Your Tongue Has Been Stolen!
Recently I read a book called The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor by Mark Schatzker because I am interested in understanding my troubled relationship with food. The book helped me understand some of the reasons why I eat the way I do, and some of the reasons that influence this. Things like the emotional needs that food fulfills, and the industry that profits off of that. I am also a little more aware of the steps I can take to reverse the years of damage and manipulation to my palate and body.
The Dorito Effect, very simply, is what happens when food gets blander and flavor technology gets better.
This effect can reasonably be tied to consequences like the obesity epidemic and “metabolic disturbance.”
The food crisis we are spending so much time and money on might be better thought of as a large-scale flavor disorder.
Schatzker thinks a part of the solution is to make food taste better through better farming practices, ones more geared towards reverting livestock and vegetables back to older versions of themselves, ones not designed for large quantities of production. Or more of a sweet spot of designing them for large scale production while also leaving room for foods nutrients.
It’s interesting that a lot of the flavor that we experience today is a copy of something else. “Natural flavoring” is a copy of natural flavors. I haven’t read the book but I assume Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation” would have a lot of good examples of this phenomenon of our contemporary culture.
In a later section of the book where Schatzker is explaining how Chicken gets its flavor, he explains that “modern broiler farmers add a yellow pigment to chicken feed - so the chickens on the supermarket shelf will look the same as chickens that have been running around outside eating leaves.”
He spends a few pages talking about Wilhelm Haarmann and the vanilla extract that he synthesized called vanillin in the 19th century out of pine cones. And how it was a nice cheap substitute for the pure thing, that could easily be made and wasn’t tied up in wars. “By the mid-1970s, the world was awash in Wilhelm Haarmann’s wonder power. Vanillin was cheap, it stored easily, and it didn’t come from politically unstable former French colonies. Everything about vanillin was perfect except for one thing: quality.”
Flavor companies became a huge industry. Farmers would worry about output, and flavor companies would worry about adding back the flavor that was lost during that production. There are “multinational flavor behemoths like Givaudan, Haarmann & Reimer, and International Flavor & Fragrances” whose purpose is to create flavors that mimic those found in nature. Extracts like vanillin are a commodity and companies like McCormick “set its sights on ‘complex’ fake vanilla.”
McCormick began selling a sweet-smelling liquid called Imitation Vanilla. Whereas vanilla extract featured hundreds of compounds, Imitation Vanilla had around thirty, and not one of them was made from vanilla beans. Vanilla had been chemically decapitated.
The process of extracting these imitation flavors reduces the original from something truly complex to something pseudo complex all while taking out the nutrients and other natural byproducts of the original as well.
Vanillin may have been vanilla’s biggest secret, but it was by no means its only secret. Vanilla contains hundreds of other aromatic compounds. Not a single one of these comes anywhere close to the dominance or likability of vanillin, and some of them don’t smell very vanilla-like on their own. These notes include ‘woody,’ ‘rummy,’ ‘smoky,’ and ‘watermelon.’ They are, nevertheless, essential to the experience of authentic vanilla. They give it what flavor scientists refer to as ‘depth,’ ‘structure,’ ‘body,’ and ‘dimension.’ On its own, vanillin is a blast of sweet cotton candy - fun but simple, a good-looking dimwit. If vanilla is a densely layered classic novel, vanillin is a comic book.
There is something odd to me about an “unknown” company that is so prevalent in our lives. Its background hum providing the flavors of our daily meals. I know that I recognize the McCormick name, it’s just not one of those brands that is upfront about its marketing. I don’t recall ever seeing a McCormick commercial, or billboard, or anything like that.
McCormick is in every aisle and on every shelf of the supermarket. The company provides “custom flavor solutions” for nine of the top ten American food companies and eight of the top ten food service companies (large chain restaurants, etc.) McCormick is in your pantry, your fridge, your freezer, and nearly every restaurant. Unless you are a hunter-gatherer or have spent your life obtaining calories via feeding tube, McCormick has used the science and psychology of food to make you happy. It’s probably happened in the last week.
It almost feels invasive. I don’t know if I can say that I ever really had a choice whether or not McCormick would be a part of my life. They just kind of glommed onto my family years before I was even born. McCormick was probably a part of my fetal development. One other thing I find eerie about McCormick and companies like it is how they probably know my emotional needs better than I do.
McCormick observes “need states.” A need state is an emotional requirement for food. A single mom who has to put together dinner for her fussy teenage daughters has a need state for a no-fuss dinner with a hint of adventure - the flavors of an exotic Asian country with lush forests and waterfalls, perhaps - to shoo away the dreariness of the Tuesday evening meal.
This all reminds me of a passage from Don Dillilo’s White Noise where a character is describing the grocery store:
Everything is concealed in symbolism, hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material. But it is psychic data, absolutely. The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. Energy waves, incident radiation. All the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering, rearranging, peeling off the layers of unspeakability. Not that we would want to, not that any useful purpose would be served.
When we walk through a supermarket and buy our groceries, we are walking through a maze of symbols that are asking for our attention. Or the groceries are telling us, selling us, that they can meet our needs.
There is a survey called the Yale Food Addiction Scale that “measures the degree to which people’s eating habits resemble classic addictive behavior like smoking cigarettes, snorting cocaine, or shooting heroin. The higher a person's score, the more his or her eating behavior resembles substance abuse.” This survey was used in a study that measured cravings in people, and to demonstrate “the way the brains of people who can’t control their eating are like the brains of people who can’t control their drug use.” Compared to people without behavioral food problems, food addictive types want food more.
The biggest difference between these two groups had nothing to do with drinking the milkshake. It was all about the anticipation generated by the picture. The food-addictive types wanted it more.
Daniel Plainview eat your heart out.
Their problems aren’t that they enjoy food too much. It’s that they want food too much. The desire for food to meet their emotional “need states” is elevated. Personally, I can attest to that. I know that when I actually get a meal that I am craving, I am almost never satisfied or as satiated as I imagined that I would be. The real pleasure of that experience comes from the anticipation of getting the meal. Though there is still powerful chemistry at work when I do eat these meals that are high in salt, sugar, and fat.
Salt, sugar, and fat are what psychologists call reinforcers. They trigger bursts of the potent neurotransmitters and activate the same brain circuitry as heroin and cocaine. Sugar is the worst. We are hardwired to love sweet. Babies fresh from the womb smile when their sweet receptors are triggered by sugar. Salt and fat similarly activate brain regions associated with desire and reward - and not just (food addicted-types) but in all of us. And when you mix them all together, look out. The food companies know this. The food companies, whose profit is directly related to the amount of food people eat, have been quietly amping up the amounts of salt, sugar, and fat in our foods, and the results are obvious.
An interesting way that this can be illustrated is knowing that a product “whose very purpose is to encourage repeat and escalating dosage” uses the same “flavoring” as food. Tobacco.
Cigarettes are flavored just the way Doritos, potato chips, soft drinks, salad dressings, chicken nuggets, and supermarket cheesecake are flavored. Men and women with advanced degrees purchase flavorings in bulk from flavor companies and put them in cigarettes. And industry newsletter from 1972 is open about the effect. Flavorings “make the product sell better.”
We have a complex and remarkable ability to know what we need from our food. It is based on our taste, smell, and feedback loops that interact between our brain and body. Flavoring companies - in tandem with agriculture that prioritized large yield over nutrient density - have thrown our natural systems for a loop. Schatzker says that this has turned us into “nutritional idiots.” The Dorito Effect has done this through a variety of methods.
Dilution of flavor, by making bland food that we enhance in ways more likely to blunt its nutrition further. Nutritional decapitation, where we take natural flavors and capture the essence of them without the nutritional benefits, like fiber, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. False variety, and cognitive deception:
A Dannon Strawberry Blitz Smoothie as an after-school snack (will fool us to) believe the product contains strawberries, even though it contains none.
Emotional deception
fake flavors take a preciously established liking for a real food and apply it to something else - usually large doses of calories - creating a heightened and nutritionally undeserved level of pleasure.
And flavor-nutrient confusion
A major aspect of obesity is an outsized desire for food, one that very often cannot be extinguished by food itself. By imposing flavors on foods without the corresponding nutrients, are we creating foods that are incapable of satiating the people who eat them?
Schatzker boils our food problem down to a flavor problem.
For half a century we’ve been making the stuff people should eat - fruits, vegetables, whole grains, unprocessed meats - incrementally less delicious. Meanwhile, we’ve been making the food people shouldn’t eat - chips, fast food, soft drinks, crackers - taste ever more exciting.
He has was he calls “Rules of Flavor.” One is that humans are flavor-seeking animals. “The pleasure provided by food, which we experience as flavor, is so powerful that only the most strong-willed among us can resist it.” Another rule that he has is that there is an intimate connection between flavor and nutrition. And his third rule plays off of that one, “Synthetic flavor technology not only breaks that connection, it also confounds it.”
One critique I have of the book is that the solutions he provides are mostly up to the individual, and they are expensive to boot. I can’t blame him though, the problems are wide-scale and baked into our system. The only current hope is to break out on your own, maybe grow your own food with heirloom seeds. The reason the food that is flavor-full is so expensive is because of the problems inherent in trying to feed 8 billion people.
The reason, alas, is yield. Even if every one of us from the lower middle class right on up to the 1 percent spent more on food to pay for those heirloom tomatoes, strawberries, corn, wheat, and chickens that cost $30 - a never-gonna-happen if - we still wouldn’t have heirloom flavor in the quantity we need. There isn’t enough land. The population of North America has more than doubled since 1948, while vast tracts of the best farmland have been eaten up by strip malls, golf courses, factories, and houses. The more land we use to feed ourselves, the more we encroach on the dwindling parcels of nature that are still left. Yield may have it’s downsides, but the depressing truth is we need it. Until someone figures out a way to crack the existential tradeoff between quantity and quality, real flavor will remain expensive and only a few will be able to afford it.
I am going to read more about things like this and try to learn more about how my body functions. Especially in relation to food. It feels good to be relieved of some of the guilt and shame that I feel about my body, knowing that my senses have been hijacked by multinational corporations in order to extract the most profit that they can from me. Knowing this might make it easier to resist the next bag of chips or fast food meal. I don’t believe that it will though really. It’s going to be a long and gradual process to get back to eating natural flavors. I will try to eat more fruits and vegetables with meals. I will try to get in tune with my natural ability to sense what nutrients I need.
But it’s nice to know that caving into cravings is not so much a failure on my part, but more of a result of a concerted effort to steal my tongue. I still think there is some personal responsibility I need to take to make sure I am eating as healthy as I can, but I won’t let myself feel so bad about not being able to resist the superfoods engineered to pack a flavor punch that’ll rocket anyone into Flavortown.