DORITO EFFECT
If you want to eat healthier, try adding the secret ingredient in junk food: flavour. Author Mark Schatzker explores the value of taste in a new book.
The key to understanding why we like the way things taste lies not so much right under our noses, but rather, in them.
The human nose, Mark Schatzker writes in his new book The Dorito Effect, is technology money can’t buy — and even if it could, it would be in the form of a device costing around $350,000. We perceive so much more about our food through olfactory stimulation than scent alone: we detect ripeness and umami, and we experience emotional responses to smells. Plug your nose and your sense of taste is impaired; unplug it, and the volatile aromatic compounds released when we eat food are taken up and processed as the nose, Schatzker writes, performs “its greatest talent: appreciating food.”
“No activity stimulates the human brain to the degree that tasting food does,” he writes. “Why did evolution endow us with a brain-hogging $350,000 flavour sensor and stick it right in the middle of everyone’s face?”
Because flavour, Schatzker argues, is far more important than you may think.
“We have this problem because we think food that’s delicious is bad,” Schatzker says over drinks on a recent night in Toronto, referring to the North American habit of equating things that taste great, like Doritos, with things that are particularly unhealthful, like Doritos. “We have to resist the lure, because that never goes to a good place. That clearly has not been working for us. If flavour is so bad, what the hell is it doing there?”
In embarking on a quest to solve this quandary, Schatzker ended up landing on a very particular — and wholly original — thesis: We may perceive delicious foods to be bad and tasteless ones to be good, he suggests in The
Dorito Effect, because much of our real food has so diminished in actual flavour due to overproduction. Like, for instance, tomatoes that taste like tap water, or chicken that needs to be drowned in seasoning to be made palatable. At the same time, the snack and processed food industries have excelled at engineering foods so exaggerated in their sensory appeal that they are at once irresistible and repulsive. We distrust big, bold flavours, in other words, because they no longer exist where they’re supposed to.
The little orange chip of the book’s title isn’t cited without reason; in retelling the history of Doritos in his opening pages, Schatzker sets up one of the more important points of
The Dorito Effect: at first, Doritos were just tortilla chips, triangular and salty but without any defining taste. It was only after the addition of “flavourings” — the original Doritos were taco-flavoured, whatever that may have meant — that sales took off. We may love salt, fat and sugar, Schatzker says, but only so much.
“A good example is Fanta,” Schatzker offers. “If you took a drink of sugar water you’d be like, that’s insipid. I’m not going to drink that. But when you mix in these flavourings, it tastes like orange.” He pauses. “A cartoon version of orange, yes,” he jokes before continuing, “The important part, though, is that you like it. There’s that old saying: ‘If it tastes good, spit it out.’ ”
The Dorito Effect is neither an indictment of fast food — Schatzker readily admits in person and in print that he’s not immune to its charms — nor a paean to the virtues of healthy eating. Instead, he liberally sprinkles his investigations into the science and history of taste with humour. During our interview, the conversation twice turns to the topic of goats: dozens of pages in the book are dedicated to a series of Utah experiments that deduced that the animals will avoid foods that have in the past made them sick, even if they smell, look or taste good. I relate to the goats, telling Schatzker that I often avoid ice cream even though I love it. “I knew it,” he responds. “I had you pegged for an ice cream goat.”
Schatzker was inspired to delve deeper into the significance of flavour during research for his first book, Steak, which detailed one man’s (his) quest to find the most delicious cut of beef. He discovered — much to his surprise — the tastiest steak came from grass-fed cattle that was “nicer to the cow and nicer to the planet,” Schatzker says. The best-tasting beef also turned out to pack in the most nutritional value. “It wasn’t what I expected,” he says. “When I set off on my steak journey, I consciously excluded health [as a topic of concern],” Schatzker continues. “This isn’t about health, this is about flavour.”
The most revelatory thing about The Dorito Effect is an expansion of the same idea: healthy food and food that is flavourful are one and the same.
Take the case of olive oil, the most highly prized of which is characterized by what you might describe as a burning sensation at the back of your throat and just one of the numerous foods whose taste-health relationship is investigated in the book; the same burning sensation is a noted characteristic of the pain reliever ibuprofen. Not long after, it was discovered that olive oil contains anti-inflammatory properties — not unlike ibuprofen. The stronger the burn the higher the quality, but also the greater the health benefits. Flavour, in other words, is information.
The intimate connection between taste and the nutritional information it departs, Schatzker says, has been confounded by processing and synthetic flavour technology. Which is to say, by junk food — or, as he has it, “food that tastes like something that it is not.” Artificial flavours fool the part of our brains that translate the pleasure we feel when we eat flavourful food into the message that we’re getting what we need. In other words, better food satisfies us on a greater level.
“No matter how much you like peaches,” Schatzker says, “there’s no way you could eat 1,200 calories’ worth of peaches” because your body gets its nutritional quota in two or three. A bag of Doritos, on the other hand? Calorie dense but nutritionally void — satiety only comes in numbers.
“There’s a thing in animals called neophobia and neophilia,” Schatzker explains. “Neophobia is kind of a fear of new foods; neophilia is a desire for them. Typically, animals that are well-nourished are neophobic, which is to say, they don’t need anything else. One of the things I find interesting, culturally, about North American neophilia is that it’s like, somehow, we aren’t getting what we need. I think it’s an indication — and maybe the science isn’t sound here — that our diets are actually lacking.”
The fact that we eat junk food with a greater frequency than our Asian or European counterparts, Schatzker suggests, has something to do with a culinary phenomenon more pervasive in North American food culture than elsewhere: “We’re trend-obsessed.”
“In North America; companies are constantly innovating on flavour,” he says. “They’re essentially serving you the same thing nutritionally, which is carbs, sugar and fat, but now it comes in shishito pepper flavour.”
Schatzker remembers a conversation he had once, with another food writer, about cold-pressed canola oil. “It’s like Canada’s olive oil, and we should celebrate it,” he recalls saying. “And he said, ‘Oh, that’s over; I wrote about that two years ago.’ And I said, ‘Well, if it tastes good, why is it over?’ ”
The solution, Schatzker reiterates, is simple: we must recalibrate our palates. In order to do that, we must seek out flavourful, whole foods — easier said than done, he admits, even for more affluent segments of the population, and those with greater access to things like farmer’s markets. But he’s hopeful: “The exciting thing to think of is that maybe we are, right now, with flavour where we were in 1980 with craft beer and wine, which is to say it was a desolate wasteland, people would go to Europe, then come back and cry into their hands. But look at how far we’ve come.”
He himself has adjusted his own palate: after the Michelinstarred chef Alain Ducasse told him that finding good ingredients is more difficult than cooking them, Schatzker started visiting more markets, eating more vegetables and, eventually, actually craving them. “My message isn’t all that original,” he says. “If we want people to eat real food, it has to taste better. It can’t taste like cardboard, and everything sort of tastes like cardboard now.”
“The word sustainable isn’t in the book,” he continues. “Organic is there a couple times, mainly because I’m criticizing it. Everyone always has really lofty ambitions for what their book should do. I would really love if this could modify the food conversation towards flavour, particularly how it’s lacking.”
In that case, it’s the right time for The Dorito Effect to hit shelves; by the time the book will be available, this year’s spring harvest will be in full swing. A nice reminder that those bright green asparagus stalks look, smell and taste good to you for reasons you couldn’t possibly begin to imagine.