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Robert Goldstein, a hedge fund manager in New York, was getting huge cravings for sweets when he came across a tropical plant called
Gymnema sylvestre that works a little like methadone for heroin addicts.
Compounds extracted from the woody vine keep the brain from getting overly excited for sugar by disabling the sweet receptors on the tongue. For an hour or so, brownies and doughnuts and Oreo cookies all taste like putty, which helped Goldstein control his cravings so well that he put the plant’s extract into little white pills, which he named Sweet Defeat. Said one review: “It’s like willpower in a bottle!”
Meet The Cookbook Author Who Hates Food
June 4, 2021
Mark Bittman is a food writer who doesn’t like food very much at least not the way it’s been produced over the last 12,000 years.
Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal covers the evolution of agriculture from the age of man to modern industrial farming, but it’s no sunny tale of human ingenuity.
In his view, human greed sluiced through the capitalist system has created an intolerable modern food system that is poisoning both humans and the planet, breeding poverty, slavery, war, and every other bad thing one could conceive. There’s a blurb from Mr. Global Warming himself, former Vice President Al Gore. Inside the jacket flap are quotes from Malcolm X and Naomi Klein; the table is being set for an astringent left-wing repast.