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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.
"An entertaining examination of an industry whose many customers have a sweet tooth."
“One of the world's most relentless critics of food industry influence.”
“A vivid, unvarnished portrait of the commercial environment for breakfast. . . . Deconstruct[s] the iconic cereal box itself – revealing how box design, cartoon mascots, and government lobbying work in tandem to give us products that are frequently up to 40% sugar by weight.”
“Sugar Coated tells the story of American cereals from their start by John Harvey Kellogg to the present day. The book is illustrated with 44 cereal box covers to show how cereal marketing has changed over time.”
"[Nestle and Sutherland] trace cereal’s evolution from 19th-century sanitariums to today’s supermarket shelves. In the process, they pull back the curtain on the multibillion-dollar industry’s artificial dyes, aggressive claims and hidden lobbying."
"[Marion Nestle] is a woman worth celebrating . . . the doyenne of food politics, my friend, my mentor."
“What begins as a deep dive into cereal boxes becomes a fascinating case study in how food is marketed, regulated, reformulated, and sold to us, often in ways that have little to do with what we might assume from the front of the package.”
"Among other things, it makes you really wonder about what (and how) cultures come to consider some foods appropriate for breakfast and others not."
"Sugar Coated uses the colorful history of these packages to follow the U.S. cereal industry from its origins on a health resort in Michigan to its present-day position as a multibillion-dollar centerpiece of American culture."
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.
Contents
Introduction
1. Breakfast Cereals: The Basics
2. The Cereal Box: An Overview
Part I. Ingredients
3. Sugars: Ingredient #1 or #2
4. Grains and Fiber: The Whole Point
5. Flavors and Colors: Natural and Artificial
6. Nutrients: The More, the Better
Part II. Claims
7. Overcoming the Claims Barrier: Cancer and Heart Disease
8. More Heart-Health Claims: Ingredient Petitions
9. Nutrient Content and Structure/Function Claims
10. Widgets: Nutrition at a Glance
11. Diet Claims: Fads and Fantasy
12. "Green" Claims: Natural, Organic, and Non-GMO
Part III. Marketing
13. Marketing to Kids: It's GR-R-REAT!
14. Targeting Adults and Families
15. Cereal for All: Targeting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
16. Marketing Philanthropy: Do Good, Feel Good
17. Cereal Goes International
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
List of Cereal Box Illustrations
Notes
Cereals: A Selected Bibliography
Index