Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster eBook. Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com Contents Definitions • PART ONE   THE DORITO EFFECT “Things” and “Flavors” ONE Big Bland TWO Big Flavor THREE Big People FOUR • PART TWO   IF FOOD COULD TALK The Wisdom of Flavor FIVE Bait and Switch SIX Fried Chicken Saved My Life! SEVEN • PART THREE   THE DELICIOUS CURE The Tomato of Tomorrow EIGHT The Gospel According to Real Flavor NINE Appendix: How to Live Long and Eat Flavorfully Acknowledgments About Mark Schatzker Bibliography Notes Index For Laura junk food noun 1. Pre-prepared or packaged food that has low nutritional value —Oxford English Dictionary 2. Food that is not good for your health because it contains high amounts of fat or sugar —The Merriam-Webster Dictionary 3. Food that tastes like something it is not —Mark Schatzker PART ONE THE DORITO EFFECT ONE “Things” and “Flavors” I N THE early autumn of 1961, a thirty-seven-year-old housewife and mother named Jean Nidetch was pushing a shopping cart through a Long Island supermarket when she bumped into a woman she knew. “You look so marvelous,” her friend said, and for a sweet moment Nidetch basked in the compliment. Unfortunately, her friend kept talking. “When are you due?” Nidetch was not pregnant. At the time, she stood five seven and weighed 214 pounds, which marked her, in today’s parlance, as obese, although Nidetch didn’t know what that word meant, or that the obese were, at that very moment, coalescing into a demographic ripple that was on its way to becoming a wave. Nidetch had been to see diet doctors in New York. When their advice didn’t work, she headed across the Hudson River to New Jersey, where the diet doctors proved to be just as useless. She had tried every diet there was, and every one of them worked: She always lost weight. But then she would gain it all back—and more. Jean Nidetch could stop eating, just not for very long. She loved food too much. She loved savory things like pizza and meat, and sweet things, too, like cupcakes and soft drinks. Nidetch wasn’t one for big breakfasts, but that was because she would get up at three in the morning to gorge on cold pork chops or baked beans right out of the fridge. In summer, if an ice cream, pizza, or sandwich truck zoomed by without stopping, she would take off after it. And when visions of jelly beans began dancing in her head, she would rifle through her son’s pockets looking for some. But what Nidetch especially loved were cookies. When she started eating them, she couldn’t stop. She was addicted to them. The day Nidetch was mistaken for pregnant, she phoned the New York City Department of Health’s obesity clinic to make an appointment. Not long after,