The Dorito Effect
The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor
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Average rating4.1
A lively and important argument from an award-winning journalist proving that the key to reversing North America’s health crisis lies in the overlooked link between nutrition and flavor. In The Dorito Effect, Mark Schatzker shows us how our approach to the nation’s number one public health crisis has gotten it wrong. The epidemics of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are not tied to the overabundance of fat or carbs or any other specific nutrient. Instead, we have been led astray by the growing divide between flavor—the tastes we crave—and the underlying nutrition. Since the late 1940s, we have been slowly leeching flavor out of the food we grow. Those perfectly round, red tomatoes that grace our supermarket aisles today are mostly water, and the big breasted chickens on our dinner plates grow three times faster than they used to, leaving them dry and tasteless. Simultaneously, we have taken great leaps forward in technology, allowing us to produce in the lab the very flavors that are being lost on the farm. Thanks to this largely invisible epidemic, seemingly healthy food is becoming more like junk food: highly craveable but nutritionally empty. We have unknowingly interfered with an ancient chemical language—flavor—that evolved to guide our nutrition, not destroy it. With in-depth historical and scientific research, The Dorito Effect casts the food crisis in a fascinating new light, weaving an enthralling tale of how we got to this point and where we are headed. We’ve been telling ourselves that our addiction to flavor is the problem, but it is actually the solution. We are on the cusp of a new revolution in agriculture that will allow us to eat healthier and live longer by enjoying flavor the way nature intended.
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A fantastic quick read about flavor. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of animal studies and research into the combination of nutrition and flavor. I found the research narratives, and their interaction compelling...the stories about obesity less so. However, it makes sense that the book would be rooted in what might be an epidemic of overeating.
The footnotes and Appendix are nice as well. This is a great companion to other popular food books, like Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma.
If you like food that tastes good or are interested in the science behind feed and nutrition, you'll probably like this one.
Another book about food! This one was fantastic. It is not about eating one way or another, instead the author does a great job of showing the reader how food has changed in recent history. He attributed the change with the advent of Doritos, because that was the point where artificial flavoring started to become more important than the actual food. Our bodies are now tricked into enjoying things that are not actual food with disastrous results. He also presented just how daunting it is to understand actual nutrition of real food, just how chemically complex plants are. We've scratched the surface of this understanding and what he said we've found is amazing, that certain chemicals that we find pleasurable are almost always found in nature along with some sort of essential nutrient.
I picked up this book because my library had it marked as sociology, it's not really sociology it's a glorified infomercial for diet culture.
There are interesting tidbits in this book, I really liked the part where the author talked about the efforts that are/were done to put flavor back into vegetables and meats. Unfortunately, these tidbits fell flat for me when the author insisted on talking about fatness at every turn even when it really was unwarranted (this book contains A LOT of extra words) or even seemed downright contradicted by the things he was saying.
He does something similar with class only in the other direction he only passingly acknowledges the impact of class on diet and access to the kind of food he pushes as the solution and then returns to saying that people only want cheap food. If someone has to work 2/3 jobs just to make rent where will they get the money for 20$ worth of veggies for a single meal if that kind of fresh food is even available to them to begin with (another thing that the author absolutely does not acknowledge is that farmer markets and even just quality fresh produce are not an option for everyone considering that food deserts are a thing)? It's not WANT it's necessity that pushes people to buy the cheapest food available he comes within an inch of acknowledging it but only in a “we don't have the resources to feed everyone well so it's only going to stay the rich that can eat well tough tiddies you poor poor food addicted fatties” kind of way.
All of this combined into a condescending mess about modern chicken being tasteless and “heirloom” tomatoes that are going to save us all lazy fat f*cks (only not really because there isn't enough for everyone).
