The Dorito Effect

by Mark Schatzker

Another interesting read about how the food we eat is making us ill. Written in 2015, several years before Ultra Processed People which I finished a couple of weeks ago, it focuses on flavour and the blandness of the food we eat. The point it makes is that our food is becoming blander with time. A focus on yield and weight is causing a dilution effect which reduces flavour. Unfortunately, the chemicals that provide flavour also provide important nutrients. Bland food is therefore less nutritious than flavourful food.

The food industry, knowing that food is becoming more and more bland, ramps up the flavour in order to make the food palatable. This artificial flavour, even if it is "natural", provides no nutrition. So we keep eating the food because our body is looking for nutrition which the taste says it is getting but the body knows it is not. We are becoming overweight and obese because of it and it is not exactly our fault.

The book is especially focused on chicken and explains that if we eat an old style chicken (which are very hard to find nowadays) we will be satisified and satiated on much smaller quantities than if we eat the standard broiler chicken reared for maximum yield. Apparently the French chicken label "Label Rouge" is a mark of a chicken bred for flavour, not yield. It is more pricey, but also more flavourful.

Overall this is a very interesting book. Perhaps not as insightful as Ultra Processed People, but very much saying the same thing: the food we eat nowadays is increasingly junk and it is very hard to do anything about it.

22.12.2024 to 25.12.2024.