Effective advertising, Nestle reminds us, is supposed to be subliminal. You aren’t supposed to feel it. In the case of these Pop Tarts, I am meant to feel urgency and trust. The marketing should stop short of saying exactly what the box means to imply: Buy me now. I am wholesome, and I will make you look great. I will make you happy. Yes, happiness exists, and it is I, the Pop Tart.

On Thursday night on the campus of NYU’s Steinhardt School, I listened as four of the eminent professors of food-centric sciences of our time ostensibly told their audience “Why We Eat What We Eat.” The event was in honor of the school’s 125th anniversary. In 1890, it became the first school of pedagogy in the country, predicated on the idea that teachers should have some kind of training. The idea remains unfulfilled in much of the field of nutrition today, where so many people claim expertise.

But Nestle has the bona fides, billed by the university as “one of the world's most powerful foodies.” Her latest book, Soda Politics, will be published October 5. She was joined on stage by Krishnendu Ray, the chair of her department at NYU, Gordon Shepherd, a distinguished professor of neurobiology at Yale, and Steven Shapin, a distinguished professor of the history of science at Harvard.

Half of our plates should be covered in fruits and vegetables, according to federal nutrition recommendations, Nestle reminded us. She then pulled up a slide showing the money that the government actually gave out from 2008 to 2012: Less than one half of one percent of all agricultural subsidies went to production of fruits and vegetables. Four times as much went to tobacco.

Despite the fact that fruits and vegetables are the only foods that experts encourage us to eat with abandon, all fruits, vegetables, and nuts are considered “specialty crops” by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Less than five percent of land planted with food goes to growing fruits and vegetables. More than 50 percent goes to growing soybeans and corn, to feed animals and refine into sugar.

“If you go into a supermarket, you see that most of what’s lined up there is to sell sugar,” Shepherd noted. Some of that we pay for directly, and some of it we pay for in taxes that subsidize its production. Shepherd’s neurobiological research has been integral to understanding how the brain processes what we call flavor, which gets lost in the process. It’s a sensation that he says most people wrongly believe is driven by taste, only because taste happens in our mouths, and food goes in our mouths.

Rather, flavor is largely a matter of smell. Shepherd explained the critical role of something called retronasal olfaction, meaning that exhaling air pushes air over the food in a person’s mouth and up into their nasal cavity. From there, sensory signals spread throughout the neocortex, to areas associated with emotion, motivation, language, and more. All of this underlies future cravings. But none of this would happen if you held your breath or nose while eating. You taste almost nothing. You look childish.