Patrick Sullivan
speaker
435 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 8 Jul
Patrick Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, Breaking Big Food, the full title is How the American Food System Went Rotten and How It's Being Revived.
It loosely follows the creation of our coffee shop, Firefly, but also really looks at, through the lens of Cali Means, how the food system went rotten over the past 40 years.
Well, in 1985, R.J.
Reynolds, the maker of Camel cigarettes, purchased Nabisco for about $5 billion.
In 1988, Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, they purchased Kraft Foods for about $13 billion.
And these are just two of the examples of big tobacco buying up
The food companies that you know the names of, by the 1990s, big tobacco actually controlled about 40% of the food supply in America.
Going down in flames.
Was that a pun intended or?
It was.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, the first thing that they started to look at, like any business does, is how do we get our customers to buy more of our products?
Oh, we make it taste better.
We make it, you know, everyone remembers the Lay's ad, no one can eat just one.
That wasn't a marketing campaign.
That was like a promise.
They basically worked with the tobacco scientists, became food scientists, and they began studying like how do we make, how do we tickle the pleasure centers of the brain with potato chips and candy and sodas?
And they found this sort of perfect mixture of fat, salt, and sweet that makes it so no one can eat just one.
Yes and no, I think they did a little bit of that, but more so it was like ingredients that were used as preservatives and looking at like switching from cane sugar to high fructose corn syrup, which gives you the sweet, but for a lot less cost.
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