Salt Sugar Fat Read Online Free

been greater. This was a time when we, as consumers, trusted more than we doubted. We didn’t question, or understand, what we were putting into our bodies—at least not like we do today. At that point, the media still fawned over the release of every new food or drink designed to be handheld, for the road, convenient. “Slow food” was a complaint, not a social movement.
    In some ways, the officials at Pillsbury and Kraft who organized the CEO meeting went even further than I was prepared to go, more than a decade later, in assessing the effects of their work, especially with their talk of cancer. Nutrition science is so notoriously mushy that blaming even a fraction of our cancer on processed foods requires a leap I am not comfortable making. Food studies don’t have the rigor of the double-blind randomizedtrials that are the norm in drug company research, and blaming any single food product for our health troubles is particularly fraught. Yet here they were, linking their own products to a significant part of the country’s health troubles, from diabetes to heart disease to cancer.
    Their lack of reticence raised a tantalizing question: If industry officials were willing to go this far, this fast, in accepting responsibility, what else did they know that they were not saying publicly?
    The lengths to which food companies will go in order to shield their operations from public view were already apparent to me from my own recent reporting odyssey, which had started in early 2009 in southwest Georgia, where anoutbreak of salmonella in a decrepit peanut factory left eight people dead and an estimated nineteen thousand in forty-three states sick. It took a long, winding hunt for me to track down the secret inspection report that revealed one of the root causes:Food manufacturers like Kellogg hadrelied on a private inspector, paid by the factory, to vouch for the safety of the peanuts. The report the inspector wrote in visiting the factory shortly before the outbreak cited none of the obvious warning signs, like the rats and the leaky roof.
    Later, in attempting to trace an
E. coli
–taintedshipment of hamburger that had made hundreds ill and paralyzed a twenty-two-year-old former dance teacher in Minnesota named Stephanie Smith, I found the federal government to be of little help. Not only that, the Department of Agriculture is actually complicit in the meat industry’s secrecy. Citing competitive interests, the public agency refused my requests for the most basic facts, like which slaughterhouses had supplied the meat. I ultimately obtained the information from an industry insider, and the smoking-gun document—a detailed, second-by-second account of the hamburger production process called a “grinding log”—showed why the government is so protective of the industry it is supposed to be holding accountable. The burger that Stephanie ate, made by Cargill, had been an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of the cow and from multiple slaughterhouses as far away as Uruguay. The meat industry, with the blessing of the federal government, was avoiding steps that could make theirproducts safer for consumers. The
E. coli
starts in the slaughterhouses, where feces tainted with the pathogen can contaminate the meat when the hides of cows are pulled off. Yet many of the biggest slaughterhouses would sell their meat only to hamburger makers like Cargill if they agreed
not
to test their meat for
E. coli
until it was mixed together with shipments from other slaughterhouses. This insulated the slaughterhouses from costly recalls when the pathogen was found in ground beef, but it also prevented government officials and the public from tracing the
E. coli
back to its source. When it comes to pathogens in the meat industry, ignorance is financial bliss.
    Salt, sugar, and fat are an entirely different game. Not only are they not accidental contaminants like
E. coli
, the industry methodically studies and controls