You are what you eat, and after reading Stephan Eirik Clark’s Sweetness #9, you may be looking down at your plate for dinner this evening and wonder if what you’re eating is really what it claims to be. Is that really meatloaf you’re looking at or is it something made up to taste like meatloaf. Is that a carrot? And what about those delicious looking tomatoes that you paid a fortune for at the farmer’s market?This book has the good fortune of being wrapped up in the whole Amazon vs. Hachette battle. It’s good news for booksellers and bad news for Amazon. The author of California, Eden Lepucki was recently on the Colbert Report and chose this book as the next book for readers to buy in a protest to Amazon. Well, buying this book will also be a giant protest to food companies and flavor companies who make us eat the foods they create even though they make a lot of us ill with obesity and other health related diseases.
The book starts out with David Leveraux, a flavor chemist who still has his head in the clouds thinking that what he is creating is important. I mean, where would the world be without artificial flavors and colorings. Anyway, he discovers while testing this new sugar substitute Sweetness #9 that it may be causing some of the lab rats’ health issues. He wants to report it to the top brass at the company but soon discovers that too much money is invested in the product and is told to keep his mouth shut. He decides to take a stand and is let go.
The rest of the book is about his family. He has a wife who is always on a diet, his daughter who is a struggling vegan, and his son who can only eat foods if they are colored red (he uses a red dye if they aren’t.) When he gets a new job at another company he finds out that his boss had an unusual job of being a flavorist for a not too nice Nazi. (Don’t worry historically, that part is not true.) There is also an absurd but funny part towards the end of food terrorists bombing supermarkets. Watch out when you open that frozen food case.
As crazy as it all sounds we have all must admit that the food industry has gotten out of of hand. Food companies are forced (thank you stock market) to come up with tastes and flavors that the consumer wants to eat and hopefully it will become something we get addicted to. If we do, it will be great for the the companies that made the product and even better for the pharmaceutical and health industries because nothing raises the stock prices for a company than a product that makes us unfit.
This all may sound cynical having made a movie myself on childhood obesity. But it may not be cynicism that is finally forcing people to wake up and smell the coffee and realize that they don’t like the way it smells after all. We have one body and if we don’t take care of it then who will? Our doctors can only do so much and then it’s up to us. Reading Sweetness #9 may literally save your life.
