Feed Me Flavour!
Nothing Tastes Like What It Is And What You Can Do About It
“If humans grow as fast as broilers (supermarket chicken), a 3kg (6.6lb) new-born baby would weigh 300kg (660lb) after 2 months. Once upon a time we ate to sustain ourselves. Now food itself is toxic. What happened?”
Two truths about food that we now know beyond any doubt:
Everything we eat is getting blander. Potatoes are less potatoey, tomatoes less tomatoey, corn not as corny. The inexorable quest for higher yields is driving this.
Flavour technology is getting phenomenally better. Food tech-whizzes are adept at isolating “flavour” molecules from food and transplanting them into whatever the hungry masses want. Sugar water that tastes like orange or grapefruit or kumquat. Potatoes that taste like smoked bacon. Cheese that has hints of garlic. Easy.
Marrying things like wafers, crisps, tacos to flavours like “sweet chilli”, “garlic mayo”, “Szechwan” is rife. You see, unlike a real taco, Doritos don’t spoil, are never overdone, always taste the same, don’t need to be cooked and are dirt cheap. The tech exists, the demand is plentiful, and the free-market adores it. So successful is this cycle, that only 31% of Americans aren’t overweight or obese.
Mark Schatzker’s eye-opening, forensic analysis of our food choices is unputdownable. He tears down the illusion of “healthy eating”, breaks down the unholy nothingness we ingest every day, takes aim at greedy supermarkets and the multibillion-dollar flavouring industry and fires science-filled bullets that permeate the page to enter your consciousness. And he does it in language a ten-year-old would understand. A no-holds-barred, unflinching, scientific argument that convinced me to eat better. Now let me convince you.
Nothing Tastes Like What It Is Anymore
We all are flavour-seeking machines. As Schatzker puts it, “Eating is as much to do with nutrients as sex is to procreation”. We don’t crave vitamins, antioxidants or omega 3. We crave flavour. It’s biological. A hefty chunk of our genome is dedicated to processing flavour. Flavour influences our behaviour and psychology. We anticipate, crave, seek and consume flavour.
And because food — real food — is getting blander, we crank the flavour up to 11.
Why is food getting blander? Instagrammization.
Dilution: The Instagrammization of Food
The USA alone consumes 26 billion pounds of chicken every year. A hundred years ago, the chicken you’d eat lived for 12–18 weeks before its neck was strangled, and it was fed into a meat-grinder. Today, most chickens don’t make it past 4–6 weeks before they end up on your plate. We now hatch, grow, fatten and kill more chicken than ever before. Market forces: demand and supply. What we lose in quality, we more than makeup for in quantity. Today’s chicken looks more like a “textbook chicken” than a chicken from the ’50s. It’s ample breasted, plump and long-legged. The trade-off is that it tastes like damp cotton. But we have thousands of herbs, dips, oils, pastes, spices and sauces you can use to mask the taste. Chicken meat then isn’t so much meat as a canvas for artificial flavouring.
Tomato growers seized upon a mutation that made them uniformly red. They selectively bred this, so the product appears much more tomatoey: luscious, bright red, plump, juicy, ready to eat, #instagramworthy. Before this, tomatoes would have green spots on their skin. These little patches of chlorophyll powered the “flavour-marking” process of the tomatoes. Alas. Even if we were to re-engineer this, tomatoes would still be bland. Selective breeding has caused tomatoes, on a genetic level, to forget how to taste good.
This is dilution. And it’s happened everywhere. To everything we eat.
The taste of animal flesh is influenced by what an animal eats. Today’s chicken doesn’t eat like its forefathers. No more bugs, grass or herbs. Instead, it is fed a carb-rich, mineral-filled diet to get them as fat as fast as possible. Terrific yield, terrible taste.
The Psychology Of Smell
Flavour isn’t only what you taste. It’s more of what you smell. It’s the aroma. “Retronasal olfaction” is when aroma enters your nose not through the nostrils but through a hole in the back of your throat. Wine tasters stimulate this on purpose. All of us do it every time we eat.
Salt, sugar and fat are “reinforcers”. They trigger the same pleasure centres in our brains as cocaine or heroin. We love them. New-born babies smile when their sweet receptors are triggered by sugar. Again, craving flavour is innate. It’s biological.
Evidence cited in the book shows how smokers crave cigarettes more than they like smoking. Alcoholics crave alcohol more than they like drinking alcohol. Some of us crave food more than we enjoy eating food. We are “cravers” more than “doers”. It’s psychological.
No activity stimulates the human brain more than tasting food does.
But why do things have a flavour? And why have we evolved to aggressively seek it out?
Nutritional Wisdom: Flavour Is Information
Flavour is an evolutionary signal. It carries information. What information? Nutritional information. We are already aware of what nutrients our bodies need because that information is encased in flavour. In nature, flavour never appears without nutrition. This is why we crave flavour. We know, nutritionally, what we need, where to find it and how much of it to eat. Thanks to flavour. This knowledge is nutritional wisdom.
Here’s an illuminating example of nutritional wisdom: pregnant women in the tropics are overcome by a powerful desire to eat dirt, mud or clay in a phenomenon called geophagy. This also occurs in several animals — sheep and goats, for example. Evidence suggests this can correct a mineral imbalance and rid the body of toxins.
Another example cited in the book: sheep that were fed flavoured hay ate more of it, compared to sheep that were fed unflavoured hay. They also came back for more the next day. Flavour-seeking is an innate quest for nutrition.
Now, let’s put all this together.
Conclusion
Flavour is a signal for nutrition. We, and all other living beings, are flavour-seekers. More nutrition equals more flavour. Overproduction of fruit, vegetables and meat has rendered them bland. We bridge the “flavour gap” by caking it in artificial flavouring. But our bodies mistake these newly fangled flavours for nutrition and continue to gorge. Satiety is a built-in component of nutritional wisdom. When eating “real” food, we stop when we ingest the required nutrients without suffering a food-hangover. But what we get today is only the illusion of nutrition, not actual nutrition. So, we keep eating in the earnest quest to “find” nutrition. We never do. We find we are overweight instead.
One Other Thing
This book is my personal gamechanger. I was never a picky eater. I am addicted to Smoky BBQ coated peanuts, which I’ve convinced myself is “healthy” cause you know, peanuts. Betwixt turning pages with my BBQ masala-soaked peanuts and using my tongue to tug at the peanut debris logged in my molars, I found my flavour-seeking rock-bottom. This book led me to the light and made me look directly at the truth: I am eating illusions, not reality. I vow to ask myself every time I eat or drink something: where is the flavour coming from? If it’s biological, carry on. If it’s chemically induced in a lab, stop. I love food and this book taught me why we should all strive to eat the best-tasting real food we can find. Expensive? Sure. But still cheaper than the medical bills three decades down the line. And the savings I’ll be making on ketchup, McDonald’s, dips and Coke will be huge.
Convinced?