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Why America Has the Cheapest, Most Addictive and Most Nutritionally Inferior Food in the World

Author Melanie Warner talks about her new book "Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal."
 

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue deep inside the $1-trillion-a-year "processed-food-industrial complex," we turn to look at how decades of food science have resulted in the cheapest, most abundant, most addictive and most nutritionally inferior food in the world. And the vitamins and protein added back to this processed food? Well, you might be surprised to know where they come from. That’s the focus of a new book by longtime food reporter Melanie Warner, author of Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal.

Melanie, welcome to Democracy Now! She’s joining us from Denver, Colorado. Vitamins, vitamin-added food. You think you go to the grocery store, and you want to get a little added punch, and you want to ensure that your kids, that your family, has added vitamins. What’s the problem with that?

MELANIE WARNER: You know, one of the things with processed food that I found while doing this book, is not only that it has an abundance of the things that Michael was talking about—salt, sugar, fat—it’s also what it’s lacking, which, it turns out, is naturally occurring nutrition, in many cases. So that’s vitamins and minerals and fiber and things like antioxidants.

So, you take something like cereal—you know, you walk down the cereal aisle, and you’re bombarded with health messages: It’s high in vitamin D, a good source of calcium, fiber, antioxidants. You see these things all over the package. And one of the things—one of the questions I asked myself when I was starting to work on this book was: Why is it nearly impossible to find a box of cereal in the cereal aisle without vitamins, added vitamins and minerals, in the ingredient list?

 

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The Weaponizing of Salt, Sugar and Fat: The Secrets of How Big Food Got Us Hooked on Junk

"...So, I was amazed to hear that figure, that we are, on average, eating as much as 33 pounds of cheese a year.
And I thought, "How could that be?" And that’s triple the amount back in the '70s.
And the story goes like this.
Starting in the ’60s, people began drinking less whole milk as a way of reducing calories and intake of saturated fat.
That left the dairy industry with a glut of whole milk and the milk fat they were extracting from the whole milk to make skim milk.
They went to the government and asked for help. And they started making more cheese with that milk.
The government, since it subsidizes the dairy industry, bought the cheese. It accumulated. It was storing the cheese in caves in Missouri, when none other than Ronald Reagan came into office and says, "This is crazy. We've got $4 billion worth of cheese that’s going moldy. Stop it."
But they still wanted to support the industry, so they came up with a marketing scheme that allowed the dairy industry to collect tens of millions of dollars every year to encourage consumers—for advertising and marketing, to encourage consumers to eat more cheese, not just as a delicacy that you eat as an hors d’oeuvre before dinner, but as an ingredient in processed food.
And so, suddenly, cheese began showing up as slices on sandwiches, as ingredients in packaged foods in the store.
And our consumption of saturated fat, while we thought we were taking it out of our diets, snuck back in, because cheese is largely invisible as a fat in that form."

Michael Moss talks about his new book, "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us."
 

 

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