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

I came to the question of food and addiction inadvertently with the 2013 publication of my book Salt Sugar Fat. In it, I argued that grocery manufacturers were competing with fast-food chains in a race to the bottom that rewarded profits over health. Over the past four decades, salt, sugar, and fat had enabled the industries to engineer products that were immensely alluring. Brilliant marketing campaigns pushed the emotional buttons that convinced us to eat when we weren’t even hungry. Yet the book tried to end on a hopeful note. Knowing all that the companies did to prop up their unwholesome products, I argued, was oddly empowering. We could use that insight to make better choices because, ultimately, we were the ones deciding what to buy and how much to eat.

Thus, the initial imperative for this book: to sort out and size up the true peril in food. To see if addiction is the best way to think about our trouble with food and eating, given what we’ve learned from other substances and habits. And to peer inside the processed food industry to see how it is dealing with what, in its view, would be a monumental threat to the power it holds over us.