Journalist Mark Shactzker has just released a new book titled 'The Dorito Effect: The Suprising Truth about Food and Flavor" which details how increasingly flavor packed junk foods like soda and chips have made regular food seem bland.
Shactzker's argument is simple: as big food producers find new ways to make our favorite snacks more flavorful, we run the risk of forgetting what real food tastes like. Here's an excerpt from the Washington Post which details what he says about the development of modified Tomatoes:
"As breeders selected moneymaking traits like yield, disease resistance, and a thick skin for easier transportation, they ignored the genes that determine good flavor, there are a lot of those genes, and with each generation, some aspect of flavor can be lost. Over uncountable generations, the loss is substantial. And when the flavor genes are gone, there's only one thing that can make a tomato taste good: a bottle of ranch dressing."
Shactzker links growing obesity problems to this so called "manufactured deliciousness." It's a vicious cycle really: Flavor packed junk food alters our ideas of what regular food tastes like. To make these regular things flavorful again we resort to more flavor packed junk.
In an interview with Vox, he explains why he chose flavor as the centerpiece of his book:
"Because we've been having a frantic conversation about food for 50 years, no one ever talks about the way it tastes. I find the salt, sugar, fat thesis of obesity interesting, but I think it doesn't tell us the whole story only because salt, sugar, and fat existed in abundance in the 1950s when we were trim. Part of what's changed since is availability - corporations got really good at getting these foods to us. But it was the added flavoring that made these foods irresistible."
