Feeding You Lies by Vani Hari

Author:Vani Hari
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2018-12-05T05:00:00+00:00

WHY THE LIE?

Food companies know they can get us hooked on junk food—and one of the ways they do it is by creating tantalizing food flavors in food labs and then lying to us about how natural those flavors are. They know that consumers prefer “natural” because “artificial” has the wrong connotations and doesn’t sell.

Because of flavor technology, processed food can be addictive. I confess that once in a while, I crave Annie’s Chocolate Bunnies. Once I open the box, I literally can’t stop eating them. (I’m thinking about them right now, and my mouth is watering.) It’s like these little cookies short-circuit my self-control.

But here’s the strange twist: I don’t have the same gotta-have-it feeling when I make homemade cookies. Although my homemade cookies are delicious, I don’t want to eat the whole batch at once. It’s only those chocolate bunnies that I can’t resist.

What’s going on? Why can’t I stop? Is it the sugar?

Turns out, it’s way more than just sugar. Not long ago, I sat down with Mark Schatzker, author of the acclaimed book The Dorito Effect.5 The book borrows its title from the tortilla chip that became a nationwide sensation after it was flavored with a delectable taco taste. In his book, Schatzker delves into the reasons why food doesn’t taste the way it used to. The story begins with the move toward mass production, which requires Big Food to skimp on quality ingredients for the sake of higher profits. Instead of seeking out deliciousness, Big Food focuses on yield, pest resistance, and cost. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking at tomatoes, strawberries, wheat, or broccoli: the food industry has systematically bred out flavor in pursuit of more practical “virtues,” like whether or not a tomato can be shipped thousands of miles without bruising.

There are two big problems with this approach. First, it makes our food less nutritious. When we breed crops to satisfy the Big Food industry, we end up growing fruits and vegetables with dramatically fewer health benefits.

The second problem is that those industrial ingredients lead to really bland food. (There’s nothing tasty about GMO corn and soy by-products. And those mass-grown tomatoes usually taste like cardboard.) To compensate for this blandness, Big Food companies have engineered ways to make synthetic flavors that are so enticing and addictive we can’t stop eating them.

Take Doritos. They started out as a plain tortilla chip with a little salt, hardly like the ones you’ll find in stores today. This inaugural version of the chip was a market failure; sales were dismal because they didn’t taste like much. However, a marketing executive at Frito-Lay named Arch West decided that the chips would sell better if they were coated in an intense orange powder that resembles taco flavor.6 And thus was the modern Dorito born, a food that has become a template for countless other highly processed junk food products that hide their tasteless ingredients by dousing them with tasty chemicals.

These chemical flavors can save the companies a huge amount of money.

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