No one I know personally or have ever met or have even heard of has ever eaten an energy bar solely for its taste. Whether it's a PowerBar—or a Balance Bar, a Balance Bar Gold, a PowerBar Pria, a Clif Bar, a Detour, a U-Turn, a Think Thin!, a Kashi GoLean, a Pure Protein Chocolate Deluxe, an Atkins Advantage, a Muscle Sandwich (Original, Cinnamon, or Vanilla), an Odwalla Berries GoMega, or even a Kelp Krunch Original Sesame Whole Food Energy Bar, these confections may enable you to leap over skyscrapers or drop 30 pounds in time for the beach, but so unpleasant and metallic are their assaults on the olfactories that a new vocabulary similar to winespeak threatens to spring up. To describe the Detour Coconut Almond bar, for example, as having "a nose of chalky dried apricot with a hint of molybdenum on the palate, a mouthfeel of hosed-down fleece-jacket interior, and a sprightly finish of bubble gum and Reynolds Wrap" wouldn't be inaccurate—or atypical. As a friend said to me recently, "At an okraphobes' food convention, most of these bars would finish second to okra."

But if the taste of ground minerals coated with excessive sweeteners is so reprehensible (see the Reprehensibility Index at mensvogue.com/health), why were more than a billion of these bars sold last year in an ever-increasing, nearly $2-billion-a-year business? Either one person is eating an unconscionable number of these things or they are incredibly popular.

The phenomenal success of the energy bar is a uniquely American story. The first were baked at home (in California, of course) by the Olympic marathoner Brian Maxwell back in 1986 because he needed an easily digestible and portable energy source. I didn't have one from the '86 vintage, but by all accounts they tasted 50 times worse than the current ones, which is unimaginable. Ten years later, this runner turned magnate was selling $150 million worth of them. Competition grew heated.

These young and feisty bar producers, many of them based in California, were smaller and lighter on their feet than the big food congloms, and therefore more innovative. While companies like Procter & Gamble and Frito-Lay were still wrestling with the fat substitute Olestra, these upstarts pole-vaulted over them, concentrating first on high carbohydrates, and then exploiting the unlimited-protein craze brought to you by Dr. Atkins. When high protein fell into disfavor, the upstarts moved on to the more balanced approach typified by the Zone (40 percent carbs, 30 percent protein, 30 percent fat), then banished trans fats almost before the American public had heard of them, then embraced and dismissed the mysterious glycemic index.

So the bigs took a page from professional baseball and did what the New York Yankees do with competition they admire: They bought them. Nestlé bought PowerBar for $375 million, Kraft bought Balance Bar for close to $300 million, and Rexall Sundown bought Met-Rx for $108 million. Even many of those that remained independent, such as Clif Bar & Co., sold millions of dollars' worth of product—so you might take their wrapper copy about little sun-fed altruists toiling in organic fields and grinding up your own personal oat-and-whey combo while saving planets and whales with a grain of sea salt. This is big business.