A software engineer who works on grocery store shoppers’ reward programs told me recently that he doesn’t think his clients are able to manage the data they are collecting about our food preferences. Apparently the captains of the food industry are swamped with too much information.

I have no way of verifying whether or not this is true, but I find the idea comforting.

I’d like to believe the human beings at the other end of the data stream are just as overwhelmed and confused as I am, that the seamless loop between producer and consumer hasn’t been closed quite yet. Maybe there are still opportunities for serendipitous experiences unmediated by neuroeconomists.

Is this some regressive adolescent emotion surfacing for murky reasons in my late adulthood? It might be, but if Dr. David A. Kessler, former head of the US Food and Drug Administration, is correct, it appears there is a great deal of truth behind my paranoid fantasies. And although I’m sure it won’t be long before the marketing people get better at data mining, it won’t necessarily impact our health. We’re already at the cliff’s edge.

In The End of Overeating (Rodale), Kessler argues that the food industry deliberately engineers foods that override the body’s natural feedback system by elevating dopamine activity. The pleasure set points in our brains have been reset according to Dr. Kessler. He backs up his assertions by referencing many sources, including interviews with two University of Michigan scientists, Joshua Berke and Kent Berridge. Kessler ends by offering a number of suggestions (which he calls “food rehab strategies”) to prevent hypereating.

I suppose I shouldn’t find it shocking to discover our food is beginning to resemble crack cocaine in terms of health consequences, that food industry leaders appear more like drug lords than responsible leaders, and recovery strategies use the language of Alcoholics Anonymous.

There are some aspects of late turbo-capitalist culture—like having our choices as consumers relentlessly tracked and then manipulated on a neurological level—that are tiresome, intrusive and toxic.

Ultimately, of course, this is a political issue.

The End of Overeating deserves a large audience and could impact an important public conversation that has already begun as a result of the local food movement. It would make a wonderful choice for book clubs.

For better and for worse, we’re living in the middle of a paradigm shift in our ability to alter our foods and just about everything else in the world. This shift is due to a technological leap. But who controls the technostructure? Who gets to make the decisions? Do these folks have our best interests in mind?

At the very least, before we all collapse from toxic life styles we might take a step back and ask ourselves, Is this the way we really want to live? * * *

Last Saturday I attended a poetry reading honoring Angel Naftis at the Neutral Zone, one of the centers of the vital Ann Arbor poetry scene.

A group of around 75 people, most of whom were in their teens and early twenties, sat in rapt attention listening to young people recite their poems. Jeff Kass, the charismatic Creative Arts Director of the Neutral Zone, was master of ceremonies. The event paid tribute to Ms. Naftis, a star on the slam poetry scene here and a role model for many other young poets.

I’m old enough to remember the way Beat poets in the late 1950s and early 60s revitalized the American poetry scene by emphasizing vernacular language and oral poetics, but I wasn’t paying attention more recently during the rise of rap and hip hop. I’m getting up to speed by reading Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop

, by Adam Bradley (Basic Civitas Books), a smart introduction to the complexities of these new lyric poetic forms.

In one of the lines of the last poem she read, Angel spoke of “the texture of language.” In the midst of this phantasmagoric culture we live in, she is working to discover the textures of her own singular voice, her own authentic poetics.

Angel is leaving Ann Arbor to attend classes at Hunter College in New York City. We wish her well.