Liquid Gold

This week's reading was the fat section of Salt, Sugar, Fat. Fat gives us the texture, the oiliness, and a hidden taste that is much more hidden than salt or sugar. Fat has been targeted for causing bad health way before salt and sugar made their way onto the scene. Butter and other oils have been around for ages, and it's common knowledge that too much of an oily, fatty product is bad for you. However, the use and consumption of fats have drastically increased over the past few decades, and now nearly everything we eat is packed with fat. A key point for the proliferation of fats in our diet is that they don't set of "alarm bells" like salt or sugar, but we barely eat anything that doesn't have the wonderful texture or amazing taste of fat.

One of the most interesting parts of this section was the section about cheese. Historically, cheese has been regarded as generally healthy. But as Moss points out, the food industry has reformulated the process and now cheese is loaded with fats, and we have been coerced in to eating more and more of it per year. The aging process has been replaced with enzymes to speed things up. Now, many foods are loaded with cheese, purely because Americans really like it, and will buy products with more cheese. A specific example is the frozen pizza: historically, as the food giants competed to win over the American populace, adding more and more food to pizzas increased sales. Over the last decade or so, the amount of cheese consumed by Americans per year has increased drastically.

Although fat has been under public scrutiny for the longest of the three killer ingredients, we still tend to turn a blind eye when it comes to flavor and price. Everything from fried food to cheese and and kind of dessert are loaded with fat, and we just continue to consume more. The next time you prepare a meal and think you're eating healthy, be sure to check the fat content - you'd be surprised at the difficulty to escape this chemical sensation.