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How We Got Here: Chapter 2

how we got here Jun 01, 2026

The Day Cigarette Companies Took Over Your Pantry

Estimated Read Time: 10–12 Minutes

Last week, I wrote that maybe you're not broken. Maybe you're living in a weird time.

A time where obesity, chronic disease, anxiety, distraction, exhaustion, and confusion around food have somehow become normal. A time where most people feel like they're constantly trying to get healthy while simultaneously being surrounded by things that make that increasingly difficult. The point of that article wasn't to provide answers. It was to start asking questions. If something changed, what changed? If so many people are struggling, why? And if our grandparents and great-grandparents seemed to have a different relationship with food, movement, and health than we do, what happened between then and now?

This week, I want to show you one of the first things that made me stop and say:

"Wait... what?"

Oddly enough, it starts with school lunch.

If you grew up in the 80s, 90s, or early 2000s, you probably remember the food. Lunchables. Capri Sun. Kool-Aid. Oreos. Ritz Crackers. Fruit snacks. Pudding cups. Tiny bags of chips that somehow tasted better when they came out of somebody else's lunchbox. There was always that one kid who had the good snacks. The kid everyone wanted to trade with. The kid running a small black-market economy out of his lunchbox, somehow turning two fruit roll-ups into a package of Oreos and a Capri Sun before recess was over. Looking back, it's funny how much social currency was tied to food. Nobody thought twice about it because nobody needed to. These foods weren't controversial. They weren't viewed as unusual. They were normal.

That's an important word.

Normal.

Most parents weren't buying Lunchables because they thought they were health food. They were buying them because they were convenient, affordable, heavily marketed, and available everywhere. They were in grocery stores, school cafeterias, television commercials, Little League concession stands, gas stations, and vending machines. They were woven directly into childhood. If something was being advertised to kids, sold in schools, sitting on grocery store shelves, and stocked in millions of homes across the country, there was an unspoken assumption that somebody, somewhere, had already asked the important questions.

Most of us never stopped to ask who actually owned those products. Why would we? Most people aren't spending their evenings reading corporate acquisition histories.

Then one day I stumbled across a piece of information that completely changed how I looked at the modern food industry.

Philip Morris, the company behind Marlboro cigarettes, acquired General Foods in 1985 and Kraft in 1988. Around the same time, R.J. Reynolds, the makers of Camel cigarettes, merged with Nabisco. The tobacco-food connection actually started even earlier than that. Back in 1963, R.J. Reynolds purchased Hawaiian Punch, a sugary fruit drink that eventually became a staple in lunchboxes across America. The more I looked into it, the more tobacco companies seemed to be showing up in places I never expected to find them.

Then I started looking at the brands.

Kool-Aid — "Oh Yeah!"

Oreos — "Milk's Favorite Cookie."

Oscar Mayer Bologna — "My bologna has a first name..."

Lucky Charms — "They're Magically Delicious."

Tang — the drink astronauts supposedly drank.

Kraft Mac & Cheese.

Jell-O.

Ritz Crackers.

Nutter Butter.

These weren't obscure brands. These were some of the most recognizable products in America. They weren't hiding on the bottom shelf of specialty stores. They were in millions of homes. They were in lunchboxes, pantries, kitchens, school cafeterias, and grocery carts. Whether people realized it or not, tobacco companies weren't buying a tiny piece of the food industry.

They were buying a seat at the kitchen table.

The more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed. By the 1980s, public trust in tobacco companies was already collapsing. Smoking rates were declining. Lawsuits were mounting. Americans were increasingly realizing they hadn't been getting the full story about the health risks associated with cigarettes. This wasn't some secret anymore. Evidence kept accumulating while tobacco companies continued fighting, delaying, minimizing, and denying. The American public was starting to realize just how much the tobacco industry had been hiding.

Which raises a pretty obvious question: Why food?

Of all the industries they could have entered, why food?

The more I thought about it, the more the answer started to make sense. You can quit smoking. You can quit drinking. You can stop gambling. But nobody gets to quit eating.

Food is one of the few businesses where every customer has to keep coming back. Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Tomorrow. Next week. Next year. For the rest of their lives. If you can create products people enjoy, buy repeatedly, and build into their daily routines, you've created an incredibly valuable business. Viewed through that lens, food starts looking less like a random business decision and more like a natural next move.

But the ownership story isn't actually the most interesting part.

The more I dug into this, the more I realized tobacco companies weren't just bringing money into the food industry.

They were bringing expertise.

These were companies that had spent decades studying habits, cravings, branding, consumer behavior, emotional attachment, and repeat consumption. Their entire business depended on understanding why people came back again and again. Every company wants repeat customers, but tobacco companies had spent generations studying exactly how to create them. That doesn't automatically mean something sinister happened when they entered food. But it should make us curious about what knowledge and strategies came with them.

That's where I eventually came across a man named Dr. Howard Moskowitz.

Moskowitz was a psychophysicist and market researcher who became known for helping companies understand consumer preferences. He's often associated with the concept known as the "bliss point." The basic idea sounds innocent enough: How much sugar, salt, fat, texture, and flavor creates the most enjoyable experience for the consumer? In other words, where is the point where people like a food the most?

At first, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable question. Most people want food to taste good. Nobody is arguing otherwise. But the more I sat with it, the more I found myself thinking about what was actually being studied. Some of the brightest minds in food science weren't spending their days asking how to make people healthier. They were trying to understand what made people want another bite. Then another. Then another.

That's a very different question.

And honestly, that's the moment this story started bothering me.

Not because making food taste good is evil. It isn't. Not because eating an Oreo occasionally is going to ruin your health. It won't. What bothered me was realizing how much intelligence, research, testing, money, and effort had gone into understanding consumption. Nobody accidentally eats six chicken breasts while watching Netflix. Nobody finishes three pounds of strawberries and wonders where they went. But somehow polishing off a whole bag of chips or two sleeves of Oreos doesn't seem nearly as unusual, despite containing dramatically more calories than either example.

Most people intuitively understand that some foods seem to have a much stronger pull than others. The question is why. The answer, at least in part, is that food companies were actively trying to understand exactly what made people want more. And once one company discovered something that worked, every other company had every incentive to figure it out too.

Imagine you're selling crackers. Your competitor develops a product that customers like more. Sales increase. Stores give them more shelf space. Market share shifts. What do you do? You compete. Nobody wants to lose customers. Nobody wants to lose revenue. Nobody wants to explain to shareholders why the other guy is winning. What starts as a business decision slowly becomes an arms race.

This is one of those moments where I think people make the mistake of looking for a villain instead of looking at incentives.

Maybe tobacco companies weren't uniquely evil in this regard.

Maybe they were just ahead.

And once they demonstrated what worked, everyone else followed.

A study published in 2023 found that foods owned by tobacco companies between 1988 and 2001 were significantly more likely to be classified as hyper-palatable than foods that weren't owned by tobacco companies. Specifically, tobacco-owned foods were found to be 29% more likely to be fat-and-sodium hyper-palatable and 80% more likely to be carbohydrate-and-sodium hyper-palatable than comparable foods. That doesn't mean tobacco companies invented hyper-palatable food. It doesn't mean they caused every modern health problem. That would be too simplistic. What it does suggest is that they became very, very good at it.

Good enough that researchers could still detect the difference decades later.

To be clear, tobacco companies no longer own most of these brands. Philip Morris eventually spun off Kraft, and many of these companies went on to become separate businesses under different ownership. Oreo, Ritz, Kraft Mac & Cheese, Oscar Mayer, and many of the other products mentioned in this article are now owned by entirely different corporations. But I don't think that changes the significance of the story. The question isn't who owns these products today. The question is what happened during the decades when tobacco companies did own them, what strategies and incentives they brought with them, and what influence they may have left behind.

Around the same period, something else was happening. Processed and ultra-processed foods were becoming an increasingly larger part of the American diet. Childhood obesity rates climbed. Adult obesity rates climbed. Type 2 diabetes became more common. Chronic disease became more common. None of these trends can be blamed on a single company, a single ingredient, or a single decision. Real life is more complicated than that. But if we're trying to understand how we got here, it seems strange to ignore the role of companies that spent decades studying cravings, habits, marketing, and repeat consumption before becoming major players in the food system.

Part of the answer comes down to something I think gets lost in modern nutrition conversations. Calories and nutrition are not the same thing. Calories measure energy, while nutrition includes the vitamins, minerals, protein, and essential fats your body needs to function. Many ultra-processed foods deliver a tremendous amount of energy in a very small package while providing relatively little nutrition or lasting satiety. That's one reason eating 1,000 calories worth of chips can feel surprisingly easy, while eating 1,000 calories worth of steak, potatoes, fruit, and eggs feels like a completely different experience. One delivers mostly energy. The other delivers energy alongside many of the nutrients your body is actually looking for.

The result is a food environment where people can consume more calories than ever while still feeling unsatisfied. In many ways, it's the perfect business model. The customer keeps coming back, but the hunger never seems fully solved.

What sticks with me most isn't what happened to adults.

It's what happened to kids.

Children are incredibly adaptable. Their brains are developing. Their habits are forming. Their understanding of food is being built in real time. The foods children grow up with often become the foods they consider normal. The flavors they experience early help shape preferences later. If you wanted customers for life, getting them young would be a pretty effective strategy. Whether intentional or not, an entire generation grew up surrounded by heavily marketed, highly processed, hyper-palatable foods and came to view them as completely normal.

Parents weren't nutrition researchers.

They weren't studying corporate acquisitions.

They weren't reading food science journals.

They weren't analyzing marketing campaigns.

They were trying to pack a lunch before work, get their kids out the door, make it to practice after school, pay their bills, and survive another week. They trusted the system because most people have to trust the system. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to independently investigate every company, product, institution, and industry competing for our attention.

And maybe that's the part of the story that bothers me most.

Looking back, I don't think the biggest lesson is that tobacco companies bought food companies.

That's the clue.

The bigger lesson is that almost nobody seemed to care.

One of the industries Americans eventually learned not to trust quietly became one of the biggest players in the food system, brought decades of expertise in consumer behavior and repeat consumption with it, and somehow avoided becoming a major cultural conversation. Maybe that's the real mystery. Not that it happened. But that it happened with so little public attention.

For me, the takeaway isn't fear. It isn't perfection. It isn't throwing away everything in your pantry and moving into the woods. It's awareness. Understanding how we got here helps us make better decisions about where we're going. Read labels. Ask questions. Stay curious. Pay attention to incentives. Pay attention to marketing. Pay attention to what becomes normalized.

And when in doubt, lean toward foods that don't need an ingredients list in the first place.

Meat.

Eggs.

Fruit.

Vegetables.

Potatoes.

Foods your great-grandparents would recognize.

It isn't a perfect rule.

But it's a pretty good place to start.

And if you think this story is strange, wait until we start talking about sugar, fat, cholesterol, and the nutrition advice that shaped an entire generation. Because once I started pulling on that thread, I realized the tobacco story wasn't the mystery.

It was just the first clue.

Sources

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I’m Coach Andy, founder of Protean Fitness. Through coaching, writing, and content creation, I explore the connection between modern life, movement, nutrition, stress, recovery, and long-term health.

This series is my attempt to make sense of the modern health world, the systems shaping our habits, and the things that actually help people feel better again.

If you enjoyed this article, you can:

If you’re interested in working together or learning more about Protean Fitness, you can visit ProteanFitness.com

 

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