i was recently listening to the radio and a piece on Mark Schatzker, who recently wrote the book The Dorito Effect, came on and it was absolutely riveting. ultimately, Schatzker is suggesting that within the past few decades, namely since the 40s, food has gotten bigger and cheaper, which allowed the food industry to expand and further capitalize. a consequent result of this shift was that food became blander and less nutritious. with the decline of fresh, flavourful and nutritious produce came the surge of food engineers, who found what made natural foods flavourful and injected them into nutritionally-bankrupt foods, such as potato chips, candies, soda, etc. and this, Schatzker claims, is the premise of the health crises happening worldwide, namely in north-american countries.Â
this is such an interesting perspective. i find it so compelling because our bodies are genetically programmed to look for natural flavouring or flavours we can get from our natural environment, such as lemon, tomato, cherry, for example. however, due to the recent growth in the food market; rise of globalization; increasing demand for food distribution; the skewed capitalist interests of mega food corporations, who have sold us countless products with artificial flavouring posing as completely natural, we are now looking for and consuming these flavours in foods that are not foods at all. moreover, our bodies are never fully satisfied with the bag of chips we are eating because they do not offer any nutritional value, even though they are triggering our taste buds and tricking them into thinking they are consuming real, hearty and nutritious foods.Â
