The Dorito Effect: Our lack of flavor.

Adventure Van here with a blog about The Dorito Effect, a book by Mark Schatzker. It talks about how we've been making food more profitable, sucking out the flavor as a byproduct, then adding in artificial flavors. And it's in ways you may not even think of. I mean, Doritos are a textbook example of this. Cornchips aren't flavorful anymore, because corn isn't flavorful. So, we overload it with flavor powder to make it taste like nacho. Or salad dressing, or barbecue, or anything you can imagine. If it has a flavor, it can be put on anything. Just don't expect any of the healthy stuff to go on with it.

But you can also see it in chicken. Not only have we changed how the species has functioned, we've also began feeding them nothing but what fattens them up, not what makes them taste good. They've also been bred and changed to grow super fast, so they're larger then the large fully grown chickens 100 years ago were, while still babies. And we don't let them grow past that, we simply kill them, and send the meat out. The meat either gets ground up into a grey pulp, where we shape it into chicken nuggets and the like and then heavily flavor it, or they stay the same and we heavily flavor it as it has the same flavor as teddy-bear stuffing. Either way, we don't end up with naturally good tasting food.

And that comes at a cost. In the past, and by that I mean before the last 100 years happened, flavors were related to stuff like vitamins. Things that were really healthy, and that we needed. But now that we've began taking things that taste like vitamins and other healthy stuff we used to relate to those flavors, and throwing them on junk, we can't get the vitamins. Because our still primitive brains don't realize that, we end up eating more until we fill up on vitamins that aren't there, which is why it's possible to overeat, still feel hungry, and feel nausea and duller.

So, is there a solution that's possible? After all, it's still possible to get unaltered food. But it's expensive, and we don't have enough land to feed the large populations we have. But unlike what has been the case so far, we don't have to trade off flavor for product, and they can work together. The only problem is convincing the companies in charge of giving this food to the public are willing to take steps to get flavor back into food, or if we'll end up eating bland food with inches worth of seasoning on it.

Adventure Van, licking their fingers.