Salt Sugar Fat Part Two

 This post is a summary of the book "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss. 

The book was read and summarized for the reading app "bookbhook.com" in December of 2016. 

PART TWO FAT

That Gooey, Sticky Mouth Feel

Fat’s power to generate pleasure is on par with sweet. It is a powerful component of processed food, a pillar ingredient. Fat is surely oily in some of its forms. Canola, soy, olive, and corn are all liquid fats, viscous and flowing, easily spotted and identifiable as fat. Other fat in our food is a solid at room temperatures and not readily recognized. The taste of fat is harder to pin down. It is not part of our primary tastes. All the other tastes have receptors in the taste buds. No such receptor for fat has been found.

And yet, the food industry depends on it. Fat turns listless chips into crunchy marvels, parched breads into silky loaves, drab lunchmeat into savory delicatessen. Some types of fat furnish processed foods with a fundamental need: the capacity to sit on the grocery shelf months at a time. Fat also gives cookies more bulk and a firmer texture. It substitutes for water in lending tenderness and mouth feel to crackers. It lessens the rubbery texture in hot dogs, deepens their color, and keeps them from sticking to the grill. It also performs a range of culinary tricks for food manufacturers. It can mask and convey other flavors in food, all at the same time. This act of delivering other flavors is one of fat’s most valued functions. Fat doesn’t blast away at our mouths like sugar does.

But in one respect, fat is less powerful than the other 2 key stones of processed foods, sugar and salt. Fat’s public image has always been horrid. If a food isn’t fatty, it’s greasy or oily or heavy. Fat in food is equated with fat on the body. Fat is an energy colossus. It packs 9 calorie into each gram. This has led to the proliferation of products that claim to have less fat or lower fat.

Fat is about feel or texture. The feel of fatty foods is described with words like smooth, firm, disappears, slippery, melts, moist and warm. These textural attributes are known as mouth feel of fat. Fat is as much a feeling as it is a taste. Most of the sugary foods in our diets are not just pure sugar. They are linked up with fat.

There is no bliss point for fat. No matter how rich the food, fat is so pleasing to the brain that it never gives the signal to stop eating. Our bodies want more and more fat. There was something about the sugar and fat combination that created a powerful interplay. They boosted one another to levels of allure that neither could reach alone. The heaviest cream tasted even better when a little sugar was added. A dish or drink could be very high in fat and people wouldn’t be aware of it. Fat is trickier than sugar. In these mixtures of fat and sugar you find in so many products, most of the calories come from fat.

Liquid Gold

Americans now eat as much as 33 pounds of cheese, triple the amount they consumed in the 1970s. This is the result of efforts by the food industry. They have changed the way cheese is eaten. Cheese has become an ingredient, something we add to other food. It’s slipped into packaged foods, from the frozen pizzas, to peanut-butter-and-cheese-crackers to packaged dinner entrees to the breakfast sandwiches. The dairy aisle is loaded with cheese made more and more convenient for use in recipes, to boost the usage at home.

This deployment of cheese as a food additive is a windfall for food companies. It has equally big implications for overeating. Cheese is not readily identified as a fatty food. It remains solid at room temperature and hides from view.

It is every bit as attractive as sugary food. People have their limits on sweetness. But cheese is different. Cheese has fat. The fatter the food, the better we like it. This meant cheese could be added to other food products without any worries that people would walk away. The added fat could be counted upon to make them more attractive.

Food companies used this to increase consumption of its packaged, just-add-meat dinners and in the television ad campaigns they sang, Liquid Gold. There exists an opportunity for cheese ingredients in every aisle of the supermarket. One of the biggest free-for-alls took place in the freezer aisle. Frozen pizza: the more cheese that was added, the better the pizzas sold. The food industry embraced cheese – the fattest of all fat-based products.