(no subject)

"If you were to design a profitable and successful snack food, you’d want it to have several characteristics:

"It would be made of cheap ingredients, allowing a high profit margin.

"Since our government heavily subsidizes industrial grain production, you’d make them of grains and grain products…corn, wheat, and soy. Mostly corn, because it’s so heavily overproduced that we’re forced, by law, to feed it to our cars!

"It would be shelf-stable and require no preparation, so that it could be kept without refrigeration, taken anywhere, and eaten at any time.

"Therefore, you’d make it out of highly-processed ingredients that are shelf-stable, pump it full of preservatives so that it could survive for months in a vending machine, and enclose it in lots of disposable packaging so it wouldn’t get damaged in transit.

It would concentrate the tastes we’ve evolved to enjoy far beyond their natural amounts, and as much as our technology allows.

"This would be the supernormal stimuli of fatty, salty, umami, and sweet: MSG, crystalline sugar, seed oils, fruit juices, “natural and artificial flavors”.

"Finally, it would not be satiating.

"No matter how much you ate, you would never be satisfied."