Free Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss Page A

up in a kosher home,” he explained. “At Harvard I was eating hamburgers, fried fish, fries.” He went for the human taste. Back in the 1960s, so little was known about why people like the foods they do that Moskowitz focused on creating a scientific method by which researchers could study taste. He devised an experimental protocol in which he methodically created mixtures of sweet with salty, salty with bitter, and bitter with other flavors. He then walked around campus corralling guinea pigs, whom he paid fifty cents to taste the mixtures and tell him which ones they liked and which ones they did not.
    When we first sat down, Moskowitz wanted to make it clear that, while he derived much of his income from large food companies, he was no industry sycophant. We started off talking about salt, which had become a hot-button issue for food manufacturers, who increasingly stood accused of oversalting their products to boost their allure. Manufacturers were failing to cope with the increasing health concerns about salt through no fault but their own, he told me. “They have a real fear of playing around with the products, and my own personal feeling is there is an intellectual laziness in the food industry. We talk a lot about taking salt out, but we don’t want to do our homework.” On the other hand, salt—with its long-term health issues—does not have the power of sugar in compelling the industry to act. Sugar is directly linked to body fat, and as a result, low-calorie sweeteners have opened up a huge market of people eager to look better by losing weight.“If all of a sudden people started demanding lower salt because low salt makes them look younger, this problem would be solved overnight,” he said.
    We also talked about the obesity crisis, and while he has some suggestions for how the industry could help curb obesity—applying more rigorous research to the problem, for example—he said he had no qualms about his own pioneering work on the bliss point or any of the other systems that helped food companies create the greatest amount of crave. “There’s no moral issue for me,” he said flatly. “I did the best science I could. I wasstruggling to survive and didn’t have the luxury of being a moral creature. As a researcher, I was ahead of my time, and I had to take what I can get. Would I do it again? Yes, I would do it again. Did I do the right thing? If you were in my position, what would you have done?”
    Moskowitz takes pride in the science he brought to food invention.As he told a gathering of food technicians in 2010, “The history of your field wasn’t real science. There were no methods. There was no corpus of knowledge. Where did sensory research come from? It was a bunch of bench chemists asking why things taste good. And the market researcher was some hapless person trying to figure out whether the stuff would sell or not.”
    His path to mastering the bliss point began in earnest not at Harvard but a few months after graduation, sixteen miles from Cambridge, in the town of Natick, where the U.S. Army hired him to work in its research labs.The military has long been in a peculiar bind when it comes to food: how to get soldiers to eat
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rations, not less, when they are out in the field, running operations.“The problem in the military is the same as in nursing homes,” said Herb Meiselman, one of Moskowitz’s former colleagues at the Army labs. “When you go into combat, you reduce your eating, and if you do that for too long, you lose body weight.”
    The soldier’s basic food in the field is the pouch of dehydrated rations known as the MRE, which stands for “Meal, Ready to Eat,” and the shelf life alone is an appetite killer. At Natick, the technicians laugh when civilian food makers complain about having to formulate their products to hold up in the grocery store for ninety days. Army rations must last for three years, in scorching heat. To address the body weight problem, the