67 pages • 2-hour read
Salt Sugar Fat
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Key Ingredients
A few key ingredients can explain a significant amount. Salt, sugar, and fat make American foods taste appealing, while also producing serious health problems.
In Salt Sugar Fat, these three key ingredients are portrayed as the essence of processed foods. Other ingredients are viewed as secondary, whereas the addictive power and negative health effects come from these three key ingredients.
The key ingredients each provide taste, texture, and benefits to cooking and preserving foods. They all complement each other; for example, salt making sugar taste sweeter, and sugar making fat taste better. The author also describes the three ingredients as interchangeable.
Processed Foods as Engineering and Marketing Products
The food industry applies engineering techniques to food. It then leverages large marketing budgets. This combination results in precise attacks that consumers can hardly resist.
In Salt Sugar Fat, numerous food scientists discuss the mathematics, psychology, and biology for manipulating consumers to eat more food. The US Army has hired some of these food scientists to engineer its own food.
Next to salt, sugar, and fat, marketing is seen as a fourth key ingredient. Moss treats television advertisements and other messaging as weapons deployed by the food industry to sell its unhealthy products. Through fleets of vehicles in poor neighborhoods, to high-priced celebrity endorsements, the marketing muscle of the food industry is portrayed as a necessary ingredient.
Food Industry Manipulation
Secretive food companies deliberately manipulate: 1) their recipes to make products cheaper and more addictive, 2) governments and media to give favorable treatment, and 3) safety inspectors and records to provide cover.
Industrial food producers use salt, sugar, and fat to get people to buy their products instead of those of competitors. This requires deception of consumers, as well as of regulators and society at-large, to conceal the negative health effects of these food products.
Food companies hire safety inspectors to test their own products. They also hire scientists to research food, as tobacco companies hired scientists to research nicotine. The manipulation extends to stacking federal government departments with industry insiders.
Moss repeatedly claims that the government, from federal levels down, through ineptitude and complicity, has aided the food industry in poisoning people for profit and covering up their misdeeds. This comes from some parts of government manipulating their constituency, and other parts of government being manipulated by the food industry.
The Economics of Food
In many cases, the key ingredients that food companies use cost less and appeal more to consumers. Therefore, despite the harmful health consequences, the food industry continues to sell salt, sugar, and fat to succeed with both customers and investors.
The author sometimes portrays food industry scientists, marketers, and executives favorably. However, even the more-favorable industry insiders often succumb to market pressures. Every time a food company has a health initiative, the company suffers financially and reverts to the three key ingredients to remain competitive.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence