The San Francisco’s attorney’s office, on behalf of the citizens of California, has filed a devastating suit, California v. Kraft Heinz, which targets 10 food company giants, such as Mars, Pepsi, and General Mills and contemplates adding others.
If you read the filing, which I strongly urge you to do at the end of this post, 1, you’ll never want to eat a Cheetos again, although the document also explains why you may be unable to resist. One section of the claim discusses a 1988 Surgeon General list of criteria for addictive substances and how these products meet all three conditions, the substance’s ability to cause compulsive use, induce psychoactive effects via their impact on the brain; and reinforce behavior. The result is that 14% to 20% of US adults being hooked, with results like 20% to 50% of gastric bypass surgery patients continuing to overeat ultraprocessed foods despite vomiting and diarrhea
The filing chronicles how Big Tobacco, using the same techniques they had honed with cigarettes. RJ Reynolds targeted food in the 1960s, with the stated intent of building on its expertise in flavors. Hawaiian Punch was the first in a series of deals, with Nabisco in 1985 upping its ante. Phillip Morris bought General Foods in 1985 and Kraft in 1988. A 2006 article article explained the strategy:
R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris did not operate their food companies as wholly independent entities but instead rapidly integrated them into the pre-existing tobacco companies.
As a result, there was a systematic transfer of people, knowledge, information, and technologies from “Big Tobacco” to the food and beverage industry in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Big Food put the institutional knowledge of these employees to work…
The purpose of all this research was not to determine how to make food more flavorful. The purpose was to understand how to exploit the physiological structures of the human brain, to override the body’s natural mechanisms for resisting its addictive qualities, and to evade the body’s ability to control intake.
As Dr. [Phillip Morris scientist Frank] Gullotta explained in 1990, the senses of taste, smell, and touch don’t “matter a didley if you don’t have the effects in the brain. [Consuming UPF] are only pleasurable because of the consequences” in the brain.
201. As depicted in the Introduction to this Complaint, Big Food had its own version of that meeting in April 1999, when CEOs from Defendants met secretly in Minneapolis to discuss the “devastating public health consequences” of their actions, including 300,000 excess deaths every year and massive public health costs upwards of $100 billion each year. Executives from Defendants Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Post Holdings, General Mills, Coca-Cola, Mars, or their predecessors, all attended this meeting.
Hey Ford had the Pinto gas tank meeting with a similar result.
This is an OUTRAGE! We must defend Shareholder Value at ALL COSTS from this assault!
the filing: