If a food looks like it should have more calories than is stated on the label, it probably does.

At the moment, world hunger and starvation have everything to do with politics. Political conflicts, insufficient responses to natural disasters, corrupt political institutions, and inequalities in income and education constitute what public health practitioners call the ‘root’ causes of hunger and malnutrition.

The real question here is how you – as a reader, eater, and citizen – can recognize and protect yourself against the onslaught of misleading information and advice that results from food-company manipulation of nutrition research and practice. Everyone eats. Food matters. All of us need and deserve sound nutrition advice aimed at promoting public health – not corporate commercial interests.

To summarize the soy-food situation: soy companies produce about 25 billion pounds of meal and oil every year for your use, much of it federally subsidized, that they are eager to get you to buy.

It’s a tremendous way of getting people to buy more at lower cost to the producer. There’s no question that that’s an incentive to buy. Everybody loves a bargain.

If you’re sick, first you have to associate your sickness with a food. Then you have to report it to your doctor. Then the doctor reports it to some state authority. The state authority reports it to the federal authority. By the time all that happens, two weeks have gone by.

If you would like food manufacturers to explain more about the chemical ingredients listed on food labels, take up this matter with your congressional representatives. Congress tells the FDA what to do.

If you would like the FDA to keep a sharper eye on health claims on food products, you need to convey that sentiment to your congressional representatives.

This book exposes the ways in which food companies use political processes – entirely conventional and nearly always legal – to obtain government and professional support for the sale of their products. Its twofold purpose is to illuminate the extent to which the food industry determines what people eat and to generate much wider discussion of the food industry’s marketing methods and use of the political system.

You get a lot more calories for the price of hamburgers and french fries than you do for carrots, not least because the government subsidizes the production of corn and soybeans, the basis of cheap corn sweeteners and vegetable oil.