Why does a chocolate chip cookie—or vanilla milkshake or cheeseburger, etc—have such power over us? Why are they so hard to resist? David Kessler, a Harvard-trained doctor, lawyer, medical school dean, former FDA commissioner and scourge of the tobacco industry, spent years pursuing an answer. The results of his search, ‘The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite,’ hit bookstores last week.

Kessler’s key insight, as he sums it up: “Much of the scientific research around overeating has been physiology — what’s going on in our body. The real question is what’s going on in our brain.”

His theory in its most simplified form is that salt, sugar, and fat work synergistically in foods to stimulate the brain to crave more salt, sugar, and fat. Instead of satisfying hunger, they alter the brain’s chemistry in a way that stimulates hunger. There’s a growing body of research that backs this up.

None of this is really news to the food industry, which Kessler found has long manipulated this neurological response, designing foods to induce people to eat more than they should — or even want. This is the dark side of Kessler’s story, and the one with far-ranging implications for policymakers.

Kessler does not shy away from a challenge. The man’s a formidable muckraker/public health advocate, and one can be sure ‘The End of Overeating’ has caught the food industry’s attention by laying the groundwork for major regulatory action/legislation.

But if overeating is to end, it will require much more than a little re-zoning and nutrition labeling here and there. Kessler envisions nothing short of a wholesale rewiring of the brain’s relation to food. As he puts it: “What’s needed is a perceptual shift…We did this with cigarettes…It used to be sexy and glamorous but now people look at it and say, ‘That’s not my friend, that’s not something I want.’ We need to make a cognitive shift as a country and change the way we look at food.”

This, of course, begs the question: what tools from the tobacco wars are actually transferable to the food industry battle? And just how was this perceptual/cognitive shift achieved with cigarettes? When you start comparing, the former looks like a cakewalk: with tobacco it was so easy (relatively) to finger a culprit, identify conspiracy, connect cause to devastating effect. Not so for fat/sugar/salt. The former is after all a drug (even before a consensus emerged, it was widely understood to be, at the very least, not not a drug); the latter is food, sustenance, albeit a very poor form of it. Cheap too: you’ve got a whole class thing going on that was probably there in the tobacco wars, but certainly not as explicitly-stated.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

Yet again, we’ve got pig on the brain. This time we’re not feeling very hungry.

While health organizations around the world scramble to contain the spread of a swine influenza virus that’s brought us with breathtaking speed to the brink of a global flu pandemic (who says pigs can’t fly!?), relatively little media coverage has been granted to the real, or at least really likely, origins of the epidemic: those oversize petri dishes known as confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs; read: factory pig farms).

Yet the source of the outbreak should come as no surprise to anyone. For years we’ve been warned of the hazards of factory farming, pig farming in particular. It’s not for nothing that the industry that doses healthy pigs with unimaginably vast quantities of antibiotics is ground zero for this outbreak.

Also obscured in domestic reporting on the crisis is the U.S.’s involvement. Before we blame Mexico for incubating the virus, we might want to look a little closer to home. You’d be forgiven for not knowing it, but Granjas Carroll, the Veracruz pig farm believed by many to be the source of the outbreak, is a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods.

Speaking of obscurantism, since the start of the outbreak, pork industry groups have waged a remarkably successful attempt to re-brand swine flu as the H1N1 virus. Ultimately, though, our guess is even the pork industry does not possess enough lipstick for this pig.

(Note: the swine flu crisis is dramatically proving the extent to which the recent and controversial study that suggested free range pigs suffer a higher incidence of salmonella and trichinosis than their CAFO-raised cousins completely missed the point.)

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

On further thought: As much as Skinny Bastard would seem to hold little appeal for guys, I’m coming to think that’s kind of beside the point. My initial pessimism re: the book’s potential for success is perhaps a sign that I’d fallen for a clever bit of misdirection on the part of the authors/publisher.

Despite the book’s title and its ostensible attempt to crossover to a male market, Rory and Friedman know where their bread is buttered. They (and surely their publisher) are well aware that if the book is to reach the ‘guys,’ it’s going to do so by going through the ‘girls,’ who already have a familiarity and fondness for the brand and an openness to diet books to begin with.

In other words, the book can and probably will succeed without men. Women will buy the book for their partners; their partners will feel a momentary pang of hurt, then will attempt to cover said hurt by making noises signifying delighted surprise.

They (the boyfriends) will thank them (the girlfriends) as graciously as they are able, considering, and the book will molder on a shelf, eventually to wind up in the hands of a charitable organization, who will sell it at a fundraiser for $2.50 to a girl who will give it to a guy who will make noises…

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

On Monday, the women behind the mega-selling ‘Skinny Bitch’ diet book franchise are hitting bookstores with their latest opus ‘Skinny Bastard.’ This time around the ‘Bitches’ are taking their mixture of tough love + veganism to the guys. Subtitled ‘A Kick-in-the-Ass for Real Men Who Want to Stop Being Fat and Start Getting Buff,’ Kim Barnouin and Rory Freedman have retrofitted the original Skinny Bitch model to run on testosterone.

The NYTimes nicely captures how this plays out:

“Whereas the introduction to ‘Skinny Bitch’ reads, ‘If you can’t take one more day of self-loathing, you’re ready to get skinny,’ the men’s version does not assume low self-esteem: ‘Chances are, you haven’t done so badly, despite the few extra lbs you’re carting around. … But don’t kid yourself, pal: A hot-bodied man is a head-turner.’”

So will flattery and the promise of sex be enough to put the book on best-seller lists? One wonders. Considering the word ‘skinny’ carries very different (ie., overwhelmingly pejorative) connotations for men; and considering men are unaccustomed to getting their testosterone from women; and considering it is biologically impossible for Rory and Friedman to actually model the change they are promoting; and considering male receptivity to veganism is limited at the very best; it will be very interesting to see how Running Press’s initial print run of 100,000 copies sells.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

“If the taboo on pork was a divinely inspired health ordinance, it is the oldest recorded case of medical malpractice.”

Anthropologist Marvin Harris, quoted in the latest issue of the absolutely brilliant San Francisco quarterly Meatpaper. We strenuously recommend you get your hands on a copy, better yet a subscription. The current issue offers, amongst other things, the most intelligent analysis we’ve yet encountered of one of the dominant trends of recent years: the fetishization of the pig, or ‘the burgeoning school of pig worship.’

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

The recession may be walloping the fine dining and casual dining sectors, but somewhere in between there is a small but thriving niche where the upmarket and downmarket meet. In this midmarket enclave, familiar, fast, dare-I-say ‘comfort’ foods such as burgers and pizzas are approached with a sense of craft and artisanship and an obsession with ingredients imported from the world of fine dining. The new establishments fitting this mold tend to be tightly focused on doing one thing and doing it exceptionally well. By drawing on the best of the upscale and the downscale, the gourmet and the populist, these new spots wear a sort of double halo: they are simultaneously democratizing and aspirational.

Thus far this month a deafening media buzz has hovered over a number of new artisanal pizzerias in New York and LA that very much fit this mold. The focus has largely been on Jim Lahey’s much anticipated Co. But Co. is just the latest — though perhaps best, despite what a gustatorily-challenged pencil-pusher at the NYTimes might think — of the city’s new pizzerias, joining a crowded field of newcomers including Motorino, San Marzano, and Artichoke.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

This week I’ve got porkfat on the brain-if not on the tongue. And the latter’s a darn shame, considering what science tells us about the effect on the brain of porkfat on the tongue. Here is the Wall Street Journal Magazine on the neuroscience of lard (note: the following quote may not be suitable for children under 12, or the merely infantile.):

“Try [lardo] alone on the tongue. It melts into a buttery pool as the mouth produces a tide of saliva. The heart quickens. There’s even science to back up that claim: Studies have discovered that when fat is on the tongue the body releases endorphins, which creates an elated mood. Consider it a digestive orgasm.”

And you wonder why I’ve got porkfat on the brain?

This week, the WSJ added its voice to the growing movement to rescue lard from decades of infamy. The paper’s website ran a terrific multimedia package on the growing respect the stuff-the good stuff, that is; not the mass-produced hydrogenated crap-is getting from chefs, sophisticated home cooks, and even nutritionists. I defy anyone to watch Chef Ignacio Mattos prepare lardo from a 2-inch-thick slab of backfat and not feel an aching, atavistic hunger.

And now for some cognitive dissonance:

There are other, far more serious reasons for all of us to have pork on the brain these days, as the NYTimes’ Nicholas Kristof makes clear in two recent editorials. Kristof directs his attention to the emerging scientific consensus that the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed is a major factor in the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (‘super-bugs’). His specific concern is with the pork industry’s role in the emergence of a new strain of MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant staph infection that kills more than 18,000 Americans annually. According to one study, seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock. Kristof makes it clear that it’s hard to overstate the threat to public health this poses. Legislation to ban nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock will be introduced in the House this week.

We’ll be following it closely.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:”";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-ansi-language:#0400;
mso-fareast-language:#0400;
mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

(Part 2 of a recurring series; see part 1 here)

Add up L.A.’s cult of Kogi, David Chang’s continued superstardom, the rise of Pinkberry and its legion of knockoffs, and a fried-chicken phenomenon, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Korean is the cuisine of the moment. It’s a trend that stretches from street food to high-end kitchens. Even chains are getting into the act. California Pizza Kitchen may soon introduce a Korean barbecue beef pizza and Korean fried-chicken salad.

In an excellent Times article, Jennifer Steinhauer explains the rising influence of Korean-Americans in L.A.’s [and the nation's] food culture thus:

“In the last few years, second-generation Korean Angelenos and more recent immigrants have played their own variations on their traditional cuisine and taken it far beyond the boundaries of Korean-dominated neighborhoods. These chefs and entrepreneurs are fueled in large part by tech-boom money here and in South Korea, culinary-school educations and in some cases, their parents’ shifting perspectives about the profession of cooking.”

With their well-funded mixture of youthful energy and technological savvy, and a culinary sophistication unchained by tradition, 2^nd generation Koreans can be expected to continue to find inventive ways to expand the market for Korean flavors. They’re a force we can only hope to do more reckoning with.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

Hi, I’m Jonathan. I maintain the Food Network Library, and write ridiculous things about belching lambs and their effect on climate change. A big part of my job is keeping up with what’s happening in food; what people are cooking, eating, and talking about. Every week, I’ll deliver a quick roundup of what’s crossed my desk. This week’s installation:

Though the bacon explosion continues to reverberate across the internet—its authors recently signed a 6-figure book deal (for a book which, we hear, won’t even contain the bacon explosion recipe)—nothing has captured the zeitgeist like the sudden fame of Clara Cannucciari, 93-year-old great grandmother, cook, and star of the incredibly charming Great Depression Cooking (check out her latest video below).

Fascinating here is that both the Bacon Explosion, and the excess it embodies, as well as Great Depression Cooking, with its aura of scarcity and deprivation, feel equally of the moment. Interested to see where this all goes over the coming months.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian