David Kessler’s new book The End of Overeating contains an extremely polite but brutal assessment of the role of the modern corporate food machine in promoting obesity in America. How do corporations make us fat? By hiring food scientists to discover precisely the optimal combination of salt, sugar and fat to add to our foods. And I do mean all of our foods (or almost all). And the part about this that is truly diabolical is that these "hyper-palatable" foods overcome our "set points," our natural appetites if you will. Hyper-palatable foods stimulate us the way drugs do, and cause us to eat regularly beyond our appetite.
Dr. Kessler’s book is about how we can by elaborate psychological preparation avoid this obesity trap laid for us by the modern food machine, but this diary is more about what this one vivid example tells us about the modern business corporation. After all, when you think about it, the modern food industry is capitalism at its best: it is giving us what we want. Because we the consumers have proved in the marketplace that in fact we do want sugar, salt and fat in all our foods. At least our animal brains do. Our human brains say no, no, no, but our raccoon brains say yes yes yes.
So here we have the unseen hand of Adam Smith’s capitalism guiding us into the pit of obesity. What is wrong with this picture? What is capitalism doing wrong? Must government regulate every last ingredient in food? Already after heroic effort a few exceptionally nasty substances like trans-fat have been banned, but that just scratches the surface of the larding and layering of salt and fat and sugar in our foods. Our government can’t seem to offer us any protection at all against corporations which appeal to our raccoon brains. And the "unseen hand" of capitalism seems sociopathic at best in its utter lack of concern for the larger societal effects of corporate activity.
So we have corporations that have turned into giant drug dealers, whose main purpose is to get us hooked on their secret concoctions. A hundred years ago they used to actually put cocaine into Coca-Cola, but today, the highly sophisticated layering of sugar, salt and fat, along with artificial chemical flavorings, have created substances as addicting as drugs, something which food scientists can actually see on their brain imaging machines. In short modern food science has created food as addictive as drugs—and as harmful (if you take obesity into account).
You may say that labeling gives consumers the information they need to make their own decisions. But as Dr. Kessler’s book amply demonstrates the food machine has found ways around that little detail. For example your favorite cereal may contain not just sugar, but three or four or five different kinds of sugar. Why so many different kinds of sugar? Because then the maker can list them separately on the label, so the consumer only sees a few percentage of this glucose, and a few percentage of that sucrose. You can’t tell the total amount of sugar without a calculator. As the food expert tells Kessler: "They’re hiding it from the mothers."
And who can blame them for that, if it’s in the best interests of the stockholders to hide the sugar content from the mothers. Isn’t it the fiduciary duty of the corporate masters to do everything legally within their power to maximize profit?
It seems to me like we are left with a horrendous Catch-22 in our overall ideology of benevolent capitalism. Corporate officials have a duty to maximize profits for shareholders, but this is OFTEN against the public interest. It is against the public interest to induce people to overeat. Or to take out mortgages they can't afford. Or to borrow at usurious rates. Or to smoke. And so on and on and on. Regulation may prevent overt acts of harm, but capitalism itself seems to have built in thousands of gray areas where corporations strive to achieve profits even at the expense of the public good and the higher public interest.
So where is the answer to that, Dr. Kessler or DailyKos? What did Adam Smith overlook?