Ditte Isager/©Hachette Book Group, Inc.

There is widespread, growing concern among Americans about the quality of our food supply, because evidence of harm is everywhere. All one has to do is look around in any public place to realize that obesity is a terrible public health problem. As a culture, we are waking up to the fact that processed, industrialized food is killing us, and we want alternatives. When people see commercials for diabetes test kits on primetime TV, they think, “I didn’t see commercials like this 15 years ago. Something is wrong here.”

You write that the greatest challenge in changing eating habits has been to alter perceptions about taste.  What do you think about the way people assume that food must be unhealthy in order to taste good?  This seems to inform conversations about salt, trans fats, school bake sales, and even pink slime.

All human beings are “hard-wired” so to speak, to crave sugar, salt and fat. This is our evolutionary heritage. Foods that had these components were scarce in the environments in which human beings evolved, and we desperately needed the high-caloric densities these offered.