Addictive Junk Food

Fries With That? Food occupies a special place in humans’ lives; without it, humans’ existence would be unsustainable. What happens when food corporations, in their unending search for profits, are ruled by greed? How can Ivy League Universities make a difference in reducing corporate greed? In the course of a detailed investigation of the food industry, Michael Moss, the author of “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food”, learns that many corporations use the findings of contemporary science to create addictions that undermine the health of millions of Americans while raking in enormous profits. In “Rent Seeking and the Making of an Unequal Society”, Joseph Stiglitz describes outsize corporate profits with little investment in the

Harvard Crimson writer Matthew Siegel is worried about the consequences that the culture of success brings about. She wonders, “Could it be at all possible that the culture of success at Harvard drives people to skip right over the most important part of cognition—getting to know themselves and what they want and need—and instead, sends them straight into the outstretched arms of J.P. Morgan’s H.R. department?”(Siegel as qtd. in Ho 181). Enveloped in an atmosphere of “the culture of success”, where people are convinced that the best and brightest people should go to Wall Street, students at elite universities regard working on Wall Street as their preferred and ultimate goal. The “most important part of cognition” refers to the abilities to realize what they really yearn for deep down. In the process of self-discovering, some of the elite students hardly question or ponder what they might truly passionate about; they lose themselves, pursuing not just in the material sense of personal wealth and success. Moss points out that before obesity became a serious concern, the relationship between supply and demand was the prevailing concern among the company’s managers, “that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitors will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped”(Bible as qtd. in Moss 267). Bible clarifies that the consumers are not compelled to purchase food with too much sugar, salt, or fat; they buy high-sugar food out of their willingness and their demand. The firms are in a plight, for the reason that if they provide less, the consumers will buy less, and the rivals will take over their market. Ho believes that students’ interest is monopolized and narrowed because they hardly ponder what they really yearn