Book Review :: Hooked by Michael Moss

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss may cause skepticism for his claim that the major manufacturers of processed food design their products to addict consumers, his book just might convince them otherwise. He spends a few chapters early in the work to set up that idea, pulling from research into drug and alcohol addiction, but also from the tobacco industry. The food product manufacturers often ended up owning tobacco companies, in fact. Moss also digs into evolutionary biology to explain why people have such difficulty resisting processed foods, especially those that include artificial sweeteners, which our bodies haven’t adapted to. He draws on a wide range of research and experts to support his argument, yet he makes that necessary science easily accessible to the general reader. Ultimately, he points out that we can be smarter than the food product manufacturers, and that we can use our knowledge of their tricks to make wiser choices when it comes to what we eat. While he’s clear that those manufacturers are interested in nothing but making more and more money, he provides readers with ways to see through their claims, allowing people to make healthier choices for their lives.

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss. Random House, March 2021.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.