There was a lawsuit filed by a guy named Stephen Joseph against Kraft angry about trans fats in Oreos. And trans fats were used in a lot of foods at the time. And Kraft looked at this. The suit didn't get very far. But it caused Kraft, which was owned by Philip Morris, which meant they had a lot of attorneys very familiar with consumer litigation on tobacco - it caused Kraft to look at its internal documents to see what the risks were of repeating the debacle of the tobacco industry, in which internal documents show they knew all about the addictive properties of their product and covered it up. So when Kraft looked at its own internal memos and what they showed about its own concerns about its processed food products, what did they find?
MOSS: They found some things that might be troubling from sort of a public perspective on, you know, aspects of their packaging and their marketing of products that one kind of might be able to interpret as stepping over that line. Because, look; the industry has always kind of insisted, you know, OK, we're companies doing what all companies want to do, which is to make as much money as possible by making our products as attractive as possible. And so we put a lot of effort into making our products attractive. And, sure, we want people to want more and more of them. But we're not intentionally making these products addictive so that people lose control. That's been their bottom line instead of talking and arguing with me.
And I think that their internal investigation, as far as I can tell, didn't turn up any smoking guns in that regard. There were no, like, little memos of their food technologists, you know, laughing to one another, saying, wow, we just made this thing, like, totally addictive. But not just at Kraft, but at other companies, you know, they use other language that's kind of startling when they talk about sort of maximizing the allure of their products. They talk about engineering snackability and craveability (ph). And one of my favorite words hearing from them is moreishness (ph) - right? - as in, you know, wanting - where the person eating that, wanting more and more of it. I mean, these aren't English majors. These are bench chemists and psychologists and marketing executives sort of talking about their efforts to maximize that.
So to Kraft's credit, they were taking a look at their own internal operations to see if they had gone too far, or at least whether there was legal evidence that they had gone too far down the road in purposefully engineering addiction. But the purposefulness of it I don't think actually sort of matters. I think what's even more amazing is kind of their self-knowledge about it, because any number of industry officials that I spoke to don't touch their own products either because, like the former general counsel at Philip Morris, they're worried about losing control or they're just kind of worried about the health aspects of an overdependence on these ultra-processed food products that their own companies are making.
DAVIES: Right. So that was the result of Kraft's executives and lawyers looking at their internal documents. It wasn't like these were made public. The way these tend to get out is if there is a lawsuit and a court says, yes, the discovery process empowers the plaintiffs to get all this stuff. And so the food companies had to consider that, in a world where all of these tobacco lawyers were out looking for other litigation, perhaps, to file, whether down the road they were going to face a court saying you have to disgorge all of these internal documents. They wanted to protect them. What did they do?
MOSS: Well, so again, they sort of scoured their own records. And in this particular case, they settled the lawsuit, which was going after trans fats, not obesity - or not this question of whether these foods are causing us to lose control of our eating habits - they settled that case really quickly so that that lawyer wouldn't have any chance to sort of, you know, do a big discovery and find some other documents that would open up that can of worms for the food industry. So in that case and in subsequent cases - because there haven't been very many attempts by tort lawyer on behalf of plaintiffs to go after food companies from this addiction standpoint for several reasons.
DAVIES: Nonetheless, they sought legislative remedies to keep these internal memos in the vault.
MOSS: Right. So this goes back to Jazlyn Bradley suing McDonald's, the teenager, right? One of the ramifications of that was that the industry got so scared of her lawsuit that they went around to states passing legislation that actually barred people from suing the processed food industry and the restaurant industry for making them overweight or obese so that nobody could even walk in the court and actually begin a case like that. It's sort of extraordinary. Last time I looked, there were, like, 27 states that had passed this legislation to prevent people from suing the companies.
DAVIES: Maybe this is a subtle distinction. But when I read the book, I mean, it seemed to me that you made a clear case that there are biological reasons that we love and will eat a lot of processed food. And we - you detail some of those. I didn't see case - clear evidence that the food industry were aware of these biological connections and then used them to make the food more addictive and that they knew it, that they deliberately said in the same way that the tobacco companies said, yes, we know these - cigarette smoking is addictive. And we're going to continue to push it. I don't see quite the same thing.
MOSS: Yeah. Sort of that insider knowledge, I think, is just kind of built into their system of engineering their products. And so we talk to you about cheapness - right? - and how they use chemical laboratories to drive down the cost of products, knowing that we get excited by them. Another one of the things that we're drawn to by nature to food is variety, right? Humans are very adaptable in terms of liking different products.
There were previous climate changes that caused us to have to change from eating one thing to another. And that's why we were able to spread around the globe and fall in love with things like whale blubber if we were up in the Arctic. So what do the food companies do? They maximize the variety of their product in a way that triggers that natural instinct of us. And so that's why when you walk into the grocery store, in the cereal aisle, there are 200 versions of sugary starch there in the sugar - in the cereal aisle. The companies know that that excites our brain and wants us to - you know, gets us to want to buy more. And maybe one of the biggest examples, too, is that we by nature are drawn to food that has calories because for much of our previous existence, calories - getting calories was a life-or-death thing. It enabled us to put on some body fat, which enabled our brains to grow and us to get through hard times and have more babies.
And so what, though, have the food companies done? They've invented especially these snack foods that are loaded with empty calories, knowing that that causes us to get excited about that, and we'll eat that because it turns out, biologically, we're able to detect calories. We have sensors in the gut, possibly even the mouth, to tell us how many calories are coming in. And so the more calories - calories are almost as exciting to the brain as salt, sugar and fat. And so to your question - sort of, you know, do they sit down and write memos to each other saying, wow, you know, we get it; people by nature are drawn to eating things that are a lot of caloric, so we're going to maximize the calories. It doesn't kind of happen that way. Again, they're just sitting there going, you know, how do we get people to like these products? Oh, OK, let's pack them full of calories; people seem to respond to that.
DAVIES: Are the food companies guilty of knowingly marketing an addictive product?
MOSS: I have to tell you, Dave, you know, I've been crawling through this industry for 10 years now, and I still resist the idea of looking at them as this evil empire that intentionally set out to make us obese or otherwise ill on their products, right? These are companies doing what all companies want to do - make as much money. But I think one of the problem, too, is that - you know, the problem lies in kind of their own dependence on making their products, you know, inexpensive and super yummy and incredibly convenient for us. And now that more and more people are caring about what they put in their bodies and are wanting to eat healthier, these companies are finding it really difficult to meet that new demand because of their own addiction, if you will, to making these convenience foods.
DAVIES: You know, we look to regulators to help protect us from products that might harm our health. How effective is the Food and Drug Administration in, you know, policing the industry and enforcing some real standards of honesty in their advertising and the packaging? You know, we all - we see these nutritional labels on cereal boxes.
MOSS: Yeah, I mean, I continue to be amazed at how the companies are even more powerful than the agencies that are there to regulate them, supposedly on our behalf. I mean, one of the biggest triggers for compulsive eating and losing control of our eating habits for many people is sugar, and yet even today, when you look at that nutrition facts box on products and it lists, you know, target percentages of things that we should either try to get enough of or avoid getting too much of - the latter being things like salt - even today there's still a blank space next to the sugar because the FDA has been reluctant to go up against the industry and set, you know, a mere recommendation for how much sugar people should eat, even though, you know, entities like the American Heart Association have done that.
And I have to say, it's pretty startling when you look at the numbers that they suggest, the levels, the low levels, of sugar that they suggest, you know, potentially is causing heart trouble for us and other health trouble.
DAVIES: You know, you describe visiting food research labs in this book and in your previous book, and it made me wonder what your relationships with people in this industry are like. I mean, both this book and your previous book are pretty tough, you know, on the food manufacturers. I don't know. Do they talk to you?
MOSS: I think that, privately, they perhaps wish I'd never been born. But by and large, I think they've seen my reporting as being really tough but also fair and accurate. But more than that, having the documents, their own internal documents, describing how they engineer and formulate and market these products, it was those documents that enabled me to kind of find and meet people in the industry. And I have to say, one of the surprising things about this, too, is how many of them have come to have misgivings about their life work, seeing how our dependency on their products has grown over the years in a way that maybe they didn't really intend when they invented things like the Lunchables or the Hot Pockets or so many of these fast groceries in the grocery store.
And I think they were also sort of open to my take on this, which is not to write books that are, like, screeds or attacking them, but just kind of - for me, it's like a detective story. It's like, how do they do it? How do they get us so hooked on our products that we lose our free will and our ability to say no. And I think they sort of appreciate that just kind of basic journalistic approach to looking at their work.
DAVIES: Can you give us an example of someone in the industry who thought differently about their work?
MOSS: Yeah. So I met the inventor of the Lunchables, Bob Draine, who in the very beginning wanted to add things like sliced carrots and sliced apples to the Lunchables but realized that they couldn't figure out, you know, how to keep those things fresh when the Lunchables had to go to the warehouse for weeks or months at a time and then sit in the grocery shelf. I mean, he talked to me because he realized that our dependency on processed food had grown, you know, incredibly over the years. And having invented that in a much more innocent era, he also discovered sort of inside his own family - I think he had two boys and one girl, and his daughter refused to sort of serve Lunchables to her children, his grandkids. And I think that was a moment of awakening for him as well.
But he's one of these insiders in the processed food industry that has begun - has left and has begun helping alternative food inventors sell their products in ways that kind of make sense for the grocery store. And the last time I talked to him, he was helping the inventor of a vending machine that sells fresh salads come up with kind of novel marketing ways using kind of the tricks and the trades from the processed food industry to help sort of market those things on a national basis.
DAVIES: So remind us. What are Lunchables?
MOSS: Lunchables were this creation by - ultimately by Kraft - trays of processed meat and cheese and crackers. And then they came up with different versions that ultimately were marketed to kids as a bring-from-home lunch they could eat at school. And the fascinating thing about it is that the company itself sort of acknowledged publicly that they weren't so much about the food because they even made, like, a cold pizza Lunchables. And when parents were asked, you know, in trials whether they thought their kids would like those, the parents said, are you kidding? Cold pizza - who in the world would like that?
But what Kraft realized - it was not so much about the food, the ingredients, but the empowerment. Lunchables were designed in a way that would make those kids, you know, be the cat's meow when they pulled those out of their book satchels in the lunchroom, and other kids would be envious of them. So in so many ways, Lunchables was kind of an example of kind of the emotional power that these processed food products have over us and in our lives.
DAVIES: (Laughter) Status is a piece of cold, processed pizza. Wow.
MOSS: Yeah. And so they came up with the slogan - right? - which is, you know, all day you got to do what they say, but lunchtime is all yours.
DAVIES: Well, Michael Moss, thank you so much for speaking with us again.
MOSS: Really great talking to you. And thank you so much for having me.
DAVIES: Michael Moss is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter. His new book is "Hooked: Food, Free Will, And How The Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions."
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