The Food System Is Rigged: Insiders Tell All

We all know how hard it can be to ‘give up’ various foods. And with some foods, ‘once you pop – you can’t stop’. This isn’t a coincidence. Processed food is engineered to be as addictive as possible. A handful of large, multi-billion dollar business are competing for ‘stomach share': the percent of food each person eats!

These companies use focus groups, statistical analysis and all kinds of chemical trickery to induce you to eat more and more of their lousy food. These companies have one goal: more profits. That isn’t always a bad thing. In our capitalistic society progress and our standard of living are both fueled by companies making more and more profit.

But as conscious humans we need to be aware of the forces that are working on us, that these food companies are not interested in our well being. Their main montivation is making the most tasty and addictive food – so you’ll eat and eat and buy and buy and consume and consume. Being fit, limber or vital doesn’t fit into their calculus at all.

At Healthy Surprise, we try to take a different approach. Sure, we want to make money. I’ve decided to NOT be a non profit organization because I feel that in order to really have mass market appeal and compete in our market, a company needs to be self sustaining and able to fuel its own growth. But our primary mission isn’t just profits. We want to make it fun and easy for people to eat healthy and to support the companies which produce good food. We could make more money if we sold the cheapest product, or the most addictive. As a society we have to rethink what ‘cheap’ really means. Is price the only cost? Unfortunately in our culture we are too quick to ascribe the monetary value of something as it’s only cost. How you feel, how you look, do you have any disease? … these are all other ‘costs’ that people forget to take into consideration when evaluating one food vs another.

Read this article and inform yourself of the pervasive forces at work in our food culture.

Article by the New York Times

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