David Kessler has assembled a quick, readable work detailing how corporate food interests lay traps, how and why Americans fall into them, and how to disarm them.

As someone who suffers from the habituation Kessler claims to be the endgame of Big Food, I found his prescriptions difficult to digest, as few have really helped me move overcome overeating in the past few months. A general sense of awareness should come to anyone who reads this book, but one will have to try harder than me (or be less addicted to cheap combinations of fat, sugar, and salt) for it to end up as a tool of progress.

Still, Kessler’s varied accounts of corporate officers’ behavior with respect to the content of their products compels me to believe they want you hooked. An executive of the industry reviews the cheesecake factory menu in terms of the layering of fat, sugar, and salt, and it is absolutely disgusting. Studies on mice where addiction to popular food items is shown to cause conditioning approaching that caused by cocaine is startling. A third piece to the puzzle, the general argument that, in nature, size matters, is equally believable and compelling.

On the drug note, a lot of Kessler’s solutions did involve increased government regulation in the form of labeling requirements and transfat type bans. While in extremely limited cases this type of action may be warranted, I tend to be swayed away based on the Becker-Posner blog’s general consensus: such requirements are useless and burdensome where the costs of knowledge to the consumer are low. (Becker, Posner)