the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jun 7, 2021
Most of us understand how addictive junk food is. What people might not know is the lengths to which the multi-billion-dollar food industry has gone to get us hooked. There is a whole science around making junk food addictive, from the taste, smell, crunch, right down to the packaging and marketing.
The industry even uses a vocabulary that more than suggests addiction. “Bliss point” for the perfect amount of sugar. “Designer sodium” conjures up “designer” drugs. They have even perfected techniques that trick our brains into craving more by using carbohydrates that cause our blood sugar levels to spike and fall quickly—fooling us into believing we are hungry even though we just polished off a bag of potato chips. It’s ingenious and insidious. They actually figured out the perfect “break point” for potato chips (people like a chip that snaps with four pounds of pressure per square inch). This is big business and the CEO’s are serious about making profits at our expense.
They have spent decades searching for ways to increase our addiction to salt, sugar and fat.
At the same time, these CEOs are very aware of all the criticisms of the unhealthy snacks they are pushing on people. So they made “healthy” snacks using some of the same strategies they use for the unhealthy snacks. Baby carrots, for example, washed and ready to eat. Just open the bag and start crunching. Treat the carrots as a snack not a vegetable, promoting pro-junk food behavior in the anti-junk food establishment.
In other words, these capitalists have found a way to make big bucks selling “unhealthy” food as well as selling “healthy” food. What a racket! They get us addicted to junk food while they get rich, then they offer “healthy” alternatives so they can get richer still. It’s like arms dealers selling to both sides of a conflict.