Like recovering addicts, we have to do more than just what they’re doing to us. I think the lesson from drug addiction-and one reason I wrote Hooked-is that our decision-making about what to buy and how much to eat can be so spontaneous and impulsive, especially in light of companies’ marketing. In fact, I wrote a piece in the Times a few months ago about how companies shifted their marketing to capitalize on the pandemic, which is totally sinister and cunning on their part.

We went to the store and we just got walloped by these powerful memories, taking us back to our childhood and that craving for comfort food under stress. I was thinking at least we were getting away from the vending machine at work, yet here we are, turning our kitchen cabinets into vending machines. In Hooked, you explore how stress, fatigue, and painful emotions can all fuel our food cravings, so I’m guessing you aren’t surprised that snack food and candy are selling especially well right now?Īctually, I was surprised to see snack sales soar during the pandemic. In his latest book, Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions, Moss addresses the question of food addiction head-on, determined to finally “sort out and size up the true peril of food.”Ĭivil Eats recently spoke with Moss about our biological vulnerabilities to processed food, how the industry both creates and exploits our childhood food memories, and why making spaghetti sauce from scratch is a political act. But by his own account, he “hemmed and hawed, not knowing the answer, though aware that the implications could be huge.” While promoting the book, Moss was often asked whether processed foods are merely hard to resist or actually addictive-on a par with substances like tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs. Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Michael Moss first explored this dark side of processed food production in his 2013 book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.

Books by michael moss