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World-renowned food politics expert Marion Nestle joins forces with former cereal executive Lisa Sutherland to examine what cereal boxes reveal about American culture and food politics.
If you want to understand how the food business works, just have a look at a box of breakfast cereal. Hardly anything on supermarket shelves is bigger, bolder, or more deliberately designed. The fiercely competitive industry that brings us Cheerios, Froot Loops, and Trix sells a distinctly American dream: indulgence and health in one convenient package.
Cereal boxes chronicle our shifting national obsessions with health, ingredients, dietary advice, and American culture. They show us what sells food: cartoons for kids, athletes for men, weight loss for women. And hidden in the history of cereal package designs, we find clues to the corporate lobbying that shapes agricultural policy, health claims, and labeling regulations.
Sugar Coated unboxes the influence of cereal companies on food policy and the power of marketing, revealing, in the process, why Big Food is so good at selling profitable products regardless of their effects on health.
Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University and author of many books about the politics of food, nutrition, health, and the environment.
Lisa Sutherland is Interim President at Jacksonville University and former Vice President of Nutrition at Kellogg Company.
"No one has done more than Marion Nestle to expose the cynical machinations of Big Food, and her collaboration with Lisa Sutherland shows how breakfast cereal is the perfect symbol of that system."—Mark Bittman, founder of Community Kitchen and Bittman's
"The cereal box doesn't just sell food—it manufactures belief. Marion Nestle and Lisa Sutherland reveal how ultra-processed products are marketed as healthy through a carefully engineered blend of regulation, psychology, and design."—David A. Kessler, MD, New York Times best-selling author of Diet, Drugs and Dopamine: The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight and former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration
"Cereal as never before! This book lays bare a fascinating and troubling world of sophisticated food engineering, manipulative marketing and packaging, and profit, and it has been so needed, for so long."—Kelly D. Brownell, Dean Emeritus and Robert L. Flowers Professor Emeritus, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University
"Nestle and Sutherland bring us the world on a box: the world of nutrition and health claims relating to food products, daffy and ingenious and squirrelly and contentious as only food marketing and diet advice can be. They bring a wry eye to these antics—and will give us clearer eyes in supermarket aisles too."—Corby Kummer, Executive Director of Food & Society at the Aspen Institute