Salt Sugar Fat: The Story Behind the Food

Hey guys it's Adventure Van here with a blog on Salt Sugar Fat, a book about food manufacturers written by Michael Moss. From Lunchables to Coca Cola, Frito-Lay to the Dairy Industry, the book is one large, scary ride through how Salt, Sugar, and Fat are all used in dangerous amounts in even the most benign of foods and in the most unexpected of places. And Moss goes through interviews and old advertising to show how the public face of companies that benefit from a form of addiction can help normalize and help praise dangerous things. It also documented the past of these food companies, and how adding one of these key components of salt, sugar, or fat originally was a huge boon for the creator.

Salt especially is often more utilized as a tool then a flavor, and it's used as a flavor an extreme amount. Morton Salt has a worrying monopoly on, to quote the first thing you see when you go to their web page, "The Right Salt for Literally Everything", from road salt to chicken meal to the salt that ends up on your crackers and chips. And salt is very cheap to make and manufacture, so it can be bought in huge amounts and used indiscriminately, causing large amounts to be wasted and large amounts to wind up uncounted in your food. Salt is also addictive in a way that can cause cravings, and it's hard to break off an addiction like that when the vast majority of easy to buy food is stock full of salt. Sugar is also a dangerous thing that's used in a couple of things you wouldn't expect, and in vast quantities. Sugar is in almost everything. You might expect soda to have sugar, and even orange juice and milk. Bologna has sugar in it. Butter crackers have more sugar then butter flavoring, which you've correctly guessed contain no actual butter.

Fat is... well, fat. It's showed very often as a huge problem, but the near constant rage directed at it has nearly all been either misplaced or moved very quickly from the actual fatty foods, or the fat has moved from one food to another. Upon milk being demonized as full of fat, you probably noticed that the skim milk came into existence very quickly, but you may not have noticed how much cheese suddenly began getting produced as a way to get rid of this excess fat, and you very likely never realized how much companies began pushing cheese not only into all of their foods, but also as a cheap ingredient for any homemade meals you make.

I'm not saying that any of this is bad on it's own, but the way it's portrayed in modern media and the way it's pushed on everyone is a dangerous thing for health concerns in America and even all around the world. And it's not an easy problem to solve. These companies are too far into salt, sugar, and fat, that changing the amounts lower completely kills the taste of these products, and it's impossible to still make a profit.

That's Adventure Van, sighing.