Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Moss Michael

Author:Moss, Michael [Moss, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781448133871
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2013-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

chapter ten

“The Message the Government Conveys”

The Department of Agriculture is headquartered on the National Mall, a mere stroll from the Washington Monument. It is the only cabinet-level agency with this distinction, and in keeping with the open-door policies of its neighbors—the museums of the Smithsonian—it maintains a modest visitors center for tourists. With 117,000 employees, the agency prides itself on being of service to the country at large, a populist arm of the government. After all, when President Abraham Lincoln created321 it in 1862 for a country that was still heavily agrarian, he called it “The People’s Department.”

There are actually two buildings that form322 the headquarters of the Department of Agriculture, and both are massive. The main one, which houses the top brass, was built in sections starting in 1904. Its two wings, detailed with white marble, stretch for one-sixth of a mile along the Mall and are braced by the gigantic white Corinthian columns typical of the Beaux Arts style. Behind this stands the South Building, which went up in 1936 to house the agency’s expanding operations. Its 4,500 rooms and seven miles of corridors gave it the distinction of being the largest office building in the world until the Pentagon was built a few years later.

Inside the Department of Agriculture, where the public is less welcome, the agency pursues an agenda that is every bit as massive as the buildings themselves: Overseeing the food that Americans eat. Its principal mission is to ensure the integrity of the country’s most fundamental life-giving force, from farm to fork. But in this matter, the People’s Department of Lincoln’s imaginings has long been enmeshed in a conflict of interest that undermines its populist roots. On one side are the 312 million or so people of the United States and their health, which the USDA is charged with safeguarding. On the other side are the three hundred or so companies that form the $1 trillion industry of food manufacturing, companies that the USDA feels obligated to placate and nurture. Nowhere is the tension between what is good for the companies and what is good for the people more evident than in one of the pillars of processed foods: fat.

Fat, of course, is the lubricant that sustains the $90 billion trade in snack foods323, providing that crucial element known as mouthfeel to corn chips and crackers, ice cream and cookies. But in a little-known fact of nutrition, neither chips nor desserts are pumping anywhere near the levels of fat into our bodies as two other mainstays of processed foods. In fact, the biggest deliverers of saturated fat—the type of fat doctors worry about—are cheese and red meat, and it is in producing and selling these two products that the food industry has shown its greatest ability to influence public policy. With the American people facing an epidemic of obesity and hardened arteries, the “People’s Department” doesn’t regulate fat as much as it grants the industry’s every wish. Indeed, when it comes to the greatest

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