All About Flavor

Do you enjoy spicy food? Where do all those spices come from? I grew up in the tropics where a smorgasbord of spices is abundant in many of my favorite dishes. Warmer temperatures, lots of rain, and lots of sun, are great for growing flora. Competition is fierce for nutrients and energy – it’s literally a jungle out there!

 

Spices were so desired and so valuable that the Western powers fought their way to establish overseas colonies so they could control the spice trade. They left devastation in their wake, not just to the people and economies of those countries, but to the very nature of food. The story of flavor in our food is enigmatically told by Mark Schatzker in The Dorito Effect. Reading it makes me long for the old days where maybe vegetables, meat, and fruit, was tastier and more flavorful. But I might be misremembering and over-romanticizing.

 

The monstrous agricultural industry, with its focus on mass production and efficiency, has essentially made food blander. In the supermarket, the chickens or tomatoes are larger and plumper, but at a cost of flavor. What do we do? We mask it in spices, sauces, and other strong flavors. I haven’t eaten plain chicken breast meat in ages; it’s tasteless. And with the increasing convenience of spice pastes and mixes, we now flavor our food with molecules that fool us into thinking our food is tasty, without the accompanying nutrition that would have come without including the source ingredients.

 

Schatzker discusses the thesis that our bodies know what is good for us, at least in the distant old days before the agricultural revolution. We still observe this in animal behavior, where they may choose to eat different foods depending on what nutrients they may be short of in their diet. Scientists can trick those animals with flavoring molecules – that’s how we get chickens to be so plump and put on weight quickly. Without the sleight of taste, the chickens would stop eating the quick-fattening food after a while, as their bodies tell their taste buds they are missing something! We’re doing the same thing to ourselves.

 

The flavors of food come from secondary metabolites. Primary metabolism refers to the core processes of interconverting energy and biomass. Those are the chemical pathways I study in the origin of life. But the more I look at secondary metabolism, the more fascinating it seems. In flora, the chemical molecules may be related to smell, taste and flavor as a whole. Fruity odors are attractive to fauna that may help disperse seeds or their equivalent. Bitter tastes tell pests to stay away from the poison. It’s the dose that makes the poison, and relatively large organisms such as ourselves will happily consume these bitter tastes for medicine, or for the buzz it gives us in caffeine or cocaine. And now food chemists, by extracting or synthesizing flavor molecules, have messed up our habitual pathways honed by evolution.

 

Schatzker discusses the “flavor problem” in the following way: “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.” Here are his three “Rules of Flavor”:

 

1.     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.

2.     In nature, there is an intimate connection between flavor and nutrition.

3.     Synthetic flavor technology not only breaks that connection, it also confounds it.

 

What can we do? Evolution is not going to help us veer from Rule #1 anytime soon, because that’s a long and slow process of adaptation. Rule #3 has been so co-opted by the food and beverage industry that it’s unclear what can or will be done when profits and costs and competition rule. We’ve been doing Rule #2 to spice up our bland mass-produced food. Can food scientists pivot to growing food or producing livestock that is both tasty and nutritious? Schatzker seems to think so and provides a few examples of people doing so, but they’re in the minority, and the cost is high. My suspicion is that the divide between the have and have-nots will continue to increase and those that can pay for more nutritious food will do so, while the masses will continue to suffer from a host of increasing health issues.

 

Reading The Dorito Effect was both depressing and enlightening at the same time. I’m depressed by the state of food and nutrition in the twenty-first century. As someone increasingly interested in biochemistry, I was enlightened by the complex relationships between flora, fauna, biological niches, ecology, and how that plays out in the variety of secondary metabolites being released by plants – such amazing organisms! I feel there is so much more to learn and I’m just barely picking at the surface.