Fast food isn't an accident. It's an engineering project.

I want to tell you about something that took me a long time to understand, and that changed how I look at almost every package on a supermarket shelf.

For years I blamed myself for the way I ate. The bag of chips I couldn't stop eating. The soda I said I would only have one of and finished the whole two-liter bottle by the end of the game. The cookies I told myself I would leave alone and then couldn't. I thought it was willpower. I thought I was weak. I thought other people were better at this than me.

I was wrong. Not because willpower doesn't matter. It does. But because the thing I was fighting was not a normal food craving. It was a product engineered, in laboratories, by people paid to make sure I couldn't stop.

That's not a conspiracy theory. That's what a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter documented, on the record, with names, from inside the industry itself. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

The night I want to tell you about first.

On the evening of April 8, 1999, at the Pillsbury corporate headquarters in Minneapolis, the CEOs of eleven of the largest food companies in the world sat down together for a private meeting. Nabisco, Kraft, General Mills, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Mars, Pillsbury, Nestlé, and the two ingredient giants Cargill and Tate & Lyle were all in the room. Together, they controlled seven hundred thousand employees and around 280 billion dollars in annual sales. No reporters were allowed. No minutes were taken.

The meeting was organized by James Behnke, a chemist and special advisor to Pillsbury's CEO, who suspected that the growing obesity crisis in the United States was about to become the industry's problem, whether they liked it or not. He asked Michael Mudd, a vice president at Kraft, to give the presentation.

Mudd walked into the room with 114 slides. He walked the CEOs through what their own internal research and independent studies were showing. Obesity was climbing. Childhood obesity was climbing faster. Salt, sugar, and fat were being scientifically linked to it. And unless the industry did something, class-action lawyers were going to arrive the way they had arrived for tobacco a decade earlier.

When Mudd finished, Stephen Sanger, the CEO of General Mills, the most powerful person in the room, stood up visibly upset. According to Moss's account, Sanger reminded the group that consumers were fickle. Sometimes they worried about sugar, sometimes about fat. But mostly, he said, they bought what they liked, and they liked what tasted good. "Don't talk to me about nutrition," he said, taking on the voice of a typical shopper.

That was the response. And that was, essentially, the end of it. The industry did not change direction. The products did not get less engineered. Over the next twenty years, the process of formulating food to maximize consumption got more sophisticated, more scientific, and more effective.

That's the piece that hit me when I read it. The problem was never that they didn't know. The problem was that knowing didn't stop them.

What "engineered" actually means.

Here's the part I want you to understand, because until I understood it, I kept blaming myself.

Inside the big food companies, there are laboratories, and inside those laboratories, there are scientists whose job is to solve a specific problem. The problem is this: how do you make a product taste as good as possible, but not so satisfying that the person stops eating?

The industry calls it the "bliss point." It's a real term, used by real food scientists. The bliss point is the precise amount of sugar, or salt, or fat, at which a food is maximally pleasurable to the human brain but does not trigger the biological signal that says "you've had enough." Below the bliss point, the product feels bland. Above the bliss point, it feels sickly and the consumer pushes it away. Right at the bliss point, the brain lights up and the hand keeps reaching for more.

For fat, the industry uses another word, "mouthfeel." It's the warm, gooey sensation of melted cheese. The satisfying crunch of a fried coating. The creamy dissolve of ice cream. Food scientists spend years working on the mouthfeel of a product because they know it hits the same pleasure centers of the brain as sugar, but carries about twice the calories. It is, from an engineering standpoint, an extremely efficient way to hook someone.

For salt, the industry knows that Americans now consume around 8,500 milligrams a day, which is roughly double what public health guidelines recommend. Almost none of that comes from the salt shaker on your table. It comes from processed food, where salt has been added not for taste alone but to make products feel more intense, more satisfying, more crave-able.

These are not accidents. These are engineering decisions. Made by people with degrees in food science. Working in labs. Testing formulas on human subjects. Optimizing for one variable: how much of this can we get you to eat.

The word they refuse to use.

There is one word the industry refuses to use to describe what they do. That word is "addictive."

Their preferred vocabulary, according to Moss's reporting, is "cravable" or "allure." They talk about "heavy users" the way tobacco companies once did. They study the neurology of consumption the way pharmaceutical companies study drug response. But they will not, ever, use the word addiction. Because that word carries legal weight. Because that word invites regulation. Because that word makes their product start to look like something other than food.

But independent scientists who study addiction have said, on the record, that for some people, highly engineered sugary and fatty foods activate the same neurological pleasure pathways as narcotics. Their advice to those people is not "eat in moderation." Their advice is: don't try to eat just a couple of these cookies, because you are not going to be able to stop.

I read that and thought back to every bag of chips I had ever finished without noticing. I thought back to every time I told myself "just one more" and it never worked. I thought back to my old body, and how I had spent years blaming my discipline for something that had been engineered specifically to defeat my discipline.

I stopped blaming myself.

The tobacco playbook, literally.

The most uncomfortable part of the story, for me, was learning that this isn't a metaphor. The food industry didn't just borrow ideas from tobacco. In several major cases, it was owned by tobacco.

In the 1980s, Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro, bought General Foods and then Kraft, merging them into Kraft General Foods. R.J. Reynolds, the other American tobacco giant, made its own major acquisitions in the food business. For roughly two decades, some of the biggest names in the American supermarket were subsidiaries of the same corporate structures that owned the cigarettes.

This wasn't just a change on the org chart. Researchers at the University of California San Francisco, working with the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library, have published academic papers in the American Journal of Public Health documenting how Philip Morris directly transferred marketing expertise, personnel, and strategy from its tobacco operations into its food subsidiaries. The techniques used to sell Marlboros to specific demographic groups were duplicated to sell processed food and beverages to the same groups. A 2026 paper in the same journal documented how the tobacco playbook was directly applied to design and market Lunchables to children.

Some specific examples that appear in the record. Philip Morris repurposed the "Marlboro Country Store" loyalty program concept to create the "Wacky Warehouse" for Kool-Aid, where children could redeem purchases for toys and enter sweepstakes. The cartoon mascots. The kid-focused packaging. The multi-platform saturation across TV, comic books, school supplies. Much of it came from the cigarette playbook, moved sideways.

Philip Morris spun off Kraft in 2007. But the marketing methods and product design philosophies didn't unspin. They stayed in the food industry, where they still shape what shows up on grocery shelves today.

I couldn't look at the front of a chip bag the same way after I learned that.

What I do now, and why it's simple on purpose.

I don't buy foods that are engineered. Not because I have infinite willpower. I don't. I know exactly what I do when I open a bag of highly designed chips. I've done it too many times. I know I can't win that fight, so I don't have that fight anymore.

What I have in my kitchen instead is food that isn't trying to trick me. Real fat. Real meat. Real vegetables. Nut butters with one ingredient. A jar of ghee. A block of tallow. The kind of food nobody spent years in a lab designing to bypass my sense of fullness, because there was no product manager whose bonus depended on how much of it I ate.

That's not a philosophical choice. That's a practical one. When the food isn't engineered to hook you, you eat until you're full, and then you stop, because your body still knows how to do that when the signals aren't jammed.

That's the reason I built Fatly Good the way I built it. Grass-fed ghee. Beef tallow. Peanut butter. Almond butter. One ingredient each. Zero seed oils. Zero added sugar. Nothing engineered to make you eat more of it than your body actually wants.

I'm not going to pretend our products taste better than a Dorito. Doritos are the product of decades of engineering by paid scientists specifically to be more pleasurable to your brain than anything you could reasonably make at home. Of course a Dorito wins the taste test in the first ten seconds.

What real food wins is the next hour. And the next day. And the next twenty years of your body actually working.

Fat never felt so right.

Gustavo Rodriguez, Founder