Alt-QAnon and the Food Industry

Today's NYT has a book review of a book by Michael Moss, which reprises a 2013 book by the same author that apparently said the same thing, although perhaps less.  The book has the word "hooked" in the title, and that's all you have to know.  The food corporations have exactly the same goal as did the tobacco industry -- to get us hooked on something so that we'll continue to buy it, with no regard for the health consequences.  

The book review itself -- and doubtless the book as well -- reminds us of the artificial-intelligence like way corporations act:

We find out how Big Food innovates to manipulate and intensify these addiction-inducing sensations. We also learn how multinational food companies, in gastro-Orwellian fashion, hook us by expertly tapping into our memories, introducing endless new varieties, and combining sensations and ingredients rarely seen together in nature like sugar and fat, brittle and soft, sweet and salty. None of us are immune.

According to Moss, Big Food is relentlessly and cynically striving to maximize their “share of stomach,” industry parlance for how much of the food we eat they can supply. Beyond hunting for genes that predispose us to particular cravings or quantifying exactly how much sugar our brains prefer, these corporate peddlers perniciously play with serving sizes on nutrition labels to deceive us into thinking we are making healthy choices.

To trick us to eat more they also lure us in with low prices, dazzling packaging, convenience and trumped-up variety. One example among many: Differently colored M&M’s taste the same but dupe our brains to consume more than if they were all just brown. Perhaps most cunningly, Big Food has also acquired many major brands of processed diet foods like Weight Watchers and Lean Cuisine. One has to admit it’s clever to make money helping us get fat and then profit from our efforts (usually futile) to lose weight.

All in all, “Hooked” blends investigative reporting, science and foodie writing to argue that the processed food industry is no different from tobacco companies like Philip Morris that for decades lied about the harmful and addictive nature of cigarettes. In Philip Morris’s case they were the same company (until recently, Philip Morris owned Kraft and General Foods).

In other words, just like a hostile form of artificial intelligence attempting to manipulate us in order to further its own sociopathic drive for surviving and thriving, Big Food uses science to study us, and then uses what it has learned to further its own goals, with no regard for ours, much less for our well-being.  And it's great to know that Weight Watchers and Lean Cuisine are now part of the scam.  Thus Big Food is a WRAITH, as are the individual corporations that make it up, and they all point to the truth of Alt-QAnon.

The article reminds us of how similar the food industry is to the cigarette industry -- the whole ploy is to get us hooked on stuff that we crave (and therefore have to buy again and again), without regard for whether it's good for us.  That should be no surprise, since like the cigarette industry, the food industry runs on DNA that is motivated solely by corporate profits.  In fact, the book review also reminds us that Philip Morris once owned Kraft and General Foods, so at least in that case, the DNA was absolutely identical.