Hooked

Hooked Plot Summary

Introduction

Jazlyn Bradley was just seven years old when McDonald's worked its way into her life. Her family moved to a Brooklyn townhouse only a block from one of the restaurant's locations, making it an easy stop for a quick bite. She loved the Happy Meal—the golden arches opening to reveal a fragrant burger, fries, and a toy. Some evenings, her father came home with armfuls of McDonald's, boxes multiplying as the family grew. By middle school, McDonald's had become her first meal of the day. She'd skip breakfast and lunch at school, but more than make up for it afterward, working the whole menu board—adding the biggest fries, biggest shake, and doubling everything. "I had one of those deep stomachs," she explained. "I just loved to eat. I had a food affair." This relationship with food changed over time. Where eating was once pure joy—"I'd do a little shake when I ate"—a darkness had set in by high school. She noticed how often she ate when troubled, using food to deal with issues like not getting enough attention from her parents. Her weight reached 250 pounds by age sixteen. Bradley's story illuminates a troubling reality: our relationship with food has fundamentally changed. Through brain imaging, evolutionary biology, and food industry insider accounts, we now understand that certain foods trigger addiction-like responses in our brains. The mechanisms that once helped our ancestors survive are being systematically exploited by food manufacturers who design products specifically to override our natural satiety signals and keep us coming back for more.

Chapter 1: Addiction By Design: The Science Behind Food Cravings

Steve Parrish didn't smoke until he started working for Philip Morris at age forty. As the company's general counsel, he found cigarettes soothed his work stress. "There are times when I like fiddling with the cigarette before I even light it," he explained. "I like to see the smoke go up. I like the sensation at the back of my throat." Yet remarkably, he didn't smoke at home or on weekends. Outside the office, he felt no compulsion whatsoever. This phenomenon helped form the bulwark of Philip Morris's defense against efforts to hold the company accountable for smoking-related deaths. How could cigarettes be addictive if millions of people used them so casually? The company's CEO William Campbell even testified before Congress in 1994, "I believe nicotine is not addictive." One executive compared smoking addiction to Twinkies, suggesting food cravings were similarly harmless. By 2000, however, the pressure had mounted. To save its public image, Philip Morris made a remarkable about-face. "We agree with the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking is addictive," the company announced to its 144,000 employees worldwide. This prompted its scientists to develop a new definition of addiction: "A repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit." This definition intentionally applied to cigarettes, but it applied equally well to many processed foods—including the company's own grocery brands like Oreos and Lunchables. In fact, a Louis Harris poll had found that people rated overeating at 7.3 on a 10-point addiction scale, not far behind smoking at 8.5 and higher than beer or tranquilizers. The truth was inescapable: certain foods could be just as habit-forming as cigarettes, and Philip Morris understood this better than most. The science now confirms what food companies have long exploited: speed, memory, sensory overload, and neurochemical responses all contribute to our difficulty controlling certain eating behaviors. Our brain releases dopamine not in response to pleasure itself, but to the gap between expectation and reward—driving us to seek bigger thrills with each consumption. The processed food industry manipulates these mechanisms with precision, creating products specifically designed to override our natural satiety signals.

Chapter 2: Memory Matters: Why We Eat What We Remember

Paula Wolfert, a celebrated food writer and expert in Mediterranean cooking, was known for exacting standards. She didn't just cook couscous; she hand-rolled the grain into pearls. Her cassoulet took three days to prepare with six types of pork. When dishes called for red pepper, only specific varieties from Aleppo or Kahramanmaraş would do. She utilized all five senses in her cooking—watching faces carefully when asking locals who made the best regional dishes, listening to the sound of steam venting from a couscous pot, using touch to shape dough in her palm. Then, in 2013 at age seventy-four, Wolfert was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. The world of food she had built through her senses began to crumble. First her recall for language vanished. Then her sense of smell failed, making it impossible to recognize smoke or other kitchen dangers. Her ability to taste disappeared gradually but mercilessly. Where every meal had once been a thrill, she now lived on bland smoothies with occasional Korean chili sauce—one of the few tastes still detectable. "I've forgotten how to taste most everything," she told me. "And when you cook, remembering is what it's all about. It's all related to memory." This insight—that we eat what we remember and remember what we eat—reveals how deeply memory shapes our eating habits. Memory doesn't reside in a single part of the brain but exists throughout, inserting itself into every aspect of our being. Each food experience gets logged as multiple distinct perceptions: the aroma in one part of the brain, the taste in another, the visual appearance elsewhere. These scattered bits must be reassembled when we recall eating something. Researcher Carrie Ferrario likens memory to streambeds in the brain that change over time. Those with more "water" flowing through them become deeper and better established, making it more likely future experiences will follow the same path. Food memories carved in childhood tend to be especially powerful. Through what psychologists call the "reminiscence bump," memories formed during our youth remain more accessible throughout life. This explains why the smell of cookies baking might instantly transport you back to your grandmother's kitchen, or why comfort foods from childhood retain such emotional power. Brain scan research confirms that these powerful memory channels drive our eating behavior. When showing the Coca-Cola logo to teenagers who regularly drank the beverage, researchers discovered the logo alone lit up reward centers in their brains while simultaneously deactivating regions associated with self-control. As one researcher put it, "This may, in theory, work in tandem to perpetuate habitual consumption."

Chapter 3: Evolution's Trap: How Our Biology Makes Us Vulnerable

In 1994, a team of fossil hunters from the University of California, Berkeley made a remarkable discovery in Ethiopia's Middle Awash valley. Graduate student Yohannes Haile-Selassie spotted a finger bone, exclaiming, "I found a hominid!" Further searching yielded 125 pieces of the same skeleton, eventually identified as a female who lived 4.4 million years ago. Scientists named her Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus, and she provided crucial insights into human evolution. Ardi stood at the crossroads where some hominids became chimpanzees and others became humans. Like chimps, she had a splayed toe for climbing trees, but with a small bone that kept it rigid for walking—something chimps don't have. Her pelvis showed she could stand upright and stride through forests, albeit unsteadily. This ability to walk transformed how our ancestors interacted with their environment, particularly regarding food. Standing upright moved our heads away from the ground, reducing exposure to germs and allowing us to trade a large, hardy snout for a simple nose. This seemingly small anatomical change dramatically altered our relationship with food. Our shortened nasal cavities created new air pathways that enhanced our ability to smell food through both our nose and mouth. With ten million smell receptors capable of detecting between 340 and 380 basic smells—compared to just 10,000 taste buds perceiving only five basic tastes—our enhanced olfactory abilities gave us an unprecedented capacity to appreciate food variety. This evolutionary adaptation had tremendous survival value. When climate shifted dramatically between two and four million years ago, our ancestors' ability to appreciate diverse foods enabled them to adapt to changing food sources. Their drive to seek variety ensured they obtained a range of necessary nutrients. But today, this same adaptation leaves us vulnerable to processed food designed specifically to exploit our love of variety. Where our ancestors foraged across valleys for different foods, we now simply reach into variety packs containing dozens of flavor variations designed to prevent sensory-specific satiety (the feeling of fullness that comes from eating too much of one flavor). Furthermore, evolution shaped our gut and body fat storage systems to prioritize calorie-dense foods and efficient energy storage—perfect adaptations for an environment of scarcity but problematic in our current food landscape. As evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman explains, "We by nature are drawn to eating, and the companies have changed the food." The processed food industry didn't invent our vulnerabilities, but they've systematically mapped and exploited them, creating products that overwhelm biology that evolved over millions of years.

Chapter 4: Variety Seekers: Marketing Strategies That Bypass Willpower

In a swath of New Jersey from Mahwah to New Brunswick, dozens of companies known as "flavor houses" trade in one of the processed food industry's best-kept secrets. At Flavor and Fragrance Specialties, white-coated technologists mix chemical brews that create everything from the aroma of pumpkin spice to the char on fake meat. While their ability to mimic natural flavors is impressive, their most valuable service isn't imitation—it's psychological manipulation. The flavor houses help food manufacturers exploit a fundamental aspect of human psychology: our instinctual attraction to variety. The Kroger grocery chain discovered this when it launched the Variety Research Program in 1988, teaming up with major manufacturers like Nabisco, Frito-Lay, and Coca-Cola. Their research identified distinct shopper types, including what they called "variety seekers"—people who "actively seek variety for its sake" and "rarely, if ever, buy the same thing twice in a row." Most importantly, the researchers noted, "The variety seekers have consistently been heavy users." This discovery transformed marketing strategies. Where supermarkets once carried 6,000 items in 1980, they expanded to 12,000 by 1990 and average 33,000 today. Little of this growth represents truly new products—instead, manufacturers create endless variations of existing items. Potato chips now come in dozens of flavors, breakfast cereals in hundreds of formulations, and ice cream in countless combinations. This isn't just about giving consumers choices; it's about exploiting our biological weakness for variety. Research confirms that greater variety directly increases consumption. In one study, people given ten colors of M&Ms ate substantially more than those given six colors, despite identical taste. Another study found that after people finished eating spaghetti and felt full, offering them tortellini—just differently shaped pasta—prompted them to eat more. This exploitation of our variety-seeking nature becomes even more effective when combined with distraction. When we watch television while eating, our brain essentially "forgets" we're eating, treating each return to the food as a fresh experience. Suzanne Higgs, a researcher at the University of Birmingham, demonstrated this effect by giving subjects lunch while some watched TV. Those who watched television while eating reported feeling hungrier sooner afterward and ate more cookies as an afternoon snack. The distraction had impaired their memory of lunch, leading to increased consumption later. A real-world survey by Ohio State University found that a third of Ohioans regularly watched TV during family meals, and those who did were far more likely to be obese. These insights have helped the processed food industry dominate our eating habits. With $1.5 trillion in annual revenue, they've created a world where three-quarters of our groceries are processed, most ready to eat or heat. They've blurred the lines between eating in and out, placing restaurant brands in supermarkets and snack brands on restaurant menus. By understanding and exploiting our biology better than we do ourselves, they've created a perfect storm of irresistible products that bypass our willpower entirely.

Chapter 5: The Corporate Playbook: Denial, Delay and Distraction

In 2003, a remarkable lawsuit challenged the processed food industry's grip on our eating habits. Brooklyn teenager Jazlyn Bradley, along with another plaintiff, sued McDonald's for allegedly making them obese. Their attorney, Samuel Hirsch, claimed the chain's products were "high in salt, sugar, fat, and cholesterol" and that McDonald's had failed to warn customers about health risks while targeting children through deceptive marketing. Federal Judge Robert Sweet showed unusual interest in one aspect of the case: the claim that McDonald's products might be addictive. If this could be proved, Sweet wrote, customers couldn't be fully blamed for their consumption habits, as they couldn't anticipate "a force that they couldn't have known about." Most of Hirsch's arguments were weak, but the addiction claim "does not involve a danger that is so open and obvious" that customers would expect it. The lawsuit ultimately failed, but it triggered an aggressive industry response. Within weeks, the National Restaurant Association mobilized, sending representatives to Capitol Hill to voice concerns about potential lawsuits. A congressional subcommittee quickly convened hearings on legislation to protect the industry—with no attempt at balance. Neither Bradley nor anyone sympathetic to her cause was invited to testify. When federal legislation stalled, the restaurant association shifted strategy to state legislatures. The Colorado Restaurant Association's president, Peter Meersman, drafted a bill called the Commonsense Consumption Act, which would bar lawsuits claiming food caused health problems. State representative Lynn Hefley sponsored it, warning fellow legislators: "We all remember tobacco. Nobody ever believed that anything like that would ever happen, and we know what the results have been." The bill passed overwhelmingly, and within years, similar laws were enacted in 26 states. The industry's defensive playbook extended beyond legislation. When Dana Small, a Yale University researcher, discovered troubling evidence about artificial sweeteners, PepsiCo abruptly canceled her funding. Small had been investigating how our bodies respond to beverages with reduced sugar but identical sweetness. Her findings suggested that when taste doesn't match caloric content, our metabolism becomes confused—potentially causing increased fat storage and diabetes risk. "When I started collaborating with them, it was really with the faith that they wanted to do this," Small said of PepsiCo's initial support. But when her research showed potential problems with their product strategy, the company halted her contract renewal with no explanation. Later, at a meeting in Florida, PepsiCo executive John Fletcher reportedly said of Small: "She is dangerous." A colleague explained: "What was implied was that she may discover something that may be detrimental to selling high-calorie beverages." This pattern—denial, delay, and distraction—mirrors strategies used by tobacco companies. When science threatens profits, the response is to shield internal documents, lobby for legal protection, and undermine independent research. As one former food industry scientist admitted: "It's not enough for us to know just that something tastes great and looks great. We need to know what goes on inside the body, and in the gut... someone needs to be doing that work because that's key to our future."

Chapter 6: Food As Medicine: The False Promise of Diet Solutions

William Banting drank gallons of potash solution, took ninety Turkish baths, and rowed a heavy boat for two hours each morning—all to no avail in his quest to lose weight. It was only when a medical adviser suggested he stop eating starches and sugars that Banting finally shed forty-six pounds. He wrote up his success in an 1864 pamphlet that sold thousands of copies, launching the modern dieting industry. Since then, we've chased diet solutions with religious fervor. The ancient Greeks called it diaita—a mode of living where food was just one element alongside exercise, work, and sleep. But by the third century, Christian aesthetics had transformed moderation into virtue and gluttony into sin. Luigi Cornaro, a Venetian merchant who lived to 100 by strictly limiting his daily intake to twelve ounces of food and two cups of wine, proclaimed: "O wretched and unhappy Italy, canst thou not see that intemperance kills every year amongst thy people as great a number as would perish during the time of a most dreadful pestilence?" Today's diet culture has spawned countless approaches: the Master Cleanse (lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper), the Fruitarian Diet, the 80/10/10 Diet, and dozens more. Each year we buy five million diet books, most following a formula identified by writer Malcolm Gladwell: they start darkly describing the author's previous illness or obesity, recount a eureka moment when they discovered the one secret hidden from us all, then promise weight loss without sacrifice. The science of nutrition remains so uncertain that even expert recommendations amount to educated guesses. Yoni Freedhoff, a physician who runs a weight-control clinic in Ottawa, takes a remarkably moderate approach with patients: "Go ahead, have that pumpkin pie," "Snack if you're hungry," and, "Eh, don't weigh yourself, scales can be demoralizing." When patients hope to lose seventy pounds, he aims for five or ten. "It's not sustainable," he says of extreme diets. "Even if they could prove to me their diet was better for health or weight loss, it will still flop, because food is not about just that. It's a celebration." The most treacherous diets create a state of deprivation that few can maintain. Physiologist Ancel Keys demonstrated this in his 1944 Minnesota Starvation Experiment, where healthy young men were reduced from 3,200 to 1,570 calories daily. Beyond physical changes, the men became depressed, apathetic, and obsessed with food. This same psychological response haunts modern dieters, who typically cycle through strategies that work temporarily until deprivation drives them back to old habits. Yet our faith in dieting persists. A Mintel Group survey found that two-thirds of Americans diet, and three-fourths believe they can reach their ideal weight through willpower and sacrifice. This gullibility enabled the processed food industry to co-opt the diet business entirely. Heinz bought Weight Watchers in 1978 for $72 million, while other manufacturers acquired or created their own diet programs: Nestlé purchased Jenny Craig, Conagra launched Healthy Choice, Kraft developed South Beach Diet products, and Unilever bought SlimFast. These diet brands offered modest results at best. A 2015 medical review found Weight Watchers produced average weight loss of just 5 percent—and half of that returned within two years. When asked how a weight-loss company could thrive if only a fraction of customers maintained their results, former Weight Watchers CFO Richard Samber was blunt: "It's successful because the other 84 percent have to come back and do it again. That's where your business comes from."

Chapter 7: Breaking Free: Strategies to Reclaim Your Food Choices

The temperature in Florida was already nippy when Denise Morrison, CEO of Campbell Soup Company, stepped to the podium at the Boca Raton Resort and Club in February 2015. What she said sent a deeper chill through the room: Big Food was in big trouble. Campbell's $8.1 billion in sales had fallen 2 percent that year, with layoffs looming. The entire processed food industry had gone from modest growth to negative 0.1 percent. In an unprecedented moment of candor, Morrison explained why: consumers had caught on. "We are seeing an explosion of interest in fresh foods, dramatically increased focus by consumers on the effects of food on their health and well-being, and mounting demands for transparency," she told the Wall Street analysts. "And along with this has come a mounting distrust of so-called Big Food, the large food companies and legacy brands on which millions of consumers have relied on for so long." One analyst called me afterward, saying she'd never heard such frankness from a food industry executive. In response, the largest food manufacturers launched ambitious efforts to win back consumer trust. Campbell's joined Nestlé, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola in conceding addiction and promising to make their products less problematic. They cleaned up ingredient lists, invested in genetic research to personalize nutrition, and experimented with reducing sugar while maintaining sweetness through taste enhancers. One promising approach came from researcher Paul Breslin at Rutgers University. He discovered that cells on our tongue detect sweetness and alert the brain in just 600 milliseconds—faster than cigarettes or drugs affect us. Companies like Senomyx developed substances that could amplify this sweetness perception, potentially allowing manufacturers to use less sugar while maintaining the same taste experience. The FDA would even allow these enhancers to be listed simply as "natural and artificial flavors" on ingredient labels. Yet questions remain about whether manipulating our taste perception might have unintended consequences. Dana Small's research with PepsiCo suggested that when sweetness doesn't match caloric content, our metabolism becomes confused. Similarly, Susan Swithers at Purdue University found evidence that artificial sweeteners might actually promote weight gain rather than prevent it. Most troubling, a 2016 study showed that fruit flies given the artificial sweetener sucralose couldn't sleep, felt constantly hungry, and became hyperactive. For individuals seeking to break free from processed food addiction, the simplest strategies often work best. Speed drives cravings, so slowing down helps—make your own spaghetti sauce, snack on pistachios still in their shells. Pay attention to memory formation by consciously creating new food experiences that can replace old patterns. As Eric Stice, a researcher who discovered how food cues trigger our brains, suggests: "Change what you value in food." Rather than asking "Which scone looks better today?" at the coffee shop (which activates reward circuitry), ask "How will that scone affect my health?" (which activates the brain's braking system). Address one habit at a time instead of attempting complete dietary overhauls. Some experts recommend eliminating liquid calories first, as our bodies aren't evolutionarily equipped to handle them well. Most importantly, recognize that the processed food industry's power comes partly from our unwitting cooperation. As we better understand the biology of food addiction, we can level the playing field by seeing through their tactics and creating new, healthier pathways in our brains.

Summary

The essence of our relationship with food today can be distilled to this: the mechanisms that once helped our ancestors survive—craving variety, valuing energy-dense foods, and forming powerful food memories—are being systematically exploited by food manufacturers who design products specifically to override our natural satiety signals. Breaking free from this exploitation requires both understanding and action. First, slow down your eating—this simple change gives your brain's "stop" mechanisms time to engage before overconsumption occurs. Second, consciously create new food memories to replace those implanted through marketing; seek out fresh, whole foods prepared with attention rather than convenience. Finally, address one habit at a time rather than attempting complete dietary overhauls, which almost always fail. Remember that your brain can form new neural pathways just as readily as it formed the old ones—you simply need to give it consistent new experiences to build upon.

About Author

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Michael Moss

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. Michael Moss was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2010 and was a finalist for the prize in 2006 and 1999. He is also the recipient of a Loeb Award and an Overseas Press Club citation. Before coming to The New York Times, he was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He has been an adjunct professor at the Columbia School of Journalism and currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two sons.

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