Best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Moss will be the keynote speaker at the 2017 George D. Aiken Lecture Series on Nov. 1 at the UVM Ira Allen Chapel.
Moss is the author of the New York Times’ bestseller, “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.” His writing focuses on the food industry in context of health, safety, nutrition, politics, marketing, corporate interests, and the power of individuals to gain control of what and how they eat.
“Some of the most profitable food companies of the last half century are knowingly manipulating salt, sugar, and fat to addict us to their products. And it’s working,” Moss says. “The industry rakes in a trillion dollars a year. Meanwhile, one in three adults, and one in five kids, is clinically obese, and the total economic cost of this health crisis is approaching $300 billion a year.”
At UVM, he will share how food scientists are manipulating the chemical structure of products, and how companies are adapting marketing techniques from tobacco companies. Moss will offer an objective and sweeping take of the problems, and the many solutions.
Moss is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter formerly with the New York Times, keynote speaker and occasional guest on shows like CBS This Morning, Dr. Oz, CNN, and The Daily Show. He has been a reporter at The Wall Street Journal and an adjunct professor at the Columbia School of Journalism. He continues to report on the processed food industry and is currently at work on “HOOKED: Food and Free Will,” for Random House.
The UVM Aiken Lecture Series
The University of Vermont’s George D. Aiken Lectures are a permanent tribute to the former Dean of the United States Senate and Governor of Vermont for his many years of service to the people of the state and nation. Supported by an endowment created by George and Lola Aiken and held annually at the University of Vermont, the lectures, which began in 1975, provide a platform for distinctive views on critical American issues and is the University’s major annual public-policy forum. The tradition of keeping the Aiken Lectures free and open to the public endures.
The lecture series will stress four areas of public service for which Senator Aiken is best known, namely, foreign and public affairs, energy and the environment, food systems and health, and economic development for the purpose of making Vermont, the nation and the world a better place to live and work. There will be an annual rotation of these topic areas by the corresponding College at the University: Arts and Sciences, Agriculture and Life Sciences, Engineering and Mathematical Science, Education and Social Services, Environment and Natural Resources, Nursing and Health Sciences, Medicine, and the Grossman School of Business Administration.
The Aiken Lecture Series will be at the UVM Ira Allen Chapel at 5:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. Parking is available at the UVM Gutterson Garage. Visit learn.uvm.edu/aiken to learn more.
