Why Food Became Engineered to Defeat You
Artinsal Protein Bars to Sustained Fish Sticks
From Kellogg’s anti-pleasure cereal to protein bars that cost more than lunch
There may be no phrase in modern nutrition more ridiculous than this:
“Real food protein bar.”
And yet here we are.
Recently, internet nutrition personality Paul Saladino introduced what he described as his best “real food” protein bar. While I have nothing personal against the man, I admire the confidence required to sell twelve protein bars for forty-four dollars while talking about ancestral living.
Because let’s be honest for a moment.
Protein bars are the modern candy bar.
They simply come wrapped in better fonts, cleaner branding, and enough wellness language to make people feel morally superior while eating what is essentially an overpriced Snickers bar with collagen.
Now, before the internet decides I am anti-protein-bar, let me say something clearly.
I actually like Aloha bars.
They are expensive, but they say the right words to me. More importantly, they taste better than many bars pretending to be nutrition while having the texture of compressed drywall. Besides, life is busy, airports exist, traffic exists, and there are absolutely days where convenience wins.
Still, pretending industrial engineering untouched these foods is fantasy.
And honestly, fantasy is part of the problem.
Breakfast Used to Be a Moral Lecture
To understand how we got here, we need cereal, because cereal explains almost everything about modern food.
The earliest cereals in America were basically granolas—dense grain mixtures that required chewing, preparation, and patience. While nobody was dreaming about them at night, they solved a real problem because they stored well, traveled well, and provided calories in a rapidly industrializing country.
Then came John Harvey Kellogg.
Now Kellogg was brilliant, eccentric, controlling, deeply moralistic, and profoundly suspicious of pleasure. He believed rich foods, spicy foods, meat, and almost anything enjoyable stimulated dangerous passions, and among those passions he was particularly terrified of masturbation, which he considered one of the great threats to civilization.
So his answer was blandness.
Very blandness.
Little sugar. Little stimulation. Little excitement.
The original cereal movement was not designed around pleasure.
Instead, it was designed around suppression.
In many ways, those cereals were crunchy moral discipline.
Fast forward a hundred years, and the cereal aisle becomes the exact opposite of Kellogg’s vision. Sugar increases, crunch becomes engineered, mascots appear, colors explode across the box, and breakfast slowly transforms into dessert with vitamins added.
And importantly, none of this happened because someone woke up wanting to destroy public health.
That part matters.
Food Engineering Solved Real Problems
Before obesity became the dominant nutritional problem, the real challenge facing humanity was hunger.
For most of history, people worried about:
starvation
spoilage
crop failures
transportation
and simply getting enough calories
Modern food engineering changed that reality.
Shelf-stable foods mattered.
Affordable calories mattered.
Transportation mattered.
Refrigeration mattered.
And honestly, millions upon millions of lives improved because of those innovations.
It is very easy for people with stocked refrigerators and grocery delivery apps to romanticize the past, but the past involved tremendous amounts of malnutrition and uncertainty.
So modern food systems were not evil.
They were revolutionary.
Then We Solved One Problem and Created Another
However, once calories became cheap, portable, stable, and endlessly available, the challenge changed.
The problem was no longer finding enough food.
The problem became stopping.
And this is where modern biology collides with the modern grocery aisle.
Our brains evolved in environments where calorie-dense food was rare and valuable. Suddenly, within only a few generations, we found ourselves surrounded by foods engineered to be affordable, repeatable, convenient, and highly rewarding.
That mismatch matters.
Now medications like GLP-1 help many people—including me—regain balance and reality in a food environment our biology was never designed to navigate.
Extrusion Changed Everything
Most people have never heard the word extrusion, even though it may be one of the most important food technologies in modern life.
The process is simple.
Take grains, starches, or protein powders. Apply heat and pressure. Force them through machinery.
Suddenly you have:
cereal
crackers
cheese puffs
protein snacks
breakfast bars
And here is the important part: extrusion changes texture, and texture changes satiety.
When food crunches perfectly, dissolves quickly, and slides down effortlessly, people consume more of it before fullness has time to register.
That is not conspiracy.
It is simply biology interacting with engineering.
Natural Selection Entered the Grocery Store
Food companies did not necessarily set out to create hyper-palatable foods.
Instead, they followed what sold.
And what sold was what people returned to repeatedly.
So over time, the grocery aisle became a form of natural selection.
Products survived because they effectively triggered pleasure.
Foods that did not simply disappeared.
And I will confidently say something controversial:
Reese’s sells better than Brussels sprouts.
I will die on that hill.
Now yes, Brussels sprouts can be wonderful roasted with olive oil and balsamic, and somewhere right now a chef in Brooklyn is shaving them raw onto handmade pottery while explaining their emotional complexity.
Still, Reese’s triggers something primal.
Sweetness.
Fat.
Salt.
Texture.
And your brain immediately says:
“Yes. More of that.”
For some people, comfort food is a tamale. For others, it is lefse. Meanwhile, many people find comfort in peanut butter cups or a Dove Bar.
Food is culture.
Food is memory.
Food is emotion.
The grocery aisle evolved around those realities much faster than human biology evolved to manage them.
The Wellness Fantasy
There is another uncomfortable reality that nobody on wellness Instagram likes to admit.
To feed a hungry planet, we cannot all live on pasture-raised beef, farm-fresh eggs gathered from cheerful backyard chickens, and organic kale harvested by a local poet-farmer wearing linen.
That is not a food system.
That is a lifestyle catalog.
The modern world has eight billion people.
Food has to:
travel
survive droughts
survive wars
survive supply chain failures
and feed cities that no longer produce their own calories
Engineered foods are not going away.
Nor should they.
Yes, Even on Mars
When human beings eventually colonize Mars, we are not putting cattle on the rocket ship.
Nobody is building a space ranch outside Olympus Mons.
Likewise, we are not stocking the moons of Jupiter with artisanal grass-fed herds wandering beneath methane clouds.
Instead, we will use engineered foods and lab-grown proteins because they will be:
efficient
reproducible
resource-conscious
and eventually taste just as good
That future is not dystopian.
It is practical.
Even here on Earth, whole foods are fragile. Fresh food spoils quickly, transportation breaks down, ports close, and supply chains fail. Consequently, long-term food storage matters, distribution matters, and preventing malnutrition still matters.
The challenge today is different.
We no longer live in a world where most people fear starvation.
Instead, we live in a world where many people are simultaneously overfed and undernourished.
Calories are abundant.
Satiety is not.
Food Is Not the Enemy
Food is not evil.
Engineering is not automatically bad.
Convenience matters, and sometimes a protein bar is perfectly fine.
However, pretending heavily processed convenience foods become “real food” because someone added collagen, and an Instagram strategy does not help anyone understand the real issue.
The goal is not perfection.
Awareness is the goal.
We need food systems that:
reduce malnutrition
prevent shortages
improve satiety
and avoid creating environments where obesity becomes the default outcome of modern life
Because feeding humanity was one of civilization’s greatest achievements.
Now we simply have to figure out how to do it without overwhelming the biology that got us here in the first place.
🎙️ Listen to the Podcast Version
This topic will also be featured on my podcast FORK U, where we make sense of the madness of food, medicine, culture, and the strange world we built around eating.
And if you enjoy topics like this—food engineering, GLP-1s, obesity science, history, nutrition myths, and why the modern grocery aisle looks the way it does—please subscribe to FORK U wherever you get your podcasts
