Rats in their maze. They are the giant food conglomerates: Kraft, General Mills, Post, Kellogg, PepsiCo, Campbell Soup, and others. We are the rats.

I’ve just finished reading Michael Moss’ new book – Salt Sugar Fat: How the Giants Hooked Us – and want to recommend it to readers.

Michael Moss describes how scientists at the food giants have researched precisely what we like to eat, and how to formulate and market their foods accordingly. And I do mean precisely. They’ve learned, for example, exactly how much sugar hits the “bliss point” that’s most exciting and irresistible. They’ve studied exactly how to make a potato chip – how to configure the salt so it sticks to the surface of the chip and produces an instant rush when it touches your tongue, and how to combine that with fat and sugar for ultimate effect. Every aspect of the product has been painstakingly researched and calibrated, including how the product feels in your mouth, the crunch sound the potato chip makes when you bite into it, even how large bags should be – not so you'll eat a sensible amount (they’ve gone to great lengths so you won’t) – but so you'll buy a bag without feeling guilty.

Hey, you say, I understand the problem with potato chips. (“Betcha can’t eat just one.”) But the same goes for bread, cereal, cheese, yogurt, meat, fruit juice, soup, and every other kind of processed food.

The book is fascinating, both about the psychology of eating and the psychology of marketing. Michael Moss – who won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2010 and was a finalist for the prize in two other years – knows how relate facts and tell stories so engagingly that the book goes down as easily as, well, a high-fat chocolate milkshake with bliss-point-perfect sugar and a pinch of salt (to enhance the effects of the fat and sugar).

What could be a more overused cliché than calling a book a must-read? Here the cliché fits. After all, we all eat, and to a large extent we are what we eat, as individuals and as a nation.

Moss concludes his book by observing that information is empowering. If you read his book, you’ll never travel the supermarket aisles the same way again.