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 couldn’t 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 ingredient’s 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.”
Source: ‘The Dorito Effect,’ by Mark Schatzker – The New York Times
