23 Jan 2016

The Dorito Effect

From This Way Up, 12:15 pm on 23 January 2016
Doritos

Photo: © 2013 SketchBot. Licensed under CC-BY.

Mark Schatzker

Wouldn't life be so much easier if healthy eating just meant seeking out foods with good flavour?

According to author Mark Schatzker that's how we survived in days gone by. Flavour is the key way to detect useful chemicals that we needed, like a GPS system for navigating our way to the food we required to stay healthy way before the arrival of processed foods.

In his book The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor (Simon and Schuster) Schatzker looks at how the flavour of our food has changed, and how the food industry uses artificial flavourings to make us eat more.