Here's a thing on food science from The New York Times from three years ago I keep referring to. Long but really good read.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary...

In the context of new developments of food replacements from the internet (Soylent etc), you can't help but see a tragic waste in how food science has spent all this time on addicting snacks, cynically geared towards heavy consumers.

When I think about this emotionally and feel like oversimplifying, I can't help but to lump this in as a part of the James Howard Kunstleresque argument of how Western Civilization wasted much of the potential of the "good growth period" of global capitalism on completely unsustainable living conditions (suburbia etc).