Michael Moss

Michael Moss is the author of Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist formerly with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, a keynote speaker, and a guest on shows like CBS This Morning, CNN The Lead, ATC and the Daily Show.

His work has ranged widely from exposing the corporate interests in nursing homes to the Pentagon’s failures in providing soldiers with armor, and now focuses on the food industry in the context of health, safety, nutrition, politics, marketing, and the power of individuals to gain control of what and how they eat. His next book, Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions is being published by Random House on March 2, 2021.

He won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize with other New York Times staff in explanatory reporting “For relentless reporting on contaminated hamburger and other food safety issues that, in print and online, spotlighted defects in federal regulation and led to improved practices.”

Before The Times, he reported for The Wall Street Journal, New York Newsday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction, Colorado, and the High Country News in Lander, Wyoming.

He was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for his reporting on the lack of protective armor for soldiers in Iraq, and in 1999 for a team effort on Wall Street’s emerging influence in the nursing home industry, and received an Overseas Press Club citation in 2007 for stories on the faulty justice system for American-held detainees in Iraq.

He wrote “Palace Coup: The Inside Story of Harry and Leona Helmsley,” a Doubleday bestseller, He has been an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has had fellowships with the German Marshall Fund and the Gannett Center for Media Studies. In 1983 he covered an expedition up the West Ridge of Mount Everest in Nepal.

Born in Eureka, California, on Dec. 16, 1955, he attended San Francisco State University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Eve Heyn, a writer, and their two boys.