"Natural Flavorings" Animal-Based

[Guest guest]

by Eric Schlosser

 

THE french fry was "almost sacrosanct for

me," Ray Kroc, one of the founders of

McDonald's, wrote in his autobiography,

"its preparation a ritual to be followed

religiously." During the chain's early years

french fries were made from scratch every day.

Russet Burbank potatoes were peeled, cut into

shoestrings, and fried in McDonald's kitchens.

As the chain expanded nationwide, in the

mid-1960s, it sought to cut labor costs, reduce

the number of suppliers, and ensure that its fries

tasted the same at every restaurant. McDonald's

began switching to frozen french fries in 1966 --

and few customers noticed the difference.

Nevertheless, the change had a profound effect

on the nation's agriculture and diet. A familiar

food had been transformed into a highly

processed industrial commodity. McDonald's

fries now come from huge manufacturing plants

that can peel, slice, cook, and freeze two

million pounds of potatoes a day. The rapid

expansion of McDonald's and the popularity of

its low-cost, mass-produced fries changed the

way Americans eat. In 1960 Americans

consumed an average of about eighty-one

pounds of fresh potatoes and four pounds of

frozen french fries. In 2000 they consumed an

average of about fifty pounds of fresh potatoes

and thirty pounds of frozen fries. Today

McDonald's is the largest buyer of potatoes in

the United States.

 

The taste of

McDonald's french

fries played a

crucial role in the

chain's success --

fries are much more

profitable than

hamburgers -- and

was long praised by

customers,

competitors, and

even food critics. James Beard loved

McDonald's fries. Their distinctive taste does

not stem from the kind of potatoes that

McDonald's buys, the technology that processes

them, or the restaurant equipment that fries

them: other chains use Russet Burbanks, buy

their french fries from the same large

processing companies, and have similar fryers

in their restaurant kitchens. The taste of a french

fry is largely determined by the cooking oil. For

decades McDonald's cooked its french fries in a

mixture of about seven percent cottonseed oil

and 93 percent beef tallow. The mixture gave

the fries their unique flavor -- and more

saturated beef fat per ounce than a McDonald's

hamburger.

 

In 1990, amid a barrage of criticism over the

amount of cholesterol in its fries, McDonald's

switched to pure vegetable oil. This presented

the company with a challenge: how to make

fries that subtly taste like beef without cooking

them in beef tallow. A look at the ingredients in

McDonald's french fries suggests how the

problem was solved. Toward the end of the list

is a seemingly innocuous yet oddly mysterious

phrase: "natural flavor." That ingredient helps

to explain not only why the fries taste so good

but also why most fast food -- indeed, most of

the food Americans eat today -- tastes the way it

does.

 

Open your refrigerator,

your freezer, your kitchen

cupboards, and look at the

labels on your food.

You'll find "natural

flavor" or "artificial

flavor" in just about every

list of ingredients. The

similarities between these

two broad categories are far more significant

than the differences. Both are man-made

additives that give most processed food most of

its taste. People usually buy a food item the first

time because of its packaging or appearance.

Taste usually determines whether they buy it

again. About 90 percent of the money that

Americans now spend on food goes to buy

processed food. The canning, freezing, and

dehydrating techniques used in processing

destroy most of food's flavor -- and so a vast

industry has arisen in the United States to make

processed food palatable. Without this flavor

industry today's fast food would not exist. The

names of the leading American fast-food chains

and their best-selling menu items have become

embedded in our popular culture and famous

worldwide. But few people can name the

companies that manufacture fast food's taste.

 

The flavor industry is highly secretive. Its

leading companies will not divulge the precise

formulas of flavor compounds or the identities

of clients. The secrecy is deemed essential for

protecting the reputations of beloved brands.

The fast-food chains, understandably, would

like the public to believe that the flavors of the

food they sell somehow originate in their

restaurant kitchens, not in distant factories run

by other firms. A McDonald's french fry is one

of countless foods whose flavor is just a

component in a complex manufacturing process.

The look and the taste of what we eat now are

frequently deceiving -- by design.

 

The Flavor Corridor

 

HE New Jersey Turnpike runs through the

heart of the flavor industry, an industrial

corridor dotted with refineries and

chemical plants. International Flavors &

Fragrances (IFF), the world's largest flavor

company, has a manufacturing facility off Exit

8A in Dayton, New Jersey; Givaudan, the

world's second-largest flavor company, has a

plant in East Hanover. Haarmann & Reimer, the

largest German flavor company, has a plant in

Teterboro, as does Takasago, the largest

Japanese flavor company. Flavor Dynamics has

a plant in South Plainfield; Frutarom is in North

Bergen; Elan Chemical is in Newark. Dozens of

companies manufacture flavors in the corridor

between Teaneck and South Brunswick.

Altogether the area produces about two thirds

of the flavor additives sold in the United States.

 

The IFF plant in Dayton is a huge pale-blue

building with a modern office complex attached

to the front. It sits in an industrial park, not far

from a BASF plastics factory, a Jolly French

Toast factory, and a plant that manufactures Liz

Claiborne cosmetics. Dozens of tractor-trailers

were parked at the IFF loading dock the

afternoon I visited, and a thin cloud of steam

floated from a roof vent. Before entering the

plant, I signed a nondisclosure form, promising

not to reveal the brand names of foods that

contain IFF flavors. The place reminded me of

Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Wonderful

smells drifted through the hallways, men and

women in neat white lab coats cheerfully went

about their work, and hundreds of little glass

bottles sat on laboratory tables and shelves. The

bottles contained powerful but fragile flavor

chemicals, shielded from light by brown glass

and round white caps shut tight. The long

chemical names on the little white labels were

as mystifying to me as medieval Latin. These

odd-sounding things would be mixed and

poured and turned into new substances, like

magic potions.

 

I was not invited into the manufacturing areas of

the IFF plant, where, it was thought, I might

discover trade secrets. Instead I toured various

laboratories and pilot kitchens, where the

flavors of well-established brands are tested or

adjusted, and where whole new flavors are

created. IFF's snack-and-savory lab is

responsible for the flavors of potato chips, corn

chips, breads, crackers, breakfast cereals, and

pet food. The confectionery lab devises flavors

for ice cream, cookies, candies, toothpastes,

mouthwashes, and antacids. Everywhere I

looked, I saw famous, widely advertised

products sitting on laboratory desks and tables.

The beverage lab was full of brightly colored

liquids in clear bottles. It comes up with flavors

for popular soft drinks, sports drinks, bottled

teas, and wine coolers, for all-natural juice

drinks, organic soy drinks, beers, and malt

liquors. In one pilot kitchen I saw a dapper food

technologist, a middle-aged man with an elegant

tie beneath his crisp lab coat, carefully

preparing a batch of cookies with white frosting

and pink-and-white sprinkles. In another pilot

kitchen I saw a pizza oven, a grill, a milk-shake

machine, and a french fryer identical to those I'd

seen at innumerable fast-food restaurants.

 

In addition to being the world's largest flavor

company, IFF manufactures the smells of six of

the ten best-selling fine perfumes in the United

States, including Estée Lauder's Beautiful,

Clinique's Happy, Lancôme's Trésor, and

Calvin Klein's Eternity. It also makes the smells

of household products such as deodorant,

dishwashing detergent, bath soap, shampoo,

furniture polish, and floor wax. All these

aromas are made through essentially the same

process: the manipulation of volatile chemicals.

The basic science behind the scent of your

shaving cream is the same as that governing the

flavor of your TV dinner.

 

"Natural" and "Artificial"

 

CIENTISTS now believe that human

beings acquired the sense of taste as a way

to avoid being poisoned. Edible plants

generally taste sweet, harmful ones bitter. The

taste buds on our tongues can detect the

presence of half a dozen or so basic tastes,

including sweet, sour, bitter, salty, astringent,

and umami, a taste discovered by Japanese

researchers -- a rich and full sense of

deliciousness triggered by amino acids in foods

such as meat, shellfish, mushrooms, potatoes,

and seaweed. Taste buds offer a limited means

of detection, however, compared with the

human olfactory system, which can perceive

thousands of different chemical aromas. Indeed,

"flavor" is primarily the smell of gases being

released by the chemicals you've just put in

your mouth. The aroma of a food can be

responsible for as much as 90 percent of its

taste.

 

The act of drinking, sucking, or chewing a

substance releases its volatile gases. They flow

out of your mouth and up your nostrils, or up the

passageway in the back of your mouth, to a thin

layer of nerve cells called the olfactory

epithelium, located at the base of your nose,

right between your eyes. Your brain combines

the complex smell signals from your olfactory

epithelium with the simple taste signals from

your tongue, assigns a flavor to what's in your

mouth, and decides if it's something you want to

eat.

 

A person's food preferences, like his or her

personality, are formed during the first few

years of life, through a process of socialization.

Babies innately prefer sweet tastes and reject

bitter ones; toddlers can learn to enjoy hot and

spicy food, bland health food, or fast food,

depending on what the people around them eat.

The human sense of smell is still not fully

understood. It is greatly affected by

psychological factors and expectations. The

mind focuses intently on some of the aromas that

surround us and filters out the overwhelming

majority. People can grow accustomed to bad

smells or good smells; they stop noticing what

once seemed overpowering. Aroma and

memory are somehow inextricably linked. A

smell can suddenly evoke a long-forgotten

moment. The flavors of childhood foods seem

to leave an indelible mark, and adults often

return to them, without always knowing why.

These "comfort foods" become a source of

pleasure and reassurance -- a fact that fast-food

chains use to their advantage. Childhood

memories of Happy Meals, which come with

french fries, can translate into frequent adult

visits to McDonald's. On average, Americans

now eat about four servings of french fries

every week.

 

HE human craving for flavor has been a

largely unacknowledged and unexamined

force in history. For millennia royal

empires have been built, unexplored lands

traversed, and great religions and philosophies

forever changed by the spice trade. In 1492

Christopher Columbus set sail to find

seasoning. Today the influence of flavor in the

world marketplace is no less decisive. The rise

and fall of corporate empires -- of soft-drink

companies, snack-food companies, and

fast-food chains -- is often determined by how

their products taste.

 

The flavor industry emerged in the

mid-nineteenth century, as processed foods

began to be manufactured on a large scale.

Recognizing the need for flavor additives, early

food processors turned to perfume companies

that had long experience working with essential

oils and volatile aromas. The great perfume

houses of England, France, and the Netherlands

produced many of the first flavor compounds. In

the early part of the twentieth century Germany

took the technological lead in flavor production,

owing to its powerful chemical industry.

Legend has it that a German scientist

discovered methyl anthranilate, one of the first

artificial flavors, by accident while mixing

chemicals in his laboratory. Suddenly the lab

was filled with the sweet smell of grapes.

Methyl anthranilate later became the chief

flavor compound in grape Kool-Aid. After

World War II much of the perfume industry

shifted from Europe to the United States,

settling in New York City near the garment

district and the fashion houses. The flavor

industry came with it, later moving to New

Jersey for greater plant capacity. Man-made

flavor additives were used mostly in baked

goods, candies, and sodas until the 1950s, when

sales of processed food began to soar. The

invention of gas chromatographs and mass

spectrometers -- machines capable of detecting

volatile gases at low levels -- vastly increased

the number of flavors that could be synthesized.

By the mid-1960s flavor companies were

churning out compounds to supply the taste of

Pop Tarts, Bac-Os, Tab, Tang, Filet-O-Fish

sandwiches, and literally thousands of other

new foods.

 

The American flavor industry now has annual

revenues of about $1.4 billion. Approximately

10,000 new processed-food products are

introduced every year in the United States.

Almost all of them require flavor additives.

And about nine out of ten of these products fail.

The latest flavor innovations and corporate

realignments are heralded in publications such

as Chemical Market Reporter, Food Chemical

News, Food Engineering, and Food Product

Design. The progress of IFF has mirrored that

of the flavor industry as a whole. IFF was

formed in 1958, through the merger of two

small companies. Its annual revenues have

grown almost fifteenfold since the early 1970s,

and it currently has manufacturing facilities in

twenty countries.