Mark Schatzker

Very interesting book about food, flavour and nutrition. Schatzker talks about how modern chicken doesn't taste like chicken and how bland tomatoes sold in supermarkets are and how processed food leaves us feeling unhappy and lethargic. He also ties the obesity epidemic to the lack of flavour in food. He might be stretching things a bit there but it certainly is part of the problem.

At the back of the book he gives some guidelines for eating flavourfully. One of the things he says is "No show more morsel of food should pass your lips before you have asked the following question: Where did the flavor come from? If it came from the plant or animal you're eating, keep eating. If it was applied by a human with a PhD in chemistry, put it down." That would certainly cut down on most foods that you can find in a supermarket, probably everything offered on fast food menus and even most foods offered in regular restaurants. Schatzker talks about all the imitation flavours and aromas that are available now. It is big business and getting bigger all the time, $2 billion in the United States and $10 billion globally. We need all those imitation flavours because the food that is available to us gets blander and blander.

I had my own epiphany about flavour in food while eating a hamburger grilled on our own barbecue. We have been buying grass fed beef in bulk for a number of years and the taste was really good. I didn't realize how good though until the hamburger on my plate tasted almost like sawdust and I realized that we had run out of ground beef from our grass fed rancher and purchased some from the local butcher. The difference was astonishing. I will continue to buy grass fed beef even if it is more expensive than supermarket beef (and I don't think it is much more expensive when you consider each pound costs the same whether it is ground beef or filet mignon). I will also continue to source out chickens from a farmer that isn't a factory and buy vegetables that are grown in my own province. I will also continue to cook most of my own meals because then I can control what I put in the dishes.

There are lots of great stories in this book (the Utah goats alone are worth the read) but there are also lots of good lessons for anyone interested in how food tastes. show less

Over the last six decades, obesity rates have more than tripled in the US. Whereas only 10 percent of US adults were considered obese in the 1950s, that number shot up to 35 percent by 2012. Clearly, something has gone horribly wrong, and blaming it entirely on our evolved tendency to overeat, as is usually done, is far too simplistic. It’s not just that we’re eating more calories (although we are), it’s that the types of foods we’re eating are optimizing our weight gain like farm show more animals.

In The End of Craving, Mark Schatzker shows us how modern, processed foods essentially mimic the nutritional profiles of pig feed, which is used to optimize the rate of weight gain in pigs. How did we discover how to make our pigs as fat as possible as quickly as possible? To see how, consider an experiment run by the University of Illinois in 1954.

For this experiment, four groups of pigs were placed on different diets and their rates of weight gain were compared. The group that gained the least amount of weight were the pigs allowed to roam free on pasture, eating whatever they wanted, more or less naturally. The group that gained the most were the pigs enclosed in a confined space and fed “nutritionally-complete” pig feed, fortified with all of the vitamins and minerals they could possibly need—and then some.

The key insight of the experiment was that, in addition to the typical macro-nutrients necessary for weight gain (carbs and fats), the more vitamins the pig feed contained, the more effective it was at producing gains. It was soon discovered that it’s not only calories from fats and sugars that count; vitamins were shown to be necessary to unlock the use of those calories. Today, pigs are fed up to four times as much niacin (vitamin B3) and twenty times as much riboflavin (vitamin B2) compared to the 1950s, and they gain weight 40 percent faster.

The animal body naturally regulates its own diet to source the vitamins it needs. A pig, left free to roam, will eat a variety of foods as it seeks the required vitamins. This system—including the brain, digestive tract, nutrient sensors, and metabolic pathways—has evolved over millions of years in such a way as to drive an animal to their optional weight. But when you interrupt this process and artificially deliver all the required vitamins in a single food, the animal stops craving a variety of foods and simply eats more of the carb-and-fat loaded fortified food. Then they gain weight at an astronomical rate.

This may be good for farmers raising pigs, but it’s bad for humans. Since the 1950s, a whole host of processed foods have been fortified with vitamins, basically creating the human version of pig feed. As Schatzker wrote:

“Now imagine an American eating white bread with butter, or doughnuts, cake or crackers, or any other combination of processed carbs and fats. No matter how much of these foods this person eats, his or her brain will never detect a nutritional imbalance, thanks to government-mandated fortification. The appetite for some other food will never be awakened. Thanks to ancient government policy, Americans can consume vast amounts of calories without running out of the vitamins necessary to turn those calories into fat.”

By fortifying calorie-dense processed foods with vitamins, people have no urge to eat the fruits and vegetables typically required for those vitamins. Instead, they opt for the higher-calorie processed fats and carbs, and because they’re overloaded with vitamins, those calories are quickly and efficiently turned into fat.

And there is your explanation for the explosion in obesity we’ve witnessed, which just so happens to exactly correspond to the fortification of processed foods (human pig feed). Sure, this could be a case of “correlation doesn’t imply causation,” but considering the various animal experiments and farming practices that demonstrate how fortified foods accelerate weight gain, it’s reasonable to suppose that that’s exactly what’s happening to humans as well.

And it isn’t just the abundance of vitamins that is to blame; Schatzker also explains the phenomena of “nutritive mismatch,” which results in overeating because the signals the brain receives from sweet foods (via artificial sugars) doesn’t match their nutritive profile (lower-than-expected calories). This stimulates hunger and causes the person eating low-sugar foods to overcompensate by eating a higher number of calories later on.

And so, between nutritive mismatch and fortification, we’ve unknowingly created the ideal conditions for obesity. At least that’s the argument of the book.

Of course, it could just be that the fortified foods taste better. Regardless of the impact or not of vitamins, the blending of carbs and fats into artificially tasty concoctions not found in nature may be the only explanation we need for why animals and humans gravitate to these unhealthier food options. We lose our urge to eat fruit—not because we’re no longer seeking out vitamins—but because fruit no longer tastes sweet enough (compared to all the added sugar we’re used to consuming).

Do we really think that if we stop fortifying processed foods with vitamins and artificial sweeteners that people will all of a sudden ditch the pizza and ice cream and start eating a more balanced diet? I think this is doubtful. Schatzker talks about the difference between “wanting” and “liking,” and that junk food triggers a desire for its consumption that is ultimately disappointing once it’s obtained. However, I’ve never once in my life been disappointed by a piece of cheesecake, which is unequivocally bad for you and also unequivocally delicious.

I’m just not sure how convincing the argument is. I think it’s probably a combination of processed foods actually tasting better (they’ve been designed and marketed to optimize taste, after all) in addition to the effects of fortification on accelerated weight gain. It truly is the perfect storm of obesity. Either way, the lesson is the same: stay away from processed foods!

This is easier said than done, of course, but to the degree that people can substitute whole foods, fruits, and veggies for processed, fortified foods, the better off they will be in terms of weight and health. show less

We can fake anything, and we have to

The Dorito effect is that the more raw food we produce, the more bland and nutritionally worthless it becomes, the more flavors we must add to make it interesting and the more varieties we have to offer because it so unappealing. Fruit, vegetables, chicken, beef – all taste nothing like they used to and mainly taste like nothing. So we add chipotle and soy, mustard and curry, salt and pepper. And aromas. And “natural flavorings”. We consume five show more times as much spice as we did after the first world war, when the first stats appeared. The first third of the book is all about faking flavors (with astonishing precision and success) to make food industrially.

The flavorings industry is a giant you never heard of. They are not household brands (except for McCormick) but sell billions in flavorings to cover the fact that mass produced and industrially processed food has no taste. Food is becoming more like cigarettes, Schatzker says. All foods taste different, but underneath, they’re all processed dull, flat and nutritionless, if not downright harmful. Humans now eat like livestock.

The invention of gas chromatography has taken all the magic out of taste and aroma. We now have the ability to create or recreate pretty much any gustatory sensation possible, faking our way to variety, where spectacular taste once ruled. Fruits and vegetables are much blander, because we breed the goodness out when we breed for volume. Same with beef, chicken and pork; they are much fatter and blander than they used to be, and all require vast quantities of coatings, sauces and spices to make up for their lack of taste.

The middle third of the book is research into “nutritional wisdom”; plants and animals instinctively know what they need. Plants take advantage of it by deterring predators and supplying predictable nutrition. Insects and animals know what they need to consume to regain or maintain homeostasis. We also have cravings when our bodies sense we are low in some nutrient. The punchline of course, is that Man fools his body into thinking he’s eating nutritionally from the flavors and smells of the food, but is actually getting nothing of use. The result is massive overeating in an attempt to consume nutrition. We have shortcircuited a laboratory-proven system that has been foolproof in a balanced ecosystem for eons. And added vitamins – useless, Schatzker says. Vitamins only work their magic in the context of whole foods, not as chemical additions or solo pills.

Schatzker doesn’t let it rest there. In the last part of the book, he seeks out those who breed the real thing, whether tomatoes or chickens. He gathers a continent-wide group of experts to the meal of a lifetime. And he bravely states that all is not lost; for extra money and some research, you too can find great tasting food that has real food value, mostly directly from the farm. Stores and food processors - not interested.

As horrifically serious as The Dorito Effect is, Schatzker has written it with a light touch, often commenting in sardonic and sarcastic asides. It is a lively, fast and easy read. The overall effect is that it goes down smoothly, and doesn’t leave that bloated, sluggish, unsatisfied feeling like most restaurant and prepared meal experiences. You are what you eat.

David Wineberg show less

Super interesting! Schatzker argues that salt, sugar, and fat are not exactly to blame for why processed food is so bad for us. After all, if you’re just handed a glob of those three things, even in attractive proportions, you’ll probably be disgusted. It’s actually flavor that makes people keep eating, and he argues that flavor science has made food that’s capable of getting us to eat, but not capable of satisfying us the way that natural flavors (which correlate with show more micronutrients) are. Thus we keep eating, and not in healthful ways. The science of flavor was fun to read about, and this is an instance in which—if we can keep profit-seeking megacorporations from taking over, which is far from guaranteed—we might be able to fix many of the problems. Although “dilution”—a decrease in flavor and nutrition—is broadly observable in many modern foods compared to their predecessors of six or seven decades ago, attributable to selection for ever-greater size and yield, Schatzker proposes that micronutrients/true flavors are actually not that energetically expensive for plants to produce, because they have sensory effects at parts per billion. Thus it may well be possible to produce flavorful and highly productive strains of tomatoes, apples, etc. We just didn’t bother to select for flavor for a long time. show less