Quotes by Michael Moss

About Michael Moss:

Michael Moss is also the recipient of a Gerald Loeb Award and an Overseas Press Club citation. Before coming to The New York Times, he was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, New York 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.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

It's not just a matter of poor willpower on the part of the consumer and a give-the-people-what-they-want attitude on the part of the food manufacturers. What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort... to get people...

Michael Moss

Each year, food companies use an amount of salt that is every bit as staggering as it sounds: 5 billion pounds.

Michael Moss

...we eat not so much for pleasure as we do to ward off an awful feeling...The fear of hunger is deeply rooted, and food manufacturers know well how to push the buttons that evoke this fear.

Michael Moss

When it comes to salt, what was really staggering to me is that the industry itself is totally hooked on salt. It is this miracle ingredient that solves all of their problems. There is the flavor burst to the salt itself, but it also serves as a pres...

Michael Moss

Many of the Prego sauces - whether cheesy, chunky or light - have one feature in common: The largest ingredient, after tomatoes, is sugar. A mere half-cup of Prego Traditional, for instance, has the equivalent of more than two teaspoons of sugar: as ...

Michael Moss

Pressed by the Obama administration and consumers, Kraft, Nestle, Pepsi, Campbell and General Mills, among others, have begun to trim the loads of salt, sugar and fat in many products.

Michael Moss

Sugar was an issue in the '80s, so you would see low-sugar products; fat was an issue in the '90s, so you'd see low-fat products.

Michael Moss

Every one of our 10,000 taste buds is wired for sugar. But we aren't born liking salt - we develop a taste for it at about 6 months.

Michael Moss

The optimum amount of sugar in a product became known as the 'bliss point.' Food inventors and scientists spend a huge amount of time formulating the perfect amount of sugar that will send us over the moon and send products flying off the shelves.

Michael Moss

That is the one single word that the food industry hates: 'addiction.' They much prefer words like 'crave-ability' and 'allure.'

Michael Moss

In the hands of food manufacturers, cheese has become an 'ingredient.'

Michael Moss

The playing field is anything but level when you walk into the grocery store. So much government subsidy goes into processed foods. Even when you're well-meaning as a parent or a shopper for yourself, you can't help but be pulled toward the highly pr...

Michael Moss

Every time the good giants try to cut back on salt, sugar, fat calories, inevitably Wall Street raises its hand and is looking at the sales figures and the revenue and saying, 'Thou shalt not result in any loss of profit.' There's huge continuing pre...

Michael Moss

Every year, the average American eats as much as 33 pounds of cheese. That's up to 60,000 calories and 3,100 grams of saturated fat. So why do we eat so much cheese? Mainly it's because the government is in cahoots with the processed food industry.

Michael Moss

Health messages are simply overwhelmed, in volume and in effectiveness, by junk-food ads that often deploy celebrities or cartoon characters to great effect. We may know that eating fruits and vegetables is good for us, but the preponderance of the s...

Michael Moss

The growing attention Americans are paying to what they put into their mouths has touched off a new scramble by the processed-food companies to address health concerns.

Michael Moss

Companies are experimenting with replacing sodium chloride with potassium chloride, because most of the health problems come from sodium. It works for some products, but if you diminish the amount of sodium, people want sugar and fat instead.

Michael Moss

Home economics - kids in school used to be taught how to shop, how to cook from scratch, how to be in control of their diets. Doesn't happen anymore.

Michael Moss

One reason that we eat processed foods is the decline of home economics. Restarting home economics classes is one of the key things we could do to get this issue moving.

Michael Moss

The biggest hits - be they Coca-Cola or Doritos - owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don't have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating.

Michael Moss

Author Bio

  • NameMichael Moss
  • DescriptionAmerican journalist
  • AwardsPulitzer Prize For Explanatory Reporting