Free Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss Page B

Army knew it would have to compete with the convenience foods that soldiers are accustomed to eating back home. “To get them to eat more, every year we’re coming out with seven or eight new entrees to test, looking at the trends, what’s popular in restaurants,” said Jeannette Kennedy, the project officer for Natick’s research on the MRE. “The beef patty did great at the beginning of the Iraq War but got taken out because it was not scoring wellin field tests. So for 2012, we’re doing more than simple hamburgers. It’s Asian pepper steak and Mexican-style chicken stew.”
    Natick was just starting to experiment with the MRE in 1969 when it hired Moskowitz. One thing was quite clear when it came to these packaged meals. Soldiers gradually began to find them so boring that they would toss them away, half-eaten, and not get all the calories they needed. But what was causing this MRE fatigue was a mystery. “So I started asking soldiers how frequently they would like to eat this or that, trying to figure out which products they would find boring,” he said. The answers he got were inconsistent. “They liked flavorful foods like turkey tetrazzini, but only at first; they quickly grew tired of them. On the other hand, mundane foods like white bread would never get them too excited, but they could eat lots and lots of it without feeling they’d had enough.”
    This contradiction would come to be known as“sensory-specific satiety.” In lay terms, this is the tendency for big distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by making you feel full, or satiated, really fast. Sensory-specific satiety not only helped shape the Army’s mass production of MREs; it also became a guiding principle for the processed food industry. The biggest hits—be they Coca-Cola or Doritos or Kraft’s Velveeta Cheesy Skillets dinner kits—owe their success to formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct overriding single flavor that says to the brain: Enough already!
    With the appetites of soldiers flattened by war, Moskowitz began to focus his research on the one ingredient that packs more allure than anything else: sugar. This was still the early 1970s, when scientists had little understanding of how sugar created such strong magnetism in food. Exploring the science of how sugar traveled from the taste buds to the brain to create cravings would require cutting-edge medical equipment, such as the full-body scanner known as the MRI, which would not be invented until 1977. Moskowitz, however, toiling in the drab, institutional Army labs at Natick, produced some of the first primitive studies on cravings for scientific journals with titles like “Taste Intensity as a Function of StimulusConcentration and Solvent Viscosity.” Eventually, he hit a vein of research that, in years to come, would prove to be a rich strike for the manufacturers of processed foods.
    Moskowitz initially set out to learn how to maximize the power of sugar in foods, conducting the same kind of taste tests he designed at Harvard. With the resulting data he created graphs that, he noticed, looked like an inverted U. They showed that our liking of food rose as the amount of sugar was increased, but only to a point; after that peak, adding more sugar was not only a waste, it
diminished
the allure of the food.
    Moskowitz wasn’t the first scientist to notice this phenomenon, but he takes credit for being the first to recognize its financial potential—an epiphany that came one afternoon in 1972, as a colleague looked over his work.This colleague, Joseph Balintfy, was a University of Massachusetts professor who was pioneering the use of computer modeling to create complex menus for hospitals and other institutions where large numbers of people had widely divergent nutritional needs and tastes. The Army labs had retained him to work on its menus. Balintfy was examining Moskowitz’s graphs on sugar’s allure one day