Moss is particularly fascinated by Kraft’s near-billion-dollar line of Lunchables snack trays), as processors bent the American appetite to Wall Street’s will. Entire food categories were invented to support this strategy (Mr. Moss’s case: By concentrating fat, salt and sugar in products formulated for maximum “bliss,” Big Food has spent almost a century distorting the American diet in favor of calorie-dense products whose consumption pattern has been mirrored by the calamitous rise in obesity rates. From a fat-consumption point of view, he says, “trading cheese for milk has been a poor bargain indeed.”Īnd that is the nub of Mr. Cheese and its processed derivatives were deployed across a gazillion new products and line extensions during decades when Americans, as a fat-avoidance tactic, were actually cutting their milk consumption by 75 percent. Thus we have cheese-injected pizza crusts and cheese-draped frozen entrees, cheesy chips and cheezy crackers. “In the hands of food manufacturers, cheese has become an ingredient,” Mr. Fans of Humboldt Fog and Cabot Clothbound Cheddar may hope this signals the return of the artisan producer, but Michael Moss gives all credit to mighty Kraft and the other food giants. Americans eat 33 pounds of cheese and cheese products per year, per person, which is triple the consumption rate of the 1970s.
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