Mark Schatzker is a freelance writer, radio columnist for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, and author who writes about food, flavor, and nutrition. His most recent book is The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor, in which he describes a food industry interested in quantity, shelf-life, and disease resistance to the exclusion of flavor and nutrition. He recently spoke with news editor Art Keller about the consequences of this, which may be further-reaching than you think. The interview has been condensed and edited.

Art Keller: I have to say, your book made me look at our supermar-

ket aisles in a whole new way. What inspired you to write The Dorito

Effect?

Mark Schatzker: You know, the main thing was really curiosity. Prior

to writing The Dorito Effect, I’d written a book about steak. A book that

was a lot of fun to write, but a book that made me notice a few things

and made me ask a few interesting questions. What I noticed was that

the vast, vast majority of beef that the world consumes today is much

blander than it used to be. We cook steak differently. We didn’t use to

have rubs and sauces and things like that. It used to just be salt and

pepper.

I’d visit cattle ranchers, and they’d tell me that pregnant cows intuitively

somehow know to eat more protein than heifers that aren’t pregnant,

because they have a greater protein requirement to support the fetus.

And this made me ask all sorts of questions about why does food have

flavor, why do some things seem delicious, and really, how has that

changed? And broadly speaking, there’s two complementary trends.

One is that all the whole foods that we grow, the things that come off

farms, strawberries, cucumbers, chickens, tomatoes, everything is get-

ting blander. And as it’s getting blander, it’s getting less nutritious. On

the other side of things, since about the 1960s, we’ve gotten very good

Photo: Courtesy of Mark Schatker

Art Keller is the news editor of The Technoskeptic. Since serving in the armed forces and the CIA, he has been a freelance writer and commentator.

a r t k e l l e r

Interview:

On Flavor and Food

Mark Schatzker

Food

Photo: iStock.com / merc67

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at making things taste delicious, due to huge leaps forward in flavor

technology, which is to say, the ability to imbue foods with chemicals

that make them seem delicious. And this, to me, tells us so much about

where food has gone wrong. Because if you look at flavor as the incen-

tive to eat, it’s literally transferred from wholesome things like fruits and

vegetables to Doritos, potato chips, soft drinks.

AK: Right. One of the things that was most striking to me was the

description of the term that you will see on food: “natural flavor.” So,

explain how I can buy, for example, a strawberry yogurt, and it’ll say

“natural flavorings” on the ingredient list, and I could make the false

conclusion that real strawberries were somehow involved in making it

taste like strawberries.

MS: Right. Most people don’t really probe deeply what it means, they

just see that word and it sort of allays their fears, that this is something

wholesome. So, I’m going to give you a long answer, ’cause we need

to have a little history.

In the mid 1950s, the first-ever commercial gas chromatograph went

on sale. And this was a big deal, because prior to then, scientists really

had no idea what made food flavorful. I mean, we knew about things

like sweetness and sour. But so much of the richness and nuance of food

comes from aromas, which you smell through the back of your nose as

you’re eating. And up until the 1950s, we had no idea what was doing

that. We had a few very basic fake flavors, things that we discovered

almost by accident. But for the most part, if you wanted to experience

the flavor of orange back then, you had to eat an orange.

The gas chromatograph suddenly meant that scientists could identify

the complex chemicals that exist in food in tiny quantities, parts per

million, parts per billion, even parts per trillion. And they finally knew

what it was that made coffee taste like coffee and orange taste like

orange and chicken taste like chicken. Well, it wasn’t long after they

did that, that they started manufacturing these chemicals in industrial

facilities and we started adding them to food. Now, for a very long time,

these would be listed as artificial flavors. This always threw people into

a panic, ’cause they think, “It’s artificial, it must be terrible for me, it

must be giving me cancer.”

So the flavor industry more recently said, “Well,

is there some way we could find a natural source

for these things?” So what they did is they went

out, quote, “in nature,” and found sources for

let’s say, the same chemicals that you would find

that evoke the experience of strawberry. And

they would find, well, you can get one of these

chemicals in grass clippings. And you can get

another one of these chemicals in let’s say, a bark

from a tree. And you can make another one of

these chemicals by genetically modifying a yeast.

And then you get all these chemicals together

and you’ve got your strawberry flavor. And you

get to list it as “natural flavor” because at some

point, these chemicals did come from something

that grew in nature. So it’s not technically wrong,

but I would say it’s highly misleading, for the

same reason you could call morphine natural,

’cause it comes from a plant.

AK: Yes. I actually knew this was going on in

the craft beer industry because my brother has

worked in it for a long time, and he said there

were up to, I want to say 35 different chemicals

and additives that you can put in American beer

and still list it as “all natural, no preservatives.”

And we’re talking about foaming agents and

head-stabilizing agents and a bunch of other

things. And the reason they have to do that, is

that they’re using a lot of cheap ingredients in

the mass-produced beer, and so it tastes like

nothing. It’s a beer that’s brewed with corn and

rice as opposed to wheat or barley or hops or

the other things that craft beers use, and that’s

why it needs all these things to make it have a

head, to make it the right color, to give it some

semblance of flavor. But talk a bit about the con-

cept of dilution, and how it relates both to flavor

and nutrition.

essentially devoted the last twenty years plus of

his life to cracking the mystery of what’s wrong

with tomatoes. And what he’s found, two things.

The first is that by intensely breeding tomatoes to

be more productive, to be more disease-resistant,

and to have a longer shelf life, we’ve aggres-

sively selected for these traits, and in doing so,

and by not selecting flavor, we’ve lost flavor.

But there’s an even more interesting insight that

Harry Klee had. When he started to figure out

the flavor compounds in tomatoes that were giv-

ing tomatoes their deliciousness, he thought,

“How is the tomato making this flavor?” ’Cause

he thought, “If I can figure out how the tomato

makes the flavor, and I can figure out what

genes are doing that, then I can start to try and

single out these genes, and breed better tasting

tomatoes.”

He and a scientist named Steve Goff looked at

how tomatoes make their flavors, and they found

there’s about 26 flavor compounds in tomatoes

that make us go, “Wow, that’s an awesome

tomato!” And in every single case, he found that

the tomato made that flavor compound from an

essential nutrient, so things like carotenoids,

which we get vitamin A from, or omega-3s, or

essential amino acids. Our body does not have

the ability to perceive the amino acid, the caro-

tenoids, and the Omega-3s in tomatoes, but we

do have the ability to perceive the flavors that

are associated with them. So in that regard, it

has found this link between flavor and nutrition.

MS: Yeah, I think this is a really important subject. We notice this dilu-

tion that’s taken place when we buy supermarket tomatoes, for example,

or supermarket strawberries. Those are two really good examples where

they look enticing, a red color, and then you bite into them and you’re

totally underwhelmed. Strawberries that taste like water, tomatoes

that taste like plastic. The reason this has happened is because we’ve

intensely bred these over the years to be hyper-productive. If you look

at the amount of tomatoes we can grow on an acre of land, it is more

than ten times the quantity of tomatoes coming from that acre of land

than in 1932. And we’ve paid for it. We’ve paid for it in flavor, we’ve also

paid for it in nutrition, which is to say that these whole foods that we’re

growing are getting less dense in the micronutrients, vitamins, minerals.

So whole foods are in some level getting less wholesome.

It turns out that these micronutrients actually have no flavor. They’re

almost totally inert. Which is one of the reasons nutritionists have never

really put much stock in the experience of flavor, ’cause it seems chemi-

cally entirely divorced from nutrition. But it turns out that we found out

that this really isn’t the case.

So there’s a guy at the University of Florida named Harry Klee. And

in 1988 he was hired by Monsanto to create a better tomato. And they

thought back then that the reason tomatoes were so awful is because

they were picked green and they were stored in warehouses and then

they would be fogged with ethylene gas to make them ripen. So they

thought, “Well, if we can create a tomato that ripens slowly, we can get it

kind of half-ripe on the vine, and then ship it to the supermarket and it’ll

taste great.” So Harry Klee did just this for them. And what he found was

that it didn’t really work. He created a GMO tomato that ripened more

slowly, but it didn’t taste a whole lot better than the other tomatoes.

Well, at this point, he had kind of a big realization that the problems with

tomato flavor went a lot deeper than just being picked green. And he’s

“ What we found is that there’s a direct relationship between how that tomato tastes and how nutritious it is. ”

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What we do is we pick up the vapors that come

off the tomato when we smell it and when we

chew it. And what we found is that there’s a

direct relationship between how that tomato

tastes and how nutritious it is.

AK: I would say one of the most exciting parts

of the book is your description of Harry Klee’s

tomato research. What’s a little bit depressing

was his efforts to get it adopted in the commercial

tomato-growing community, despite the out-

standing flavor and good yield of his newest

version of tomato. Has there been any progress

on that horizon?

MS: Yeah, that’s an interesting subject in and

of itself. He’s developed a tomato, it’s called the

Garden Gem, and it’s not genetically modified,

it’s just a straight-up cross. He crossed his best-

tasting heirloom with a modern variety that has

all these modern traits that we love: yield, dis-

ease resistance. And what he

got was a tomato that tastes as

good as the heirloom parent

but has all these modern char-

acteristics. So it’s like a miracle

tomato! And yet, it’s hard to

get the rest of the world to see

that. And it shows us to what

degree our system has become

perverted and how flavor is just

not in the equation.

Harry Klee’s approached grow-

ers, and he said, “Hey, try my

tomato,” and a bunch of them

said, “Sure, you know, I’ll plant

a hundred plants, we’ll see how it does.” And

they say, “Yeah, it’s a great-tasting tomato,” but

then they say, “You know, it’s a little bit smaller,

and that means my labor costs go up because it

takes five plucks to get one pound versus three

plucks.” I mean, it seems almost demented, but when you realize how

tight the margins are, this is where their profit is. And then they will also

tell you, “I can deliver tons and tons of tomatoes to any supermarket. The

supermarkets don’t care if they’re flavorful.” There’s no box to tick that

says flavor, there’s no flavor bonus that will give you an extra 500 bucks

’cause your tomatoes were delicious this week. So there’s no incentive

for them to grow tomatoes. So it’s been very hard to get industry and

supermarkets and even consumers to wake up and say, “You know, hey

folks, maybe paying 99 cents for food isn’t the best strategy.”

That said, since I wrote the book, I think it is starting to change through

a lot of hard work. Harry Klee recently had an article in Science, and that

started to get some attention. I live in Toronto and I’ve gotten several

farmers now growing the Garden Gem and another variety, and people

love it. The online grocery delivery company Fresh Direct, which is

based in New York, will be selling some Garden Gems this summer. So

I think things are starting to change, but it’s certainly not easy.

AK: Yeah, that was definitely my impression, that the growth of the

enjoyment of delicious tomatoes is kind of effectively being blocked by

the food procurement system in North America.

MS: And also, you know, some of the blame does

lie on us. We have to recognize that every time we

go to a supermarket and we buy something on sale,

something priced really low, we are voting with

our dollars and we’re telling industry we value

quantity over quality.

AK: One of the things that struck me, especially

when you were talking about eating some heirloom

chicken, is how much more satisfying it was despite

eating only a tiny bit of it. And so I was wonder-

ing, have you done the math on industrial farming

versus slower-growth farming, factoring in the

conception that the way we use food now, we eat

so much more of it than is good for us, and on top

of that we waste about one-third of the food that is grown? It seems that

if we could eat less but be satisfied by less and stop throwing away so

much, we could actually afford to rely more on slower-growing breeds

of chicken and tomatoes and what have you, which would allow more

flavor and more nutrition.

MS: That’s a great question, and this is something I experienced per-

sonally. I got a farmer friend to grow some of these heirloom chickens I

talk about in the book, and an heirloom chicken is essentially the kind

of chicken our grandparents or great-grandparents were eating in the

1940s. A chicken in the 1940s would have been around 16 or 18 weeks

old when you bought it at the butcher shop. A chicken that you buy today

is about six weeks old. And a chicken today will actually be bigger. So

this shows you just how radically we’ve changed chicken genetics.

However, this chicken meat isn’t anything like the chicken of yore. It’s

nutritionally different. If you look at nutritional density, you can literally

see it in the skin, it’ll have a yellow skin and you’re literally seeing caro-

tenoids. It’ll have more omega-3s. But the biggest difference is the flavor.

If you look at old cookbooks, you look up a recipe for fried chicken, you

don’t see 11 different herbs and spices. You see salt and pepper.

So if you look at a modern recipe for fried chicken by someone like

Thomas Keller, they brine the chicken with all sorts of stuff, you know,

garlic, onions, bay leaves. They will make like a biscuit crust that will

have garlic powder and cayenne pepper and all sorts of stuff, and then

they deep fry it, so you got this really crunchy exterior. Back in the day,

they just dredged chicken in flour, with salt and pepper and shallow-

fried it, so you didn’t have this really thick skin. The description I’m

giving, you’re probably thinking, “Wow, the modern one must taste

way better.” It doesn’t. The heirloom chicken has such a profound,

warm and satisfying chickeny flavor that, until you taste it, you really

can’t understand it.

But the most interesting thing about this is how satisfying it is. And I

cook heirloom chickens all the time now. One or two pieces will totally

satisfy you. You’ll eat it and you’ll think, “My gosh, this is so delicious,”

but you don’t have this weird compulsion to keep stuffing your face.

You’re just satisfied. Real food, I think, is satisfying in a way that pro-

cessed food just can’t be.

AK: I would say that lack of satisfaction is just on display every time you

walk around. You see the profound obesity problem both in the US and

to a lesser extent Canada—it’s chronic overeating across entire sectors

of society, and as far as I know, you’re the first person to make the link

between a lack of flavor and stuffing our faces to chase a satisfaction

that we can’t get, because we’re losing the quality of the food. I like the

Julia Child quote about what the modern chicken tastes like.

MS: Yeah, well it’s interesting, she wrote

Mastering the Art of French Cooking [in 1961].

And this was just about a decade into our effort

to, quote, “improve chicken.” And she noticed

even then that these modern chickens were

cheap and plump and wonderful looking, but

they taste, she said, “like teddy bear stuffing.”

It’s sort of like a Dorito, in the sense that it’s just

a vehicle on which you impose flavor, and if you

didn’t put that flavor on, it wouldn’t taste like

anything.

Contrast that with a real chicken, where, you

know, people talk about heirloom chickens are

more expensive—and they are, there’s no ques-

tion they’re more expensive—but they go farther.

You eat less of it, but you can also use them for

so much more. I roasted a chicken a couple of

weeks ago, fed the whole family, and then there

was this carcass left over that still had meat on

it. I made a stock from it, I picked the meat off,

and I made a risotto with it with some mushrooms

that I picked. And the flavor of that risotto was

spectacular. And all I could think was, I got two

amazing meals out of this one small chicken,

which, per pound, does cost more than a modern

broiler. But they were such satisfying, delicious

meals, and there’s no way you could get that

mileage out of a modern chicken.

AK: All right, explain for us why it’s important to

get real flavor back in our food, and what people

can do to do that.

MS: We have this obsession in North America

with talking about nutrients. We think that if

Photo:

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I cut out carbs, or if I cut out fat, or if I count calories, I can perfectly

cater my body’s needs. I don’t think there’s any evidence that anyone

can do that. But I think the body already has a good system to do this,

which is flavor. And getting back to what I said earlier about cows that

intuitively know that they need to eat more protein, I think we have

this ability too. We’ve screwed it up though, ’cause we’ve robbed our

food of flavor, and we’ve also put flavor chemicals in the wrong foods

so we’ve literally crossed wires.

Flavor is the incentive to eat. Very, very few of us can exist in a world

where our food isn’t delicious. So we have to get deliciousness back to

where it should be, because that’s the key to getting people to eat more

healthily. If you go back to that example of the tomato, what do you do

with a bland tomato? You end up dumping ranch dressing all over it.

But if you’ve got a great-tasting tomato, it just needs a little sprinkling

of sea salt, maybe a little olive oil, and to put ranch dressing on it would

be a crime, because you’d be covering up this flavor.

So when you get flavor back into the foods that it’s supposed to be in,

it’s so much easier to eat properly. You’re naturally attracted to the foods

you should be eating.

AK: Seems like flavor is turning out to be the route to solving the prob-

lem of obesity in some way. And this is one of the problems. By the time

we’ve got enough scientific data to prove we’re using a technology in a

bad way, we’ve got a pattern of pernicious use really deeply embedded

in our society, and it’s really hard to root it out at that point.

MS: Yeah, absolutely, and it’s a great point. I’m certainly not against

any kind of technology, but we never look at the knock-on effects of

things, we just look at things very superficially in the moment, without

asking, “Well, what’s going to be the effect of this?”

The very first Doritos were just salted tortilla chips. And the complaint

about them was that they sounded Mexican but didn’t taste Mexican.

So Frito-Lay added taco flavor. And it was the

flavorings that turned a snack nobody wanted

to eat into a snack people literally couldn’t stop

eating. The guy who invented Doritos is a guy

named Arch West. I don’t think he was an evil

person, he was doing his job. When we tinker

with things like flavor technology, we tend not to

ask the bigger questions, which is, “Well, what’s

this going to do to the health of the country in

20 or 30 years?” And that’s how we have to start

looking at things.

AK: If people want to try some of Harry’s toma-

toes, or some of these heirloom chickens that you

talk about in the book, which sound fantastically

delicious, how can they get hold of them?

MS: So heirloom chickens are tricky. You’re not

going to find them at the supermarket, generally

speaking. See if there’s anyone doing anything in

your area. Farmers’ markets are a good place to

go. But you gotta ask questions. Ask the farmer

the breed and ask their age of slaughter. Look for

anything older than ten weeks old, and definitely

look for chickens that have been pastured, which

is to say, they live out on green grass, ’cause then

they’re eating the grass, they’re eating bugs,

they’re getting other things in their diet other

than chicken feed, and that’s where the flavor

comes from.

As far as Harry’s tomatoes go, in fact, for a ten-

dollar donation to the University of Florida, he’ll

send you a packet of seeds, and you can grow

them yourself. It’s fun to grow your own toma-

toes and it’s a great way to get in touch with real

tomato flavor.

AK: OK great. It’s been great talking to you.

MS: You’ve asked some great questions, so this

has been a lot of fun.