Food Interview Mark Schatzker€¦ · who writes about food, flavor, and nutrition. His most recent...
Transcript of Food Interview Mark Schatzker€¦ · who writes about food, flavor, and nutrition. His most recent...
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
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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.