certain foods, especially to sugar. They've discovered that the brain lights up for sugar the same way it does for cocaine.

Michael Moss

#36. In the hands of food manufacturers, cheese has become an 'ingredient.'

Michael Moss

#37. [The Center for Science in the Public Interest forced] PepsiCo to change the labeling of its Tropicana Peach Papaya Juice to reflect ... that it has neither peaches nor papaya and is not a juice.

Michael Moss