Michael Moss’ Featured Book

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

“The processed food industry has managed to avoid being lumped in with Big Tobacco — which is why Michael Moss’s new book is so important.” – Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Salt Sugar Fat comes a powerful exposé of how the processed food industry exploits our evolutionary instincts, the emotions we associate with food, and legal loopholes in their pursuit of profit over public health.

Everyone knows how hard it can be to maintain a healthy diet. But what if some of the decisions we make about what to eat are beyond our control? Is it possible that food is addictive, like drugs or alcohol? And to what extent does the food industry know, or care, about these vulnerabilities? In Hooked, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Michael Moss sets out to answer these questions — and to find the true peril in our food.

Moss uses the latest research on addiction to uncover what the scientific and medical communities — as well as food manufacturers — already know: that food, in some cases, is even more addictive than alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. Our bodies are hardwired for sweets, so food giants have developed fifty-six types of sugar to add to their products, creating in us the expectation that everything should be cloying; we’ve evolved to prefer fast, convenient meals, hence our modern-day preference for ready-to-eat foods. Moss goes on to show how the processed food industry — including major companies like Nestlé, Mars, and Kellogg’s — has tried not only to evade this troubling discovery about the addictiveness of food but to actually exploit it. For instance, in response to recent dieting trends, food manufacturers have simply turned junk food into junk diets, filling grocery stores with “diet” foods that are hardly distinguishable from the products that got us into trouble in the first place. As obesity rates continue to climb, manufacturers are now claiming to add ingredients that can effortlessly cure our compulsive eating habits.

Buy the Book:
Owl’s Nest Books | Shelf Life Books

Borrow the Book from the Library:
Calgary Public Library

Michael Moss’ Other Book

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The New York Times comes the troubling story of the rise of the processed food industry – and how it used salt, sugar, and fat to addict us.

Salt Sugar Fat is a journey into the highly secretive world of the processed food giants, and the story of how they have deployed these three essential ingredients, over the past five decades, to dominate the North American diet. This is an eye-opening book that demonstrates how the makers of these foods have chosen, time and again, to double down on their efforts to increase consumption and profits, gambling that consumers and regulators would never figure them out. With meticulous original reporting, access to confidential files and memos, and numerous sources from deep inside the industry, it shows how these companies have pushed ahead, despite their own misgivings (never aired publicly). Salt Sugar Fat is the story of how we got here, and it will hold the food giants accountable for the social costs that keep climbing even as some of the industry’s own say, “Enough already.”

Buy the Book:
Owl’s Nest Books | Shelf Life Books

Borrow the Book from the Library:
Calgary Public Library