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is also where the industry’s hold on federal regulators is most evident. Federal officials do more than shield company records from public view. The biggest government watchdogs show no teeth when it comes to controlling the industry’s excesses in promoting sugary, high-calorie fare, not only on TV but also in the full range of social media now used by the food industry in its pursuit of kids. Moreover, the government has grown so cozy with food manufacturers that some of the biggest industry coups would not have been possible without Washington’s help. When consumers tried to improve their health by shifting to skim milk, Congress set up a scheme for the powerful dairy industry through which it has quietly turned all that unwanted, surplus fat into huge sales of cheese—not cheese to be eaten before or after dinner as a delicacy, but cheese that is slipped into our food as an alluring but unnecessary extra ingredient. The toll, thirty years later: The average American now consumes as much as thirty-three pounds of cheese a year.
    The industry’s pursuit of allure is extremely sophisticated, and it leaves nothing to chance. Some of the largest companies are now using brain scans to study how we react neurologically to certain foods, especially to sugar. They’ve discovered that the brain lights up for sugar the same way it does for cocaine, and this knowledge is useful, not only in formulating foods. The world’s biggest ice cream maker, Unilever, for instance, parlayed its brain research into a brilliant marketing campaign that sells the eating of ice cream as a “scientifically proven” way to make ourselves happy.
    The manufacturers of processed food have also benefited profoundly from a corner of the consumer goods market where shrewdness in marketing has no equal: the tobacco industry. This relationship began in 1985, when R. J. Reynolds bought Nabisco, and reached epic levels a few years later when the world’s largest cigarette maker, Philip Morris, became the largest food company by acquiring the two largest food manufacturers, General Foods and Kraft. A trove of confidential tobacco industry records—81 million pages and growing—opened to public viewing by thestates’ legal settlement with the industry reveals that top officials at Philip Morris were guiding the food giants through their most critical moments, from rescuing products when sales foundered to devising a strategy for dealing with the public’s mounting health concerns. In fact, the same year that the CEOs met to consider obesity, Philip Morris was undergoing its own strategic shift in how it discussed and handled the health aspects of nicotine. Bludgeoned by media attacks and the public’s growing concern about smoking, the company privately warned and prepared its food executives to deal with similar bloody battles over the heart of their operations: namely, the salt, sugar, and fat.
    “The tobacco wars are coming to everyone’s neighborhood,” one Philip Morris strategy paper warned back in the 1999. “For beer, we have evidence of rising anti-alcohol sentiment in the U.S. And for food, it is clear that the biotech issue, already so ripe in Europe, is spreading internationally. There are also the continuing issues of food safety and the health effects of certain food elements such as fat, salt and sugar.”
    To win these wars, the strategy paper continued, the company would have to explore and study its vulnerabilities and even open dialogues with its critics. “This means we have to engage. No more bunkers.”
    M ore and more, consumers have come to focus on these same three ingredients, whether out of concern for obesity and heart disease or simply a desire to eat food that is less processed and more real. There has been a commensurate push from elected officials too, from the White House to City Hall in New York, where salt, sugar, fat, and calories in processed foods have come under heightened criticism. The response from