Salt Sugar Fat (24 page)

The urban centers of America don’t have many supermarkets, so there the drink managers focused their efforts on corner stores, which are laid out like traps for the unwary. Kraft had to work hard to get its drinks on the shelves, since it didn’t deliver directly to the stores like Coke and Pepsi did through their “up and down the street” campaigns. On this front, however, Kraft had its own secret weapon, borrowed straight from Philip Morris. The beverage division hit the phones to call these stores and sell the owners on the virtues of carrying Kraft’s drinks, first and foremost among which was their low pricing to suit the low incomes of their customers. But they didn’t leaf through the phone book; they used targeted lists prepared by the tobacco company in selling cigarettes—yet another example of the synergy Philip Morris had been advocating.

“Consumers in these stores represent prime prospects for our value-oriented brands, but have been inaccessible,” the beverage division explained. “As such, we have leveraged Philip Morris’ scale by utilizing their tobacco data base to develop a list of carefully selected stores to target via telemarketing. Our initial test of this program in the first quarter generated over $1 million” in added sales.

They even targeted people who may have overindulged on the company’s drinks in the first place: diabetics, whose growing ranks were, ironically,
opening up a hot market. Or, as the beverage division put it, this “targeted marketing effort involves new programs on our sugar-free brands that are focused against diabetics.”

“Diabetics already represent 12 percent of the U.S. population and this figure is unfortunately expected to steadily grow as the large Baby Boomer segment ages,” the committee was told. Unfortunate for those afflicted, perhaps, but not for sales of the company’s artificially sweetened Crystal Light. “We believe there is significant untapped opportunity through advertising and promotion programs aimed at gaining trial with diabetics,” which Kraft would leverage by combing the Crystal Light diabetic campaign with another developed for sugar free Jell-O.

Finally, they dusted off one of the early stars of processed foods, turning back to the first product General Foods created in the wake of the 1956 speech by its CEO, Charles Mortimer, who implored his food developers to get creative: Tang. With sales now flagging, Kraft drink managers aimed to rejuvenate the brand. They looked at the age of the people who drank Tang, and decided to go further than even Coke dared to go. Where Coca-Cola had drawn the line at age twelve in its pursuit of kids,
Kraft went after a younger set. “We restaged the brand by changing our target consumer from Moms to Kids age 9–14, otherwise known as ‘tweens,’ ” the report disclosed.

Lund, the Philip Morris executive who prepared the meeting minutes, summed up the Tang presentation in this way:
“For Tang, it’s a three-part restage—new target, new positioning and a fully loaded marketing plan.”

Tang and Kool-Aid were among the highlights of this Corporate Products Committee meeting, which took place on June 24, 1996, but they were really just two among many. It turned into one of the committee’s longest sessions ever,
an all-day affair in midtown Manhattan. The morning started with Marlboro and the introduction of a new cigarette box in the brand’s most recently captured territory: the kingdom of Nepal. Lunch was served as the beverage division delved into all its feats, and if that conversation was all about sugar—from its power to attract to the power of alternative sweeteners when sugar becomes overwhelming—what came next
on the agenda was something else. This discussion moved on to frozen pizza, whose allure was now being enhanced by the addition of ever greater amounts of cheese, on top and in the crust, so as better to compete with the fast food pizza chains.

The fat in this cheese and a range of other foods in the Philip Morris portfolio would bump up against its own consumer backlash, for which the company managers would need all of their cunning and skill. Through the 1990s and beyond, fat would in some ways grow to be even more powerful than sugar, delivering untold riches to Philip Morris and other food manufacturers. It would also bring them some of their biggest troubles.

T
here is a piece of lore, cherished among food scientists, that Aristotle was the first to explore our ability to detect flavors in food. This ability, called taste, is one of the five basic senses that include sight and smell, and the study he made of all of these senses was part of the remarkable observations on life that established him as a founding figure in Western philosophy. A student of Plato, who in turn had studied under Socrates, Aristotle had been tutoring Alexander the Great and other future kings of ancient Greece in 335
B
.
C
. when he established his own school in Athens known as the Lyceum. It was there, over the course of twelve years, that he is believed to have written his series of elegant treatises that ranged from physics to music, ethics to zoology, politics to poetry. Among these writings was
De Anima
, which examined the life force in plants and animals, and it was in this book that Aristotle attempted to parse the nature of taste. He was fond of creating lists, and first and foremost on his list of tastes was sweet, which he described as pure nourishment. The others that followed, which
included bitter, salty, harsh, pungent, astringent, and acid, were mere “relish” that served as a counterbalance, “because the sweet is over-nutritive and swims on the stomach.” The final entry in his lineup of basic tastes, however, was one whose power to generate pleasure was on par with sweet. Aristotle called this the “fat or oily.”

Twenty-four centuries later, fat is seen as one of the most potent components of processed food, a pillar ingredient even more powerful than sugar. As Aristotle pointed out, fat is indeed oily, in some of its forms. Canola, soy, olive, corn, and the other oils are all liquid fats, viscous and flowing, easily spotted and identifiable as fat. In other cases, fat in our food is a solid at room temperatures, and not readily recognized. A hunk of cheddar cheese is one-third fat, along with protein, salt, and a little sugar, and even that statistic understates the force that fat brings to food. Two-thirds of the calories in that cheese are delivered by the fat, which packs more than twice the energy of sugar.

When it comes to divining the allure that it brings to food, however, the taste of fat is a bit harder to pin down. It is not part of our official roster of primary tastes, which currently consists of just five members: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and a more recent addition known as umami, which is a meaty, savory taste derived from an amino acid called glutamate. Some food researchers have argued for adding fat to the list of five primary tastes, but they face one substantial hurdle:
The entry rules for this group requires that scientists know how each taste interacts with our taste buds, and no one has yet figured this out when it comes to fat. All the other tastes have receptors in the taste buds that have been identified and labeled as their hosts. It is through these receptors that the sweet taste and other flavors get delivered to the brain.

No such receptor for fat has been found.

And yet, because of fat’s remarkable powers, the processed food industry relies on it like no other component. Fat turns listless chips into crunchy marvels, parched breads into silky loaves, drab lunchmeat into savory delicatessen. Like sugar, some types of fat furnish processed foods with one of their most fundamental requirements: the capacity to sit on the grocery
store shelf for days or months at a time. Fat also gives cookies more bulk and a firmer texture. It substitutes for water in lending tenderness and mouthfeel to crackers. It lessens the rubbery texture in hot dogs, deepens their color, keeps them from sticking to the grill, and, as an added bonus, saves the manufacturers money, since the fattier trimmings of meat they use in making hot dogs cost less to buy than the leaner cuts. Indeed, the entire hamburger industry—which turns out seven billion pounds or more of ground beef each year—revolves around fat. Hamburger is a mixture of beef carcass trimmings that are purchased from slaughterhouses throughout the world, based on their fat content. The fattiest scraps are called “fifty-fifties,” as in half fat and half protein, and these are mixed and matched with less fatty cuts, like “ninety-tens,” to achieve the desired fat level in the final ground beef. When retailers like Walmart place their orders for ground beef from the meat companies that make the hamburger, they do so by specifying the fat content, which ranges between 5 and 30 percent. Surprisingly, fat is even the key determinant of the nutritional value of ground beef. The Department of Agriculture has a handy online calculator, and depending on the percentage of fat that is entered, the levels of calcium, niacin, iron, and other elements in the meat go up or down—as do, of course, the loads of saturated fat, which is the type of fat associated with heart disease.

Fat also performs a range of culinary tricks for food manufacturers, thanks to another of its extraordinary powers. It can mask and convey other flavors in foods, all at the same time. This can be seen in a dollop of sour cream, which has acidic components that, by themselves, don’t taste so great. Fat coats the tongue to keep the taste buds from getting too large a hit of these acids. Then, this same oily coating reverses direction, and instead of acting as a shield, it stimulates and prolongs the tongue’s absorption of the sour cream’s more subtle and aromatic flavors, which, of course, is what the food makers want the taste buds to convey to the brain. This act of delivering other flavors is one of fat’s most valued functions.

Fat has a final trait, however, that makes it even more essential than sugar in processed foods. Fat doesn’t blast away at our mouths like sugar
does; by and large, its allure is more surreptitious. As I spoke with scientists about the way fat behaves, I couldn’t resist drawing an analogy to the realm of narcotics. If sugar is the methamphetamine of processed food ingredients, with its high-speed, blunt assault on our brains, then fat is the opiate, a smooth operator whose effects are less obvious but no less powerful.

A
ristotle’s observations in taste were all the more remarkable given how poorly he actually understood the mechanics of the human body. He rejected the concept of the brain as the mind’s organ, which his teacher Plato had embraced, and chose instead to view the brain as a regulator of the heart’s temperature. The heart, by his estimation, played the starring role in matters both physical and psychological; some scholars believe he even saw the heart as the primary organ of taste, with the tongue a mere facilitator. Today, of course, scientists are turning to the brain to understand the allure in food and our ability, or lack thereof, to control our consumption. Some of the more intriguing studies on this subject have emerged from Oxford University in England, where a neuroscientist named Edmund Rolls has been investigating, to put it broadly, how the brain processes information. Rolls is not a food scientist, though some of his work on the brain’s role in thirst and appetite has been funded by Unilever, the global food giant based in England. Rather, he roams widely through the field of brain research, using medical imaging machinery to monitor the brain’s responses to various stimuli. In 2003, he published on the
results from an experiment in which he charted the brain’s response to two substances: sugar and fat.

It was already well established that the ingestion of sugar will light up the nucleus accumbens and other areas of the brain that are collectively known as the reward centers, generating intense feelings of pleasure when we engage in acts of self-preservation like eating. Sugar’s effect on the brain is so strongly and consistently exhibited in these studies that some scientists have come to see certain foods as potentially addictive. At a federal
research facility in Long Island called the
Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists have studied the brain’s reaction to processed foods and drugs like cocaine, and have concluded that some drugs achieve their allure, and addictive qualities, by following the same neurological channels that our bodies first developed for food. Where the Brookhaven scientists used foods that were sweet, or both sweet and fatty, in their studies, Rolls wanted to know whether fat
alone
had the same narcotic-like affect on the brain.
He recruited a dozen adults, healthy and mildly hungry, having not eaten for three hours. One by one, they entered the tunnel of a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, or fMRI. Once inside, they couldn’t move their arms, so plastic tubes were placed in their mouths, through which they were fed a solution of sugar and another solution of vegetable oil. Purchased at a local supermarket, the oil was made from rapeseed, also known as canola, and came fully loaded with fat in all three of its basic modes: saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated. In addition to the sugar and fat solutions, a third served as the control by mimicking plain saliva.