Sunday Book Review

The Dorito Effect, by Mark Schatzker

By TAMAR ADLERJUNE 12, 2015
Tamar Adlerjune fa una resenya del llibre The Dorito Effect de Mark Schatzker, al New York Times.

Nota: Flavor= barreja de gust i aroma.

A few years ago I sat with a friend and looked at a menu, and we wondered why
everything seemed to be flavored like a taco. Or Caesar salad or maple syrup. I couldnt
quite say what about it bothered me, but I held a conviction that something was wrong
in a thing a Mexican snack, salad dressing, tree sap being turned into a flavor.
I remained wary without knowing why. In The Dorito Effect, an illuminating and
sometimes radical book, Mark Schatzker shores up my unease with good evidence.
Over the last 70 years, American animal and plant breeding has focused on yield, pest
resistance and appearance not flavor. The pleasure of an ingredients taste did not
seem to have practical value. Schatzker cites the national Chicken of Tomorrow contest
sponsored in the late 1940s by the grocery chain A.&P. Chickens were bred and judged
for uniformity of size, volume of breast, hatchability and feed efficiency. Their taste
was not considered. Supermarket chicken since at the cost of flavorful meat has
been big and able to get that way very fast: According to a gruesome statistic from a
2013 article in Poultry Science, if humans grew as quickly as the Chicken of Today, a
three-kilogram (6.6-pound) newborn baby would weigh 300 kilograms (660 pounds)
after two months.
The story has been repeated with tomatoes, strawberries, broccoli, wheat, corn and
more: all bred for size, speed of growth, pest resistance, shelf life, appearance not
taste. The pleasure of eating seemed superfluous. As Schatzker puts it, Hedonism, as
any puritan can tell you, never leads to virtue.
Except that in pursuit of flavor, it does. In nature, Schatzker writes, flavor never
appears without nutrition. Flavor means nutrition. Omega-3 fatty acids have flavor.
Phenylethanol, a chemical compound humans love and often describe as a rose note
in tomatoes, is made by an essential amino acid, which its presence signifies. Flavors
purpose is to help us become like ingestive homing pigeons. Our bodies learn to draw
connections between flavors and the physiological responses they signal. Through this
post-ingestive feedback, latent intelligence in our digestive systems is animated. We can
seek out and find what we need, nutritionally, and stop eating once we get it.
A perfect case is illustrated in an old study, begun in 1926, conducted by a Chicago
pediatrician named Clara Davis. She foster-parented 15 babies whod never been

exposed to the ordinary foods of adult life and for six years let them eat whatever
they wanted, in any order, from a list of 34 foods including water, potatoes, corn meal,
barley, beef, lamb, bone jelly, carrots, turnips, haddock, peaches, apples, fish, orange
juice, bananas, brains, milk and cabbage. They chose balanced diets sometimes
strange ones: One child ate liver and drank a pint of orange juice for breakfast. Their
preferences changed often. Another child, who had started off with rickets, was early on
given a glass of cod liver oil as medicine. Over the course of his illness, never
encouraged, he drank it irregularly and in varying amounts of his own free will until
he was better, Schatzker writes. This unconscious wisdom has been subsequently
studied in goats and calves, showing repeatedly that if the body can make nutritional
connections via physical feedback from flavor, it will be a good nutritionist.
But for the body to develop credible associations including feeling satiated
between dark greens and iron, or eggs from free-ranging chickens and carotenoids, or
tomatoes and phenylethanol, it needs to be communicated with honestly. Otherwise it
cant learn. All over nature, animals ... limit their meal size not because theyre
stuffed and couldnt possibly eat another bite, but because theyve hit a secondary
compound wall, i.e. met nutritional needs beyond calories. Synthetic-flavor technology
makes bland ingredients attractive without supplying the myriad benefits of the real
thing. The twin forces of flavor dilution and fake flavor have short-circuited the
biological basis for mutable appetite.
One particularly wonderful thing about Schatzkers thesis is that if flavor is the voice in
which the nutritional benefits of the natural world call out to us, then the impulse to eat
taco-flavored Doritos, Caesar wraps and maple-flavored ribs is not the opposite of but
rather akin to impulses toward $6-a-pound heritage-breed chicken, or dandelion greens.
They are both, as Schatzker puts it, unconscious strategies against dilution. Access,
not moral fiber, is the difference between one persons search for flavor and anothers.
Aside from changing the status of flavor from frill to nutritional essential the most
radical thing about The Dorito Effect is that Schatzker doesnt suggest returning to
agriculture of simpler days. His solution is technological. He suggests turning to what
started the mess in the first place: breeding. The trade-offs of flavor for pest resistance,
for example, werent inevitable. Schatzker writes of five successful contemporary
breeding experiments of chicken, tomatoes, potatoes, cacao beans and lettuce that
keep a focus on factors like yield and shelf life, while adding flavor to the list of
priorities. Its doable; it just needs to be done.
The book has two real flaws. The first is the weak climax of Schatzker making a meal of
naturally flavorful ingredients. I find it impossible to drum up excitement for these meal
scenes, fixtures in food journalism. The confirmation bias of the writer makes them
valueless. Theyre tautologies. If the meal fails, the argument doesnt hold and the book
isnt published. Besides, the project is undertaken every day, successfully, in plenty of
restaurants that have built their reputations and filled their dining rooms by serving
meals that dont include genetically diluted ingredients. There are plenty of home cooks
doing it too.
There is also the strange omission of one American chef who not only serves fullflavored foods from heirloom seeds, but publicly works with breeders to do exactly
what Schatzker recommends. Dan Barber has collaborated with Michael Mazourek at

Cornell and Steve Jones at the Washington State University Research and Extension
Center to breed varietals of squash and wheat for intense flavor, high yield and pest
resistance. (Disclosure: I briefly worked as Barbers research assistant 11 years ago.) In
other words, one of the countrys most respected chefs already understands the flavor
principle and is, from a populist perspective, breeding seeds that match Schatzkers
priorities. But Schatzker doesnt mention Barber, never mind ask him to cook the
books triumphant meal.
The other problem is the writing. So much good research and reasoning deserve better
sentences than they get. Schatzker refers to himself as a card-carrying member, uses
Mc to signify industrial and makes winking references to the libidos of teenage
boys. Clich stands in for an original prose voice. There is trace of mind in the subject,
but not in its expression.
Still, other than in Dan Barbers book, The Third Plate, this is the first time Ive read
of improving our food through smarter breeding, and the first assertion that human
appetite may possess an intelligence equal to that of human love another belief Ive
long held, also without knowing why.

Reference: THE DORITO EFFECT. The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor
By Mark Schatzker. 259 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.