Book Reviews
Salt Sugar Fat Summary & Review: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
Michael Moss's investigative deep-dive into how the food industry engineers salt, sugar, and fat to maximize craving — the bliss point, the…
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Michael Moss
"The Pulitzer-winning reporter who went inside the food industry to show exactly how craving gets engineered into a bag of chips."
Michael Moss is an investigative journalist who spent much of his career at The New York Times, following earlier work at The Wall Street Journal. In 2010, he and colleagues on the Times staff won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for a series exposing contaminated ground beef and the regulatory failures that let it reach store shelves. His 2013 book, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, spent years reporting from inside the packaged food industry — interviewing the scientists, marketers, and executives who engineer craving into processed food — and became a #1 New York Times bestseller and James Beard Award winner. He later extended the same investigation in Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions (2021).
1 book featured·Pulitzer Prize, Explanatory Reporting (2010)·Former investigative reporter, The New York Times
Books by Michael Moss
Our in-depth summaries and reviews of his work
Key Ideas & Recurring Themes
The bliss point is engineered, not accidental
Moss shows how food scientists systematically test formulations to find the exact concentration of sugar, salt, or fat that maximizes craving, using the same rigor as pharmaceutical research.
The industry knew, and discussed it anyway
A 1999 meeting of the country's top food-company CEOs was called specifically to confront the obesity crisis — and ended with the industry choosing taste and market share over reformulating for health.
A small 'heavy user' base drives the business
Moss's reporting shows that a minority of frequent buyers can account for the majority of a packaged food product's sales, which is who these products are really engineered and marketed for.
Notable Quotes
"Don't talk to me about nutrition. Talk to me about taste, and if this stuff tastes better, don't run around trying to sell stuff that doesn't taste good."— Salt Sugar Fat (quoting General Mills CEO Stephen Sanger)
"The public and the food companies have known for decades now, or at least since 1980, that sugar and fat and salt are the primary reasons we can't stop eating."— Salt Sugar Fat
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Book Author Michael Moss
Salt Sugar Fat Summary & Review: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
Michael Moss's investigative deep-dive into how the food industry engineers salt, sugar, and fat to maximize craving — the bliss point, the heavy user economy, and what a shopper can actually do about it.