Something has happened to food in America: It is no longer simply food - filling, good-tasting, life-sustaining. Rather, it is "fat-free" or "high in fiber" or "low in cholesterol" - either an enemy that will steal life away or a savior that will prolong it indefinitely. In this provocative book, Michelle Stacey chronicles the psychological and cultural forces behind this American obsession, forces that have transformed oat bran and broccoli into magical totems, and steak, butter, and eggs into killers.

We have refashioned food into preventive medicine, a moral test, sometimes literally a mortal enemy - and in the process we have lost sight of one of its most basic functions: the giving of pleasure.

Stacey takes us on a revealing journey through the landscape of American food paranoia, from supermarket aisles, research laboratories, and the factories of food manufacturers to restaurant kitchens and food conventions. We peer inside the heads of advertising slogan writers, and learn from "restrained eaters" why there is no such thing as "normal eating" anymore.

In each chapter of Consumed, Stacey delves into a different aspect of the American food obsession, introducing us to the people most actively and publicly involved with our food - rethinking it, selling it, cooking it, refiguring it in the lab.

We meet, among others, the inventor of the first FDA-approved fat substitute, who explains how technologically engineered foods are designed to fool us into eating well; the head of nutrition research at the Quaker Oats Company, who takes us through the rise and precipitous fall of the quintessential American health-food fad; a lobbyist for futuristic foods that are designed to prevent specific diseases; a back-to-nature food scientist/baker who is touting a little-known grain he says is the next oat bran; a chef who reveals a kitchen's-eye view of America's conflicted eating patterns.