EmpiricalRequires evidence

The dark side of specialisation is the same engine turned on the customer, and this is Part I's spine at its sharpest. Food companies compete for a share of your food spending, so each has an incentive to make its product maximally addictive in order to capture more of your future expenditure, and a specialised economy lets them employ hundreds of food scientists, psychologists and marketing experts to do it. Moss states the result: in their hands the salt, sugar and fat used to propel this social transformation are not nutrients as much as weapons, weapons deployed certainly to defeat competitors but also to keep us coming back for more. The capability that ended famine is now aimed at our reward pathways, and commercial success depends on it.

Capital mechanisms