<story><title>The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>It&apos;s so funny how, over the past couple of years, good-tasting food is now a &quot;conspiracy&quot;.&lt;p&gt;When a Michelin chef meticulously constructs a dish to give you pleasure, he&apos;s a creative genius whose dedication to his art is applauded.&lt;p&gt;But when the people behind Snickers do it to give you pleasure, they&apos;re nefarious conspirators trying to manipulate you and keep you addicted.&lt;p&gt;Yes, people who make food are trying to make it taste better, minimize their own costs, and keep you coming back. Why is this suddenly considered &quot;news&quot;?&lt;p&gt;(I mean, the article is plenty interesting, it&apos;s just the sensationalism of calling it &quot;food engineering&quot;, &quot;addiction&quot;, etc. that bothers me.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>If you learn one lesson from The Great Recession, it should be that nefarious conspiracy is not necessary for horrific outcomes. You just need the correct arrangement a lot of self-focused, insufficiently thoughtful people trying to push a graph up and to the right.&lt;p&gt;If you talk to a chef who makes a tasty dish, they understand a lot about their influence on people&apos;s health, and the ones I know feel responsible for it. A human&apos;s evolved moral mechanisms work in that context.&lt;p&gt;But if you look at the property bubble and the related financial engineering, every individual had plausible deniability. They were just following orders/incentives/the market. They had no direct moral connection to the outcome of their actions, and by and large refused to think hard enough that they could see one. As Upton Sinclair said, &quot;It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.&quot;&lt;p&gt;The same applies to the modern epidemic of diabetes and obesity. The human cost of that is incredible, and we will be dealing with it for decades, possibly generations.&lt;p&gt;Many processed foods are engineered, and they are addictive. The way they are created, marketed, and evaluated isn&apos;t materially different that how tobacco products were made and sold. The only real difference is how society&apos;s attitude to those products has shifted.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>It&apos;s so funny how, over the past couple of years, good-tasting food is now a &quot;conspiracy&quot;.&lt;p&gt;When a Michelin chef meticulously constructs a dish to give you pleasure, he&apos;s a creative genius whose dedication to his art is applauded.&lt;p&gt;But when the people behind Snickers do it to give you pleasure, they&apos;re nefarious conspirators trying to manipulate you and keep you addicted.&lt;p&gt;Yes, people who make food are trying to make it taste better, minimize their own costs, and keep you coming back. Why is this suddenly considered &quot;news&quot;?&lt;p&gt;(I mean, the article is plenty interesting, it&apos;s just the sensationalism of calling it &quot;food engineering&quot;, &quot;addiction&quot;, etc. that bothers me.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DanBC</author><text>Take a chicken.  Roast it, with vegetables.  Include some lightly steamed vegetables.  Have some kind of gravy.  If you really want it have some kind of honey glazing for the carrots.&lt;p&gt;That&apos;s a reasonably healthy meal.&lt;p&gt;Take the same chicken.  Take as much meat off it as you can, and sell that as chicken breast etc.  Mechanically recover other bits of meat from the carcass.  Shape it into a tiny mouthsize bite, with salt and spices and fat and filler.  Then cover it in a breadcrumb coating.  Deep fry it.  (That crumb coating soaks up the oils.)  Serve it with a sugary-sauce.  You now have something which is much cheaper than the roast chicken; it&apos;s much easier to eat; it&apos;s weirdly tasty; but it&apos;s also weirdly not satisfying.&lt;p&gt;And the reason this is done is not to create the best tasting food possible (the motivation behind Michelin starred chefs) but to cuts costs while getting people to buy more.  They don&apos;t care about the pleasure you get - they only want your money.</text></comment>