The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

Schatzker, Mark. The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor. 2015. 259p. 498 mins. ISBN 9781476724218. Available as an audiobook from Overdrive.

Older people often complain that the food they eat is bland and doesn’t taste like the food they used to eat when they were children. For the most part, they are right. Over the last one hundred years, humans have managed to tremendously increase the yield of food. Crops now produce five, ten, or sometimes twenty times the amount of food they did a few decades ago. Thanks to the green revolution, we are able to feed an ever increasing population. However, it comes with costs.

Eating chicken used to be an expensive proposition, but industrial processes now make chicken fatter quicker, all the while keeping the price cheap. However, much like the crops we eat, what has been lost in this industrialization and standardization is the taste these foods developed as they aged. To compensate for this, food companies developed flavoring compounds to ensure that the taste of any given product could be enhanced. The birth of the Dorito chip is symptomatic of this process. A perfectly good crunchy corn chip was made to taste like an entire taco, thus opening supermarket doors to this new product. But in the process our brains became tricked by these new flavors that are not related to the taste of the food.

In this book the author explores a growing gap between how the food taste (better and better) and the nutritional value it has (worse and worse). For examples, blueberry waffles in the frozen section of the grocery store contain no blueberries, yet the consumer is baited and switched to a product that taste just like blueberries, without the nutritional value of actually eating blueberries. Societies worldwide are experiencing this phenomena, which leads to higher rates of obesity and diseases.

Other countries have taken measures to address these issues, by banning flavoring, and by consumers being aware of the products they buy. Chicken is more flavorful in France because poultry is not grown on an industrial scale and is given more time to mature and acquire a taste. Italian pasta and heirloom vegetables continue to be the pride of specific regions and are jealously protected.

It is up to us, the consumer, to demand better tasting food grown through natural processes, and not enhanced by a flavor industry diminishing the nutritional value of food. Pair this book with The Omnivore’s Dilemma for a depressing yet hopeful overview of the whole food industry in the United States.