Michael Moss on Curiosity, Corporate Power, and the Hidden Costs of Convenience

Michael Moss never set out to be an investigative journalist. “I was a really obnoxious kid who was always asking why,” he laughs. But a high school English teacher in San Francisco changed everything when she sent her students out to report a story. Moss handed in his first article, and the next day she told him, “You know, Michael, I think you have a knack for this. And by the way, there are people who will actually pay you to wander around the world learning things and writing them down.” From that moment, he was hooked.

At San Francisco State, a professor encouraged him to skip class to write for the Sierra Club. Moss never graduated—he chose the newsroom over the classroom. “I was kind of too impatient to finish school,” he says. “I was having too much fun already.” His first newspaper had just 4,000 readers in Wyoming, but his editors were “fantastic teachers,” sometimes harsh ones. “The vividness of learning on the job was really good for me,” he reflects.

His career would take him from local newsrooms to war zones and, ultimately, to the New York Times, where his investigations reshaped how Americans think about food. Moss still remembers how little interest he first had in the story that would define his career—the 2008 salmonella outbreak at a Georgia peanut plant. “My first reaction when my editor suggested it was to walk away,” he admits. He’d just returned from Iraq, pitching stories on U.S. arms sales. But his editor, Christine, calmly reframed it: “Think about the gravity of this. Little kids are eating these peanuts and getting sick or dying… there’s no one else we can blame for this catastrophe.”

That conversation pulled him into a deeper realization: the real stakes of everyday food. “You read everything you possibly can,” Moss says of investigative reporting. “Not just gathering facts, but gathering the names of people who might talk to you.” Trade publications, insider documents, and long flights to meet reluctant sources are his bread and butter. “Documents are the backbone,” he emphasizes. But so are people. “The combination of finding insider documents that were never meant to be public, and then convincing the people who wrote them to explain them—that’s where the real story comes from.”

Moss’s 2009 New York Times investigation into a single contaminated hamburger traced how one meal paralyzed a 22-year-old dance instructor and exposed deep flaws in meat safety. “I was looking for one hamburger, one situation,” he explains, “because otherwise the information could just get dry and overwhelming.” The day after publication, the USDA ordered a nationwide review of meat inspection practices.

His follow-up stories and books, Salt Sugar Fat and Hooked, uncovered the corporate engineering behind processed foods. Moss discovered “a huge trove of memos and emails” released through tobacco litigation that revealed Philip Morris—then the largest tobacco and food company—using the same psychological and chemical playbook to sell snacks. “Reporters really hadn’t ever looked at that material from a food perspective,” he notes.

The parallels between Big Tobacco and Big Food run deep. Executives, Moss found, rationalized their roles with a kind of moral distance. “They invented these products in a much more innocent era,” he says. “Before marketing went crazy and deepened our dependence on them.” Some, like former Coca-Cola president Jeffrey Dunn, later switched sides, launching campaigns to sell vegetables instead of soda.

For Moss, these stories aren’t about villains—they’re about systems. “These are companies doing what most companies want to do: make as much money as possible by making their product as attractive as possible,” he says. The root, he argues, lies in capitalism itself. “It rewards profit over everything else.” He contrasts Costco—whose membership model aligns profit with consumer trust—with the typical food corporation, “where safety isn’t as profitable as shelf life.”

Policy solutions like soda taxes can help, Moss notes, but “it’s hard to get anything like that done.” Unlike tobacco, “you can’t hold up Oreo cookies and blame them for making the country sick.” Processed food is too ubiquitous, too woven into everyday life. And while Europe has introduced warning labels and traffic-light systems, Moss cautions that companies simply “reposition their ingredients” to dodge regulation.

Still, he’s hopeful about small, personal revolutions. Cooking from scratch, he says, doesn’t have to be slow or elitist: “My recipe for spaghetti sauce takes 90 seconds—plum tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, basil. Cooking from scratch doesn’t have to be time-consuming, and it makes us mindful and appreciative of the food.”

He recognizes, though, that not everyone has that luxury. “I’m thinking about people in Kansas shopping at Walmart,” Moss says. “A basket of blueberries can cost as much as a two-pound frozen pizza with four meats and three cheeses.” For many, the real challenge isn’t willpower—it’s economics.

Moss defines success as changing minds—especially expert ones. “The biggest reward is getting great feedback from somebody who knew the subject I was writing about,” he says. Personally, success means something simpler: “Getting to the top of the mountain—and back down safely.”

The 6Degrees team extends its heartfelt thanks to Michael Moss for his candor, humanity, and relentless pursuit of truth. His work reminds us that the stories shaping our diets are also stories about power—and that the smallest acts of curiosity can illuminate the hidden costs of what we consume.