'Stuffed: An Insider's Look at Who's (Really) Making America Fat' by Hank Cardello
BOOK REVIEW
In the fight against obesity, parents are shoving vending machines out of schools and state governments are falling over each other trying to legislate trans fats out of restaurants. Hank Cardello, a former food industry executive with Coca-Cola and General Mills, has his own solution, which he proposes in "Stuffed: An Insider's Look at Who's (Really) Making America Fat," written with Doug Garr: Serve up a tasty, profitable business scenario and let the industry take the forefront in shrinking America's growing waistlines. Cardello's ideas may not win over food purists, but his ideas derive from practical, real-world experiences.
From the beginning, food providers were just giving Americans what they wanted, writes Cardello, who began his career marketing Betty Crocker cake mixes. Although Swanson TV dinners were born out of a desperate ploy to carve up surplus turkeys before they rotted, the huge popularity of what was really quick-serve airplane food revealed that Americans were hungering for fast and easy meals over quality. The spectacular profit-making machines of McDonald's and other fast food chains just fed on the same growing trend.
"This was not an industry of evil people," Cardello says. "No one ever set out to addict people to food or make them overweight." But as one success begat another, food makers and restaurants favored affordable, high-calorie ingredients that eventually overwhelmed sedentary Americans.
That doesn't mean the food industry is innocent. Consider the once modest-sized bagel or chocolate-chip cookie. A vendor can sell a humongous cookie for twice as much despite using just a few pennies more in ingredients. The downside? The consumer consumes many extra calories.
Grocery stores are to blame for obesity as well, Cardello explains. Shelves are stocked in a way that maximizes profits, often by pushing the least healthful foods on unsuspecting shoppers. Meat, for example, often is stationed in a far corner to force shoppers through the more profitable aisles laden with cookies, cakes and candy.
By the time food executives sensed culpability for the obesity epidemic, it was too late. Changing French fry oil at a large restaurant chain can have such a huge financial and taste impact that corporate buyers can't risk profit margins for hard-to-measure health benefits. In another example, a Nestle executive explains that changing some of the ingredients in the ever-profitable Nestle Crunch bar could drive up the cost and cause a marketing nightmare.
