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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #58: Flavor's role in the food crisis

This week inaugurates what will be an occasional Friday feature, “Food for Thought.” Each one will present material from a book or article that illuminates a thought-provoking idea related to food and health. This week’s excerpt comes from “The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor” (2015) by Mark Schatzker.  

“The Dorito Effect, very simply, is what happens when food gets blander and flavor technology gets better. This book is about how and why that took place. It’s also about the consequences, which include obesity and metabolic disturbance along with a cultural love-hate obsession with food. This book argues that we need to begin understanding food through the same lens by which it is experienced: how it tastes. The food crisis we’re spending so much time and money on might be better thought of as a large-scale flavor disorder. Our problem isn’t calories and what our bodies do with them. Our problem is that we want to eat the wrong food. The longer we ignore flavor, the longer we are bound to be victims of it. . . .

“Yes, part of the problem is junk food. There’s more of it, and it’s more alluring than ever. But nonjunk food is a bigger problem. It isn’t as flavorful as it used to be, which has the inverse effect of making junk food yet more enticing. Even worse, we’re turning real food into junk food. Thanks to its off-putting insipidness, we coat it in calories, drench it in dressing, and dust it in synthetic flavor.”