Flavour by Bob Holmes

Author:Bob Holmes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Chapter 6

WHY NOT IGUANA?

WHEN BOB SOBEL’S kids were little, they would sometimes run up to a strange man in the grocery store and hug his leg, saying, “Hi, Grandpa!” Eventually, Sobel figured out the reason for the error: Their mental sketch of “Grandpa” consisted of gray hair, glasses, and a beard—and anyone who satisfied those criteria, they figured, must be Grandpa. It didn’t take many failures before Sobel’s kids upgraded their sketch, of course, but he has always remembered how little information they needed at first to leap to their conclusion.

It’s a lesson Sobel—no relation to Noam Sobel of the chocolate-soaked string—puts to use every day in his job, as vice president for research at FONA International, a company in the business of creating flavours for the food industry. Designing flavours is largely a matter of finding a way to sketch a chemical likeness—a caricature, if you will—of reality. Case in point: Sobel likes to give people a fresh apple and a Jolly Rancher green-apple-flavoured hard candy. “Which one has more chemicals?” he asks. Most people assume that it’s the patently artificial Jolly Rancher. But nature is made of chemicals, too. The real apple, in fact, contains at least twenty-five hundred different flavour chemicals, while the Jolly Rancher has precisely twenty-six. What makes the flavour industry possible is that our mental image of “apple flavour” doesn’t require all twenty-five hundred chemicals. “Just like our picture of Grandpa, it’s going to pick out a few,” says Sobel. That’s exactly what Jolly Rancher has done with their apple candy. “It has enough information to give you the apple. The goal of flavour chemists is not to duplicate exactly all 2,500 flavour chemicals that nature uses. It’s to re-create the impression.”

Sobel is explaining all of this in his well-modulated, gently sibilant voice in an auditorium at FONA’s headquarters in Geneva, Illinois, a bucolic suburb of Chicago. In an industry notorious for its obsessive secrecy, FONA is unique in flinging wide its doors to let the sun shine in. Several times a year they welcome clients, competitors, and the odd hanger-on like me to Flavour 101, a free short course in the workings of the flavour industry.

In the room with me are two chewing-gum developers from Wrigley, people from Butter Buds Food Ingredients (a manufacturer of dairy flavourings), Grapette (a maker of soft drink flavours), and PepsiCo (which needs no introduction). There’s someone from a company that makes vegetarian “meat” products. There are representatives of processed-food makers, pharmaceutical companies, a major liquor company, and a food-packaging company. There are several new hires at FONA itself. And, along with me, one other outsider—an anthropologist studying the food industry.

Sobel’s long face, slightly protruding lower lip, and pleasant smile make him look a bit like a 1980s-vintage TV news host. He has the enthusiastic demeanor of a good high school chemistry teacher, which is what he once was. Back in 1999, his wife suggested he take an outside job during the summer holiday. He ended up working as a flavour analyst at FONA and discovered a world he’d never known of.

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