 Welcome trustees, leaders of the university, students, faculty, staff, and friends of the university. I'm Tom Vogelman, Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and I'm delighted to see you all here. Welcome to the 2017 George D. Aiken Lecture. This lecture series is a permanent tribute to George D. Aiken, former Dean of the United States Senate and Governor of Vermont. For many years of service to the people of the state and nation. Founded in 1975 by George and Lola Aiken and supported by an endowment, the George D. Aiken Lecture is hosted at this university to provide a platform for distinctive views on critical American issues, and it is the University of Vermont's major annual public policy forum. The theme of these lectures rotate among George Aiken's three primary areas of interest in public service, namely energy, agriculture in the environment, and foreign affairs. These lectures are accordingly hosted by the corresponding academic units at the university. So I will be remiss without making this announcement. Please turn off your cell phones. So for the introduction of today's lecture and our distinguished speaker, Michael Moss, I am pleased to turn the podium over to Provost and Senior Vice President, David Rossofsky. Welcome. The University of Vermont, as you all know, is a global leader in food systems education, research, and in collaboration. In fact, we are the first and the only U.S. university to offer bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees in food systems. And here at the University of Vermont, we're passionate about making the food system more sustainable, more healthy, and more just. It seems our speaker this evening, Michael Moss, shares our passion. He writes on the food industry in the context of health and safety and nutrition, marketing, corporate interest, and the power of individuals to gain control of what and how they eat. Michael Moss is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of Salt, Sugar, Fat, How the Food Giants Hooked Us, a number one New York Times bestseller and the topic of his talk this evening. He's currently working on a second book about food and addiction for Random House, Hooked, Food, and Free Will. Between 2000 and 2015, he was an investigative reporter with the New York Times, reporting most recently on the processed food industry. In 2010, he won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for his investigation of the dangers of contaminated meat. His article on hamburger was the centerpiece of a body of work focused on surprising and troubling gaps in the food safety system. Before joining the Times, Mr. Moss was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, New York Newsday, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. He was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for his reporting on the lack of protective armor for soldiers in Iraq, and in 1999 for a team effort on Wall Street's emerging influence in the nursing home industry. He received an overseas press club citation in 2007 for stories on the faulty justice system for American-held detainees in Iraq. Mr. Moss is a former adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and has had fellowships with the German Marshall Fund and the Gannett Center for Media Studies. He's an occasional guest on shows like CBS This Morning, Dr. Oz, CNN's The Lead, ATC, and John Stewart's The Daily Show. A bit of housekeeping before tonight's lecture. Please record your questions for tonight's Q&A session after the lecture. Record them on the white cards found on your seats. These cards will be collected at the end of the talk. Now please join me in welcoming Michael Moss. Thank you for that. Wow. I heard you guys were a tough audience in Vermont. I haven't heard any booing yet, but I'll hold out hope yet for you. Thank you also to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the continuing and distance education. I love that name. I just wanted to say that. And the Aiken board of directors for hosting me tonight. And I brought along, setting my timer. I brought along my friend the Prezi here because it has these little Sherlock Holmes footprints wandering around here. Because for me kind of crawling inside the world of food was like being inside a detective story. So I love the little layout on this and I brought a few pictures for you too. And the story for me started in 2008 when I was in Algeria reporting on Islamic militants when a couple of FBI agents showed up at this place the New York Times headquarters looking for me. For the previous few years I had been running around a rock tormenting the Pentagon for the war in Iraq and then the Middle East tormenting the Pentagon for the war on terrorism. And according to the FBI somehow that had managed to land me on an al-Qaeda hit list. I'm not sure that was the hit list I was on, but at any rate the editors called me back to New York immediately and I only mentioned that because I went from one war to another, that war, that war to another. So having a meeting with my editor Christine up on the 14th floor of the New York Times looking for a new subject to write about and I think I was pitching her U.S. arm sales overseas when she said to me what do you think about peanuts, Michael? And I go, haha Christine, let me tell you about this arm, you know, men's factory. But no, no, you hear me out. There's been an outbreak of salmonella in peanuts and thousands of people are getting sick across the country and I'm still not getting it. So she goes, let me explain Michael, right? This is the investigative group. We look for big powerful stories. Peanuts, parents are giving them to their little kitties to make them healthy. This isn't junk food and they're getting sick. These are being processed not in China. We can't blame them for this one but right here in the United States and they're being used as ingredients by this trillion dollar processed food industry about which we really know very little and indeed when I went down to Georgia and did some reporting on the ground on the factory, it became a story about that food industry using control over its food chain because weeks and weeks were going by as the biggest companies, food companies in the country were still trying to figure out if they were using these particular peanuts in their products and recall after recall was happening. And my reporting on contamination next took me to Minneapolis, Minnesota. This is Stephanie Smith who I focused on a bit in the story because she was a dance instructor taught children how to dance. Went to her mom's house for a hamburger, a Sunday supper and a week later she was paralyzed from the waist down from E. coli contamination in the hamburger and I was incredibly lucky to come across a trove of documents that allowed me for the first time to tell the story of a making of a hamburger that was tainted by E. coli and told, and in this case it was a story about the meat industry intentionally losing control over its food chain and its ingredients in order to avoid trace back for costly recalls. And I was continuing to write about pathogens in food when I had dinner with one of my best sources in Seattle, Montsour here who tests meat for E. coli for the meat industry and he said to me, you know, Michael, as tragic as these episodes of contamination are you really should look at some of the things my industry, meaning the meat industry is intentionally adding to its products over which it has absolute control. He was really upset over salt in processed meats which led me to think about sugar and fat as this unholy trinity, if you will, on which the processed food industry deeply relies on to make their products cheap, easy and irresistible. Wait, that's not it. There it is, yes. Oh, sorry, I have to laugh every time I see the cover of the book and you can see it here. The artist was a Russian in the Hudson Valley of New York who read the book, got it, went into the supermarket, pulled all his own favorite stuff off the shelf and ripped out the lettering and rearranged it to reflect what was really going on inside which you can still see the tear marks there. And the first thought I had actually in the book project was, look, I mean we've always known that eating too much of the food, I like to call the food we hate to love, can make us sick and otherwise ill and boy was Monsour right. I mean, obesity is now past a third of all Americans. Last time I checked 20 through 24 million Americans at Diabetes and another 70-some million had prediabetes. Gout was up to like 8 million people in the United States with huge sort of medical costs involved in that. But again, I was incredibly lucky to come across a mountain of internal documents that put me inside the largest food companies as they were formulating, marketing, selling their products and it was those documents that enabled me to identify key people in the industry who met with me and told me even more secrets. And the overwhelming sense you get from that material is not that this is an evil empire that sort of intentionally set out to make us overweight or otherwise ill. This is an industry that's driving day and night to get us to not just like their products but to want more and more of them. And as an investigative reporter I'm obligated to follow the money and obviously there's a ton of money sloshing around in the food industry but I have to say I really fell in love with the language that they use when they're talking to each other about their efforts to maximize the allure of their products. They don't have to use the a-word or addiction which they loathe tremendously, they have words like craveable, snackable, right? And here's my favorite, moreishness. These are not English majors, right? These are bench chemists and marketing people really sort of true to their heart describing their efforts. And through kind of those documents I met great people including this man Howard Moskowitz, a legend in the food industry responsible for many of the big icons in the grocery store. In his words he engineers products to be irresistible. He was trained in experimental psychology at Harvard, High Math at Queens College. And he walked me through one of his recent projects for Dr. Pepper in which he created a new soda flavor. As he explained to me, he started with no less than 60 versions of sweetness, each one just slightly different than the next one. Subjected those to 3,000 consumer taste tests, took the data, threw it in his computer, did his high math regression analysis thing and out came charts like this which he sent to Dr. Pepper with a bell shaped curve just like the ones you students are graded on except that the top of the curve is not the dreaded middle C, it's the optimum of sweetness, not too little, not too much and this is a really fine point that the companies try to hit. Anybody who likes sugar in their coffee, where you can do this test yourself, just keep adding sugar till you hit that sweet spot and then keep adding more sugar and pretty soon you're going to be going, yeah. What was Howard Moskowitz who coined one of my favorite terms which was the bliss point to describe that perfect amount of sugar and really it's not that the food companies has Howard Moskowitz is working for them engineering bliss points of sweetness for things like ice cream or cookies, things we know or candy Halloween, thank you, things we know are sweet, expect to be sweet and can deal with as treats, the food companies marched around the grocery store adding sugar to things that didn't used to be sweet before engineering bliss points so that bread started to have sugar added to it and a bliss point for sweetness, sugar came to have as much sugar per serving as ice cream. One of my favorite spots in the grocery store is the pasta sauce aisle where some of the brands had the equivalent of two, sometimes three Oreo cookies worth of sugar in a tiny half cup serving and what that did was create this expectation in us that everything should taste sweet and it's a real problem especially for kids who are little walking bliss points for sugar because their brains think sugar is the energy that their bodies, their growing bodies need so when you drag them over to the produce aisle which we'll get to later and try to get them more to eat more of that stuff that's why you have hell on your hand suddenly and they didn't do just that though but they changed the name of, oh sorry I did have to throw that in this wasn't that long ago but this kid is now in college and that kid's well on his way I don't know where time goes they changed the name of sugar who can guess how many ways the food industry spells sugar and don't just count these because there's a whole bunch more any guesses out there, take a wild guess 60, very, very close sorry I said small, 56 I counted anyway there probably are four new ones just since I came up here today and it's not just sugar of course ah, fat in some ways is even more powerful than sugar because it kind of sneaks up on you this is the word that the food industry describes and it's not a taste officially yet it's still classified as a sensation and it's that feeling of biting into a warm toasted cheese sandwich because you have a nerve that comes down to the top of the roof of your mouth and goes to that same reward center of your brain that says wow, love that let's have more and you can probably tell I'm more of a fat guy than a sugar guy because my brain right now is thinking yeah that sounds really great I'll take more of that, I'll take more of that too here's another question for you we need there's too many food people in here we need like Chuck what's your major? business, yes Chuck is going to be our guinea pig here tonight would you please open that bag of potato chips put one in your mouth I love potato chips this is hard to give it away and tell me what percentage fat do you think that potato chip is? 20% Chuck is low, anybody else? the magic number for snacks and a lot of other foods in the grocery store for the fat content is 50% and that hits that luscious mouth feel sensation where that product will actually start melting in your mouth and speaking of melting though so we've got sugar we've talked about fat it's not just those and we'll get to salt later it's not just those ingredients either the industry is incredibly clever at other elements that go into these products did you know that the more noise a potato chip makes when it goes into your mouth and you crunch down on it you want to eat that potato chip you didn't know that? they know that and the potato chip makers even have machines that gauge how much noise the potato chip is going to make when it crunches down but here's one of my favorite things for Chuck cheetos we're coming back to some language here this is one of my favorite terms so please Chuck place that item on your tongue on the roof of your mouth and tell me what happens to the item when you do that it crumbles it wasn't quite what I was looking for you're even chewing and chewing isn't something you have to do with processed food you just kind of it kind of melts I'm thinking it kind of disappears so they discovered that when you put an item like that in your mouth your brain thinks that the calories in that item disappeared as well and so you might as well as Chuck is doing eat the whole bag and they call this they call this the vanishing caloric density again bench chemists being very precise about their efforts when I was at the time I was doing these little video snippets to try to reach out to people who didn't read the newspaper and I have just a little diddy to play for you here Taco Bell's Doritos Locos Tacos just released in its third iteration is a marriage made in processed food heaven it joins a perfectly engineered snack with a proven fast food Colossus this is Michael Moss and I write about this section of food and marketing for the New York Times and so I've been asked what's in it there are the ingredients of course but it's real powers lie in what food scientists call psychobiology that's the study of how the brain reacts to stimuli the reason the Doritos Locos Tacos have been so successful says food scientist Steven Witherly is because they are engineered to target taste buds using the most powerful features known to manufacturers it has dynamic contrast that's the pleasant sensation of biting through the crispy shell to the fat-laced filling Taco Bell offers lower fat options but the Doritos versions hit the mark for maximum allure half its calories come from fat which gives it that craveable quality called mouth feel acids, lactic and citric which get the saliva flowing and excite the brain's pleasure center in turn the brain says go ahead, eat more it has a long hangtime flavor system in which the lingering smell stimulates food memories and cravings and yet this is the strangest one of all it's forgettable none of the many flavors and Doritos Locos Tacos are strong enough to trip a signal called sensory specific satiety that will cause you to feel like you've had enough that's the point they are designed to make you want more that means more profits and more opportunity to live up to the translation of the Doritos name little bits of gold there's something else catch carefully that is something Chuck grew up on yes the lunchables wait you don't even have to open or taste it you can take it home what I want you to do is look at the list of ingredients on the side panel Chuck it's a long list alright which of those ingredients you think are most important to get people not just to like lunchables but to go bananas over them no stop it's not any of the ingredients the most important thing about lunchables is the marketing and in fact the CEO the company who invented the lunchables was sort of famous once internally for saying you know lunchables really isn't about the food it's about the empowerment that kids feel in the lunch room when they open this package up and suddenly they're like the cat's meow of all of their friends that's when they came up with the marketing slogan who remembers I bet you can't eat just one everybody remembers that potato chips well lunchables had directed at the kids all day you gotta do what they say but lunchtime is all yours and I spent a whole chapter writing about the lunchables because I found the inventor who opened up the documents to me and talked about how he did it and it was absolutely fascinating but also because lunchables marked kind of the intrusion of fast food think about it I mean plain pizza cold pizza crust tomato sauce and cheese you put on and anything else they started making cold hamburger lunchables and taco lunchables and pancake lunchables sort of the intrusion of fast food into the grocery store and I thought they were buying food that was good for them and it really completely kind of changed the atmosphere in the food store one of my one of my favorite characters in the book is this guy his name is Jeffrey Dunn and for 20 years he was the fiercest warrior at this company he rose to become president of Coca-Cola for North America, South America Jeff Dunn walked sorry the blurriness he asked me through Coca-Cola's pioneering of the supersize me phenomena where you could go into a restaurant and get all the coke you wanted for the same price the war like language that they used with Pepsi their competitor in which they called their best cast customers not their best customers these are people who would drink two or three cokes a day but heavy users and their targeting is a corner stores like Tatiana here in Philadelphia knowing that when a child goes into a store and all the snack companies do this knowing that when a child goes into a store and uses some of his or her own spending money and makes that first purchase decision that's words they use in business they will become brand loyal not just to the brand but to the product as well and one of the most kind of powerful kind of marketing forces which surprised me I had forgotten in the food industry was none other than Philip Morris they didn't make french fries but back in the late 80s they bought the old company general foods and then craft and became the single largest processed food manufacturer in North America for all of the 90s they say 90s in the late 80s they bought craft all of the 90s into the 2000s and you can kind of see through the documents the tobacco company documents the tobacco managers at Philip Morris nudging and cajoling their food managers to use some of their marketing techniques that they use for cigarettes to sell food in the grocery store but the big surprise for me was that it was none other than Philip Morris that privately turned to their food managers this is in the year 2000 and warned them that they were going to face trouble over salt sugar fat obesity just like the tobacco part of the company was facing trouble over cigarettes and cancer and that the food division had to do something to lessen their dependence on salt sugar fat or they were going to be really in big trouble and the other thing that happened to is that inside the companies you know arose the cabals of insiders who also became alarmed about the growing responsibility that the food companies had over not just obesity but even some kinds of cancer and etc and there was this just journalistically fantastic meeting back in the late 1990s in Minneapolis Minnesota and the old Pillsbury headquarters where the heads of the largest companies got together were brought together by these insiders who were becoming alarmed about their culpability on obesity etc and the insiders urged the CEOs to do something collectively to turn the corner and start doing better by consumers with healthier food and you can probably imagine what happened but one of the most powerful people in the room CEO at the time of General Mills gets up and said look excuse me but I hear what you're saying but you know we are already decayed by consumers if they want a low fat version of our product we're making that if they want a low sugar version that's on the shelf there someplace but there is no way because we are also beholden to shareholders and there is absolutely no way we're going to mess around with the company jewels as he called salt sugar fat if that's going to diminish sales which really kind of got me or takes me to the final sort of of the of the ingredients one of my biggest surprises besides that meeting and just the whole extraordinary science used by the companies is that they in fact are more hooked on using gobs of salt sugar fat in their products than we are in eating those and it really came to light to me when I sort of took a look at salt flavor burst because if we go back to that potato chips the first thing that hit Chuck's tongue which sent a signal to the brain was in fact the salt on the surface of that potato chip and it's a very powerful hit on the reward center of the brain sending pleasure back to him but here's a really interesting thing about salt unlike sugar which I mentioned kids are walking bliss points for sugar we're actually not born with salt I guess that's a scowl I don't know it's been too long since my boys were a baby but that apparently is a scowl on a baby and it's not until about six months of age that we come around and we kind of start liking salt and so I went to the food industry and I said biggest companies and I sort of sent them a note saying look salt has become like this public enemy number one it's links to heart or heart disease everybody's trying to cut back why don't you guys just like cut back on your products on the use of your salt and Kellogg surprisingly raised its hand so I flew to Detroit and I drove out to battle Creek, Michigan where they prepared for me special versions of some of their biggest icons except in this case they left all the salt out to show Michael Moss why salt was so important to them and we started and we sat down leaving all my electronic equipment behind by the way but I did manage this picture these are the cheez-its that they prepared for me without salt at all and normally I could eat cheez-its day in and day out which is why I'm not even going to hand these but without salt we couldn't even swallow them because salt they stuck to the roof of our mouth because salt adds texture and solubility and we moved on to the frozen waffles put them in the toaster and they came out looking and tasting like straw because salt adds the color and the taste and here was the best part we moved on to the corn flakes put them in her bowl added milk, took a bite and before I could say anything the chief spokeswoman for Kellogg's was sitting at the table and she gets this look of horror on her face swallows and she blurts out metal I taste metal M-E-T-A-L and I'm kind of thinking boy I'm glad you said that I thought one of my fillings fell out and was sloshing around in my mouth and when she said that the chief technical officer who's in charge of all scientific things he kind of chuckles a little and he says that's really interesting not everybody will taste them at all but one of the many people do and one of the beautiful things about salt is that it will mask the off notes that bad taste that are inherent to some processed foods salt to us is a magical ingredient in so many ways and then he went on to tell me about whoof which is what they call warmed over flavor which is one of the biggest problems in the processed food industry packaged foods industry because when meat gets re-warmed the fat in the meat oxidizes and gives off what the food scientists describe as the taste of wet dog hair that's why they call war and it's called warmed over flavor but they pronounce it woof like the wet dog hair well who can guess what the solution to woof wet dog hair taste in canned vegetable beef soup would be more salt of course and who can guess how many types of salt the food industry makes companies make to sell to the food industry in shape and texture and additives if you kind of add it all up anybody want to take a guess here 5, 12, 40 yeah that was an easy one 40 different types I counted up which which is kind of astounding and again kind of reflects extraordinary science that goes into their use of salt sugar fat which is much different than our use of salt sugar fat don't get me wrong in any of this I have salt in my kitchen I have tons of oil that I use olive oil especially and when I make pasta sauce I add a pinch of sugar because my mom always added a pinch of sugar so there's nothing wrong about salt sugar fat in our hands but things are changing here I get to a little bit of optimistic part of the part of the talk I mentioned the meeting back in 1999 in Minneapolis it was a very different meeting a couple of years ago in Florida where representatives of the largest companies went down and met with investors who are asking them why they should keep selling their stock or investing in the companies and one after another of the food companies was reporting dismal profits earnings were way down and the more forthright among those company officials this was including the head of Campbell's soup at the time stood up and said you know I'm sorry guys but we are losing the trust of our customers more and more people are caring about what they put in their mouths and that's being reflected in their purchase decisions and they are starting to not buy some of the most junkiest items in the grocery store and I had another incredible meeting after the book came out it's been about a year and you kind of have to get to the end where I write about hot pockets and describe them as basically being a poster child for the obesity crisis well hot pockets are made by none other than Nestle at the time the single largest food company in the world I got a call from Nestle saying hey we'd like you to come talk to our private meeting of those about 60 research and development people and on the shores of Lake Geneva where they have their headquarters and I said really no no no here's out I mean you know we are now convinced that you know if we were responsible as you say for the share of the obesity crisis we need to now become part of the solution so I went over there and I spent some time with their 350 PhD scientists it's really amazing operation they have and you know to their credit they are doing amazing things to cut back on salt sugar fat in their products so now you can even get a hot pocket that is much lower in salt sugar but here's the thing and it's a bit of a confession on my part because as much as I've sort of harped about salt, sugar, fat when you go to nutritionists smart nutritionists and you ask them what's the first thing you would advise somebody to do a typical American to do to sort of change their eating habits to eat healthier the answer you get back is not reduce cut back on salt, sugar, fat the answer I get back anyway is to double down on your vegetables fill up half your plate with produce which kind of really surprised me at the time but it's really true the government very quietly has been urging us to do the same thing kind of to no effect you know I sort of ask myself the question what would my food giants do if they suddenly had to start selling stuff in the produce aisle and the most cynical among us would probably say well they'd smother it in cheese sauce or caramel coating icing or something else that Chuck would love right but no if they had to do it there's plain stuff in the vegetable aisle what would they do and I became convinced that they would go back to their tried and their true they would work on getting the cost down of stuff in the produce aisle they would work on getting they would work on making it more convenient to use vegetables and buy vegetables and use them and prepare vegetables in the kitchen it is like really hard but most importantly I became convinced that they would go to their best friends most powerful friends on Madison Avenue and ask the advertising industry to come up with some way for selling vegetables like they sell cheez-its and potato chips and cheetos so I got this really crazy idea and this is kind of when I crossed the line from being a journalist to I don't know what but I sort of said to myself well if nobody is hiring Madison Avenue to do an advertising campaign for the produce aisle because it doesn't get any marketing all the marketing is in the rest of the 90% of the store that sells all the package goods why don't I try to do it so it took a while because advertising companies are really busy making a lot of money but I finally found a company that agreed to do an advertising campaign for me on a vegetable in the produce aisle and not only that but to let me inside their world when they did this campaign film it and then write a story about it and it wasn't just any vegetable that I asked them to do I asked them to do an advertising campaign that would wow people about what arguably is the most difficult vegetable for a lot of us and here's I just want to show you two snippets of the video that we did of their advertising campaign I do not like broccoli and I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it and I'm president of the United States and I'm not going to eat anymore broccoli in spite of its well known health benefits broccoli is not a popular vegetable it was derided by President George Bush and it's pretty much ignored by the rest of us I'm Michael Moss and I write about the intersection of food and marketing for the New York Times I'm trying to answer a question what would it take to get people to eat better advertising firm Victors and Spoils whose previous clients include Quiznos General Mills and Coca-Cola took on the challenge pro bono and about halfway through ever they called me up and said come on Michael could you come in we want to show you something and I go and they go look you haven't given us any money we're not going to spend any money of our own so we can't do like a real advertising splash or what have you we're going to kind of like pretend to do like a social media campaign in like Berkeley or Brooklyn or Burlington somewhere cool like that and just to kind of get people jazzed a bit and we're going to pick a fight with another item in the grocery store and I thought oh great they're going to go after Cheetos or one of our other favorites and they go no no no no you're forgetting your Coca-Cola chapter where you wrote about how the war between Pepsi and Coca-Cola was in fact an entirely bloodless war because every time one of those companies came up with an advertisement that counted its product all boats rose in the soda aisle it was good for everybody just to have attention be brought to one company and they said no no no hear us out and so here's what they decided to pick a fight on for my little broccoli campaign so our key consumer insight that we're working with is that everyone is currently talking about kale it is everywhere this is on Appetite magazine there's a whole section on the vegetable revolution in here and there's a timeline around when all of these vegetables had their it moments broccoli is not on this list there's nothing new or exciting to say about broccoli part of our challenge is going to be how to change the visual communication the visual style of broccoli in culture that wall over there says broccoli isn't exactly that cool but maybe there's something cool and not be cool like you don't want to do anyone but maybe you know maybe they're in on the joke I mean the fact that broccoli is having its own campaign I think you can have a lot of fun with broccoli so you're basically saying like I'd like you to live longer here's something that's going to do that so in essence broccoli is probably a better gift than flowers is it a brocade oh you heard that so he said is it a brocade this is how they get their juices going these you know the the artistic types on in the advertising industry coming up with sort of cracks like like that and the other important thing though I should have mentioned is that the very first thing they decided was there's no way we're going to talk about broccoli being good for you that's what the government has been preaching forever we're going to make it fun we're going to find some way some way to sort of get people jazzed about broccoli without sort of hammering home the health benefits so I still laugh at this one I don't know how I did this but I talked in your times into putting this entirely fictitious broccoli campaign on the front cover of the New York Times magazine and inside were just a few of the advertising fake advertising that they would have done if somebody actually hired them to do this that they were going to run in this case kind of picking a fight on poor Kale boy did I and this went on and on and I boy did I hear from the Kale people I'm still hearing from the Kale people who didn't read the chapter on it I didn't realize their boat was going to ride you know if we actually ever did this and that was it the story kind of came and went and I thought that was fine I did my job and thank the New York Times and blah blah blah but then something really cool happened some students at Yale read the story were excited about it and took some of the loot that the advertising company had like these great t-shirts and eat fad free and they did a real advertising campaign New Haven is one of the biggest food deserts in the country a lot of poor people live there do not have access to good produce and they went into the few grocery stores that are there and did these billboards advertising picking fun of Kale and managed in their scientific study to double the sale of broccoli in the week or something like that and then and then one of the biggest broccoli growers on the east coast picked up the campaign and started running with it and on and on and on their is still having a lot of fun I'll show you something a little later the other cool thing that sort of has happened too is that some of the people I wrote about in the book have switched sides remember Jeff Dunn at the Coca-Cola Company well he quit and went to work for one of the two biggest farms that grow carrots and make baby carrots and he was actually one of the first people who suggested to the care people that they could steal marketing ideas from his former industry to do that sell produce as stuff that's really sort of fun to do so that was kind of the marketing side I mentioned that I think the food industry would also try to cut their costs and I ran across farmers in the Midwest I don't know if you know but most of the produce, most of the crops that we grow in this country are corn but not the corn you eat, the corn in the cob but corn for for corn syrup and ethanol and animal food some of those farmers are now switching sides and starting to grow produce in the middle of the country in some cases in greenhouse so they can eat like us all year long they're also fiddling with the grocery store to make it more convenient and alluring to go into the produce aisle we talked about this in a workshop earlier today which was a lot of fun but basically there are scientists practicing nudge marketing trying to get people to remember who they are when they walk into the grocery store because everything about the grocery store is designed to get you to forget about yourself when you go in the door that's where you have that soft la la land music going on neon lighting and the layout of the store so these scientists started putting mirrors all over the store in order to remind people of their body types as they went shopping in order to avoid what the supermarkets want to do which is to typically get you to make an impulse decision get you off your shopping list because that's where some of the extra revenue comes from that they need in a very thin profit margin industry so these guys oh sorry these guys decided to oh 7% we are totally going to make it in order to remind people of the body image at one point they did all kinds of crazy stuff at one point they took the shopping cart nudge marketing nudge economics and put some duct tape down the middle and in the front half of the cart put a sign that said put your produce in the front half of the cart and just with that little nudging people double their produce sales in whatever amount of time the study was but they also did this they put mirrors in the cart this is a mirror reflecting the image of the guy pushing the cart this is an El Paso place that is a real significant weight issue because they are getting hammered culturally from all sides and he was funny because he goes yeah this is pretty good but this mirror is kind of rectangular and he goes you should really turn it around vertically so I can see this part of my because you had like a really big gut so that kind of cool stuff is happening people are also trying to reinvent some of the some of the most kind of awful corners of the food industry bending machines there's this guy named Luke in Chicago his first profession was selling lubrication oil to factories and he went into a factory that was making these things called uncrustables which were frozen peanut butter jelly sandwiches with the crust caught off and he said why would any parent give them that and they explained to him it's not parents it's the schools that are good of all their cooking equipment this is the only thing they can use these days and he said well I think I can come up something better than that at least for vending machines and he got the idea of selling fresh salad in the vending machines this is one at O'Hare airport he's actually doing really really good and at one point he reached out and got together with the inventor of the Lunchables to come to borrow steel some of those incredible marketing tools and ideas that made Lunchables kind of so successful and apply those to schemes like this produce is also getting its own advertising people are doing really fantastic videos if this one plays no preaching and I have to say that's kind of working in my house too I mean one of the one of the things that happened to me since the book is that I've started to kind of deal with the kids um God we forgot to open the Coca Cola well next time sorry I know you're disappointed because there is something really great in there but okay is not preach to the kids but um but have a conversation with them and that's for me that's been one of the best things about the reporting experience is that I now go into the supermarket and look at these products and kind of like start laughing because I know what's behind them and why they're doing what they're doing on the front of the packages and why they're burying the rest of the stuff in the small print on the back of the package and when you do that with kids and don't preach but kind of talk to them about produce in fun ways like that or just have a conversation with them about seeing food as empowerment and seeing information about food as empowerment you know I think you get a much better a much better reaction and these are kids these are college students in Saudi Arabia they can't drive but they started to and I gave a talk there because diabetes is just running rampant in Saudi Arabia it's like El Paso they're getting hammered culturally from all sides American junk food and their own customs of not letting women go to gyms and etc etc so they're now doing these projects where they're designing cool stuff where they're just kind of describing some of the products and how much sugar goes into a soda for example so there's really great stuff happening in schools one of my favorite excursions was going to a school in Rochester actually one of the poorest schools in the country where middle school had a food project and they decided to kind of figure out all the stuff that went into their favorite foods in this case they were really intrigued by color and how they had to be more attracted to the brightest colors this is true in the animal world as well and then also to kind of think about how they would remake food that they loved in a better way to reformulate it in ways that they would sort of still they would still like it and I can't and I'm just gonna I'm just gonna wrap up here so we have time for questions if you think you might have some questions and as was mentioned I'm doing a next book about it's called Hooked it's about food and addiction because when Sultry Graffat came out the very first question I got from reporters was so Michael, tell us just how addictive is this stuff that I was like I had kind of danced around that in the book because I really didn't know and I didn't know what the word addiction kind of meant to different people and scientists and stuff and so I decided to sort of spend some time crawling inside the heads of brain scientists as they're trying to figure out what food does do to our brains going back to my food giants and trying to figure out how they are anticipating or dealing with the charge that they're designing addictive stuff and then kind of looking at some other maybe even more significant issues that are going on that are not in the realm of addiction and I didn't cover in the first book but just to give you one little tidbit I ran across this the other day there's a point in Hooked when I'm kind of dealing with diets and dieting and diet foods and abstention because abstention and drugs is kind of the way to go but it's hard to do in food because you just can't stop eating so it's a difficult parallel to do that but I ran across just for fun this item in the diet aisle of your frozen food section in the grocery store and going back to the broccoli video I thought this actually looked pretty good a lot of broccoli in that smart one who can guess and I should mention too one of the fun things when you turn a packaged food around and look at the list of ingredients they don't tell you how much of anything is in that product but they do list things in order so the biggest item comes first and the smallest item comes last so it gives you a little sense of the relativity in the items so you're going to be privately guessing where broccoli is on the list of ingredients in this product where broccoli is the very first item on the big print on the front of the package which is the only thing most of us pay attention to top 10 here is it number one? no it's not number one number two? any guesses yet? no the cheese sauce that was actually quite a few items and the cheese I just boiled it down to one is it three? no that was the modified cornstarch nope no it wasn't salt our old friend the salt wait a minute I don't see any salt I don't see any salt in that picture no it wasn't that and actually that was when you broke it down on the ingredients list so that was sort of two ingredients so we're up to seven or eight anyway but no technically six no that was a nada no that was that gum thing I can never pronounce either spice hang in there hang in there we're going to get there spice by the way could be 100 ingredients depending on whatever they got in the factory to put in there that is a catch all we could talk about later what about no extract is wait how far does this go do we have energy no extract is a banado wasn't 10 was it yes we got to the broccoli it was the very last ingredient in that poor diet food the upshot of which is you have to be careful in the grocery store even if you think you're doing right by your health and your body because there are a lot of pitfalls out there so thank you and I look forward to any questions that you might have and I see a microphone here or if you speak up you don't want to come up I can probably repeat your question and do it that way but it looks like the microphone is going to work right it works yes so we're collecting the cards but while we collect the cards I get to ask a question because I have not done that yet today we have all of our driving around so my question is related to advertising so part of it is making these foods and part of it as you said is getting the foods into us so it seems that it has been impossible to get any kind of legislation any kind of rules any kind of strategies aside from voluntary compliance by industry to not advertise so much given that you're a journalist and freedom of speech I'm sure is like a thing so that's what they say it's freedom of speech we can do what we want do you ever see a day when we can limit legislatively advertising to children so it kind of falls in the category of any action that the government can take to kind of coerce the industry into doing things I'm a little discouraged that we're going to see anything along those lines a regulation of any sort that's going to squeeze the industry a little bit and I'm much more and I'm much more kind of interested in this idea that people which led to this in the industry's view this horrific meeting in Florida two years ago where they had to confess horrible earnings that people may changing their purchase decisions to buy healthier stuff will send the message to the industry that they have to change and so by pure economic drive they'll advertise the junkiest stuff less than they will the other things which would just be a fantastic deal it's up to us again to do it because we can't compel them to do it right okay we know that these large industrial food companies use a number of marketing tools to get consumers to buy their products so what are the most successful productive marketing tools that drive consumers to buy healthy food right so I think part of that is in the broccoli campaign I think part of it is thinking about how do we sell produce to people without seeming like we're preaching can we make it fun in a way that will kind of speak to kids and I think that's been the best thing that people have kind of come up with to date which is stop already with the preaching and let's entertain and let's make kids laugh and then maybe hopefully they'll come to broccoli if a bunch of other things happen too thank you for doing this yeah let me see sugar seems to be in everything even in my kashi go lean cereal I had to stay below 25 grams per day as the American Heart Association recommends put your dietitian hat on now I think that's just like really really hard to do I mean I look there are I mean people who really need to seriously lose weight will keep diaries of what they eat and I can't imagine doing that and or even looking at the fine print and all the products I eat I mean I think the surest way to do that is just to sort of minimize the amount of packaged food that you eat and try to go for staples with you know a bit of cooking I mean one of the things I started to do more was make my own pasta sauce which you know you buy a can of tomatoes if it's off season and you add whatever a couple of spices are in your cabinet and a little garlic and saute that up and you add tomatoes and five minutes you have a really great pasta sauce for less money and you don't have to add kind of the tons of salt or in some cases sugar that they do with that so either you have to painstakingly design a you know a diet program for yourself having studied the nutrient facts boxes on all the items or you just kind of start steering your your your way toward eating kind of basic stuff and give up convenience I mean that's the thing so the these foods were convenient and we were paying a price for that convenience that the companies of course didn't want to tell us about do you anticipate litigation similar to the tobacco litigation if so is it likely to be successful hmm yeah I kind of get into this more in the next book but I think the short answer is there's a pretty big difference and I can't tell you I don't think the food companies are too worried about that because when it comes to a jury and what comes to tobacco kind of has little redeeming value other than calming you down but but it's not like food and the problem with a lawsuit against the food industry is which of the 60,000 items that are sold in the grocery store are you going to pick on and how would you possibly link that item with any one person sort of health problem because there's nothing inherently wrong with with cheez-its it's the amount of cheez-its and the amount of sort of those kinds of foods that we've come to be dependent on as an issue and then you've lost your defendant when it's the whole industry when I go to the nutritionist the other piece of advice I get is to eliminate processed foods all together what made you choose to work with these giant companies rather than speak outright against them what made me I'm sorry what made you work with the companies so demonize them versus working with them oh right yes so I think just kind of having more of a practical view I mean it's for many most of us we can't just dump processed foods and I'm kind of not about about arguing that we should just totally abandon processed foods but rather controlling trying to control them rather than sort of let them control us and use them some extent people just can't I mean many people just can't don't have the resources, the time to do that kind of shift over from processed foods so I think I've just been sort of trying to be a little more practical minded about that and at least just to give people the facts I mean if reading my stuff convinces you that you do you are going to make that move to completely abandon processed foods fantastic that's your that's your decision but I think there are ways that other people can work with them and control them in ways that we don't know this individual worked at craft foods Phillip Morris from 86 to 96 and now works in the addiction field for drugs and alcohol there is research that indicates that you can delay the age of first use it reduces the likelihood of addiction delaying the age of first use of drugs is there similar research for food if so who funds it um yeah delay use um boy I haven't seen I haven't seen that in particular I mean there are studies about whether you know if you raise your kid never to eat Oreos what happens when they go to their friend's house for the first time are they going to pick out more than they would otherwise or less and I think those are all pretty inconclusive in part because there are kind of so many other so many other issues going on but that's a but the delay thing is really interesting too though because one of the and I'm talking about the next book now and I shouldn't but one of the most powerful things in food is memory and memories are even more powerful the younger you are when you have those memories especially kind of in the in the early teen years so so I think that that person probably has a point there about that um why did the industry cooperate with you so what's in it for them by talking to you knowing what your intention was maybe yeah so you know as an investor reporter basically it's your job to do things that kind of coerced them in the cooperating with you and in my case I had their documents and I had their people and I had a mission to be fair and thorough and accurate in my reporting and a reputation for doing that so I think that while I said this earlier today they wished they probably wished I was never born but having been born I think that they felt I gave them a fair shake because the book is in the street it really is more of a detective story this is how they did it and I'm not telling you it's necessarily bad you can you can know that for yourself this is just this is how they this is how they did that and I think that I think that they felt that besides the fact that within these companies you know are these companies that agree with many of you I'm sure and we're cheering me on sort of privately how did Kale become popular that's a really good so I had to look at that at one point yeah so they didn't have like an advertising company the answer is nobody knows it was one of and people looked it's like one of there would be a good research project for a nice university student you know any of those it was just kind of happenstance there was a I think there was an actress who started talking about it and there was a little bit of social media stuff that exploded and the Kale people were always the nuts about it and it just kind of it just kind of took off on its own without any help from Madison I don't know but that's about the only one in the produce aisle that's had that luck I know I just want to say that I show the broccoli ads in my class and they're fantastic and the students don't laugh I was really happy tonight that all the adults laugh because I think they're hilarious and they just sort of sit there and well that's that's the challenge with advertising too you gotta know who your audience is and if you're talking that at kids and they're gonna laugh then you're so we have any more I think that's it so I can actually ask this one this has nothing really to do with the talk but is the New York Times really failing right so what are the latest so advertising is gone or substantially the print side of the business is disappearing the digital is increasing and I guess I would sort of leave it to you as readers whether you think the paper has the stature of that that it used to have I mean it's hard to we're in this kind of you know period right now where it's really kind of hard to judge because there's so much crazy news out there that it's almost like you don't even need investigative reporting for example it's just there's stuff just landing in your lap it's just like unbelievable so it's definitely having some hard hard times as the whole media is and and it's kind of dicey as to where things are going to go so we're out of written questions if anybody has the energy we've got a few more minutes you're welcome to come up and ask well so you're going to make me run back there with the microphone is that what you're going to do okay we're going to hand you the card anybody else question hi there thank you so much for your talk I'm over here I hate that feeling so I have a question about this I'm doing a lot of work on food ethics moral mapping of the food system and as we do that we pick out ethical issues and try to rank them and one of the things that's come up a number of times is the ethics of replicating the same kinds of manipulative marketing techniques for better food and what the role of manipulation ought to be in an ethical food system can you speak to that a little bit do the ends justify the means in tricking kids over into the protozole no I have no idea I have no idea about the ethics the bottom line for journalism is you shouldn't lie and you shouldn't mislead deceive them do we ever lie to our kids to get them to do something good that's a really tricky place we're more concerned about it backfiring though not worrying about the ethics but having the kids kind of see through it and running the other direction and it just kind of failing that would be my first concern but the other issue of ethics too is should produce need marketing I mean really should we apply the truisms and the tricks that Lunchables did to produce and I think that's a really good question and I don't have the I don't have the answer to that you might have an opinion grooming oh right so right so her answer was if we sort of pitch you know broccoli to them like junk food it's a real thin line as they get older to hearing pitches about junk food then those things are maybe we're playing right into the hands of the junkiest stuff in the grocery store if we do that that's a really good that's a good theory hey thank you for being here oh you're welcome thank you for your talk my question is in the transition from getting people eating processed food with their comfort with eating more fresh vegetables we've forgotten how to cook and how are we going to get people cooking yeah so you know I had this dream once of taking a zip code some place like the Bronx or whatever and doing like 20 things in that zip code to sort of help people change their eating habits and one of the things would be to put a garden in the school to get people not to feed the cafeteria necessarily but to get kids excited about food you know and then they're going to come home and get all excited about radishes until their parents are radishes and then you gotta you gotta find a way to get radishes in their stores so their parents can actually buy the radish when they go shopping or maybe you would get one of the home delivery companies to start delivering to do that so part of the answer is there's all tons of stuff you have to kind of do and one of them is in fact cooking and I write about the demise of the economic system of teaching a curriculum in schools in agriculture or rather the shifting of it where girls and boys to some extent were taught how to shop and cook and be mindful of food and food preparation and kind of the curriculum shifted to more you know pressing matters like pregnancy or getting a job out of high school and yeah and if I was like king for a day and this is starting to happen in some jurisdictions it's starting to come up with programs that teach kids how to cook in kind of a political way um because these are kids who've never been to a grocery store before some kids don't know about utensils because they're eating things that come in wrappers that they can eat with their hands and starting to sort of as part of that starting to cook um cook as well but teaching food kind of in a political way which is you know here the companies wanting you to do kind of what they want you to do and here are we and do we have any power to decide for ourselves and sort of see it in that framework as well and in a few places it's been tried it's worked really well again it's not preaching um it's it's talking about food as power that I think could so the short is you know kids we gotta I mean I think we have to start with the kids I think I think older people like me are hopeless um are much harder at any rate I'm not sure that all the cooking shows are even helping either that's another subject but usually important cooking um yeah oh sorry oh sorry hi so I work for um a large food retailer and we yeah yes and um I'm working inside the company to try to persuade them to sell healthier food and what I hear is that we're kind of addicted to junk food ourselves that we kind of can't get off of the agreements that we've made with these giant food retailers what do you think a big food retailer should do to try to you know cause I feel like we already influence what our shoppers buy by selecting the foods that we sell right so I feel stuck and and I want to persuade them to do the right thing right so um well if if there's some agreement that the produce aisle is a great place to start I mean I think that there probably are some nudge marketing things that stores could do to get people to spend more time in the produce aisle and I you know I don't know if you guys have Wegmans here I love what Wegmans does and they were started by like a couple of produce hustlers and then they became like a supermarket but if I'm not mistaken the produce aisle and they they they do cooking demonstrations to show you how to cook asparagus or cut an artichoke if you've never done that and they also they also make produce more convenient so you can go in and buy a tray of freshly cut and assembled vegetables to take home and throw in your walk and cook which saves a lot of time and probably food ways too I would suspect so um knowing that and here's the real thing that got me when I looked at the guys in El Paso when they did their grocery cart thing in El Paso to steer people toward the produce aisle they immediately got some regional food chains really excited and they told me the food chains told me the reason for that was that the produce aisle is actually really profitable for them I mean except for having labor costs because you gotta manage the produce you can't just sit there um and it goes bad but um it's really profitable and they kind of set the prices which is a good and a bad thing but um but as a profit center in the store there's a built in economic incentive for them to kind of push the produce so um um even stores like Walmart though started experimenting um one of the things that soda companies did was they started putting suppliers at the checkout stands knowing that our shopping list falls apart most when we're waiting in line to pay and those impulse purchase decisions happen at the checkout line and so Walmart started to take those or their own refrigerators at the checkout line filled with produce which is like kind of cool and other stores have thought about putting displays you know how there's displays of potato chips like all over the store on the end caps which people see a lot because they're walking by the part of the store um the ends of the aisles are facing to the main quarters um they kind of like started putting produce there that fits the products around there so avocados near the chips that kind of thing kind of integrating produce maybe that doesn't work yeah but I guess that would be the first thing I would do and the other thing the other thing Wegmans has is this this kind of health employee kick thing going on right where they're they're really trying to nudge their employees into getting blood pressure tests and and spending more time thinking about their own healthiness sort of in thinking that will then rub off on on everything in the store and so I don't have this idea you're welcome thank you hey yes and thank you so much for your services free food you know nothing better than free food so you said a lot of our alliance on processed food is the convenience yeah there's in the last five years there's an emerging industry of meal kits those meal to delivery kits it's like a multi-billion dollar industry do you foresee the food system and the food industry shifting toward that and if you don't do you think it would still kind of help quell all these issues that come along with it yeah I think you know boy I'd be scared to invest in a meal kit company because there's like a hundred of them now all sort of fighting for a piece of that market which is I'm not quite sure where that that market is going to go we tried blue apron in my house once and I was surprised at how much work it was just reading all the fine print on the recipe card and sort of doing it which was fine I mean I do my wife works outside of the house long hours in Manhattan so I'm doing most of the cooking in the house and I have you know my own recipes basically but I did blue apron with my 13 year old and we were just kind of surprised that it wasn't totally easy so I think there's a whole gradation of those meal kits from difficult to easy that maybe people are but I think they get it they get it a really big issue which is the hardest thing about cooking for me is is thinking of things to cook designing a menu that doesn't get boring in just a week and week after week right and then shopping like going out and getting all that stuff and bringing it home that that's the big time consumer for me and so the meal kits sort of tend to sort of solve that solve that problem I don't what do you think you're the business I'm actually I'm doing a project on there so I've been learning a lot about it it would definitely I mean give you a whole meal I'll do I'll be at the price point right they're having a lot of issues with their operations I can imagine that would growing so rapidly right yeah right of course right yeah I think that's a good read I look forward to your paper we have time for one more question okay I am curious as to why when you look at the ingredient list of any grocery item you see grams you see percent daily allowance except for sugar ah sugar has grams right no percent daily allowance so I'm curious as to why and what is it so the Food and Drug Administration is in charge of that and I went to them at one point and asked that question and they said the science isn't strong enough for us to put a cap which might mean that they think they wouldn't withstand a legal challenge from the companies in court which may in fact maybe be the case but you're right there's a big hole on sugar and you have to you have to go to groups like the American Heart Association to get advice and it's pretty shocking the numbers they have 32 grams American Heart Association 32 grams for men 28 for women right that is what is that half of a soda I think that is not very abated sugar yeah I think according to them if you're having a couple sodas a week there's some evidence that you're significantly shortening your life or whatever it may be so but I have to say the nutrition science generally is real tough for journalists to deal with because it's hard to do and it's really hard to do is buying quality studies because you just can't take two groups of people and put them in a lock them up in a room and 20 years later come back and see how they did eating a lot of sugar or not it's not easy to do that stuff so do you know the difference between broccoli and boogers broccoli in what's the second? boogers I don't no right the difference? kids won't eat broccoli that's a good one I know okay now I'm going to let you make a shameless plug tell us when your next book is coming out and you're done well I don't know when the next book is coming out I'm almost done with the rewriting and so hopefully next year we'll see thank you so much thank you