Eating Doritos

Tamar Adler reviews Mark Schatzker’s The Dorito Effect in a recent edition of NYTBR. It’s another book about food, but Schatzker traces the problems with food back to breeding of plants and animals. In Adler’s summary: “Over the last 70 years, American animal and plant breeding has focused on yield, pest resistance and appearance—not flavor.” 

Well, so what? Can’t we just add flavor? I mean, look at Doritos!

Schatzker argues that this breaks the natural connection between flavor and nutrition. Adler again: “Flavor means nutrition. Omega-3 fatty acids have flavor. Phenylethanol, a chemical compound humans love and often describe as a “rose note” in tomatoes, is made by an essential amino acid, which its presence signifies. Flavor’s purpose is to help us become like ingestive homing pigeons. Our bodies learn to draw connections between flavors and the physiological responses they signal.” 

Our stomachs and intestines have a “latent intelligence,” he argues, that kicks into gear when activated by familiar flavors: “We can seek out and find what we need, nutritionally, and stop eating once we get it.” On the other hand, “Synthetic-flavor technology makes bland ingredients attractive without supplying the myriad benefits of the real thing. The twin forces of flavor dilution and fake flavor have short-circuited the biological basis for mutable appetite.”

So following your taste buds is the route to good nutrition, so long as what we’re tasting is the food itself and not some additive.