by Bob Holmes
(Jeff Peppet once received a phone call from someone who had the notion to make animal crackers with giraffe-flavored giraffes, lion-flavored lions, and so on. Could Givaudan make the flavors? Um, Peppet replied, we don’t know what a giraffe tastes like. No problem, said the guy. Neither does anyone else, so just give me a different, novel meat flavor. Givaudan didn’t take the project. But still, Daniher gets a little excited by the prospect of developing new meat flavors. “Why not iguana?” he asks, not entirely in jest.)
The notion of mixing cocktails of flavor chemicals to order, as Givaudan does, is sure to make many people uncomfortable. This widespread chemophobia is a big reason why food manufacturers are so leery of being associated with flavor companies, and therefore why flavor houses like Givaudan are so secretive about their clients’ identities. As Andy Daniher and Jeff Peppet put it over lunch in Givaudan’s cafeteria, companies don’t want to be pilloried for “putting chemicals in our food.”
From a scientific point of view, of course, this is silly, because all food is nothing but chemicals. The proteins in your steak or tofu are chemicals. The sugars that form the starches in your organic, local, sustainably farmed whole wheat are chemicals. The scary-sounding isoamyl acetate in artificial banana flavor is exactly the same chemical as the isoamyl acetate in a real banana. If you list all the chemical constituents of a banana or an apple—as one Australian chemistry teacher and blogger has done in fake “ingredient labels”—even a simple piece of fruit can sound pretty daunting. (You’ll recall from the beginning of the chapter that a real apple contains at least twenty-five hundred chemicals, and a Jolly Rancher candy just twenty-six. If you want fewer chemicals in your food, you should go for the Jolly Rancher every time.)
Even so, what the flavor industry does runs counter to the sense that most of us have that the more “natural” our food is, the better. Food companies want you to feel as though their jar of spaghetti sauce is “just like mamma used to make.” Industrially produced flavors don’t sit well with that cozy domestic vision, which is why you’ll never see “Powered by Givaudan” on the label the way computers advertise that they’re “Powered by Intel.” “People want to think that came straight from coffee and milk,” said Daniher, pointing to my bottled Starbucks White Chocolate Mocha. “But it’s a processed product.” The PR problem is even worse if the label has to mention “artificial flavor.” As a result, food manufacturers— especially the high-end ones—often insist that flavor houses build flavors that can be called natural.
It’s worth taking a moment to parse the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” in the flavor world. In the United States, for something to be called, say, a natural lemon flavor, the chemical compounds in the flavor have to be extracted from actual lemons. Naive consumers might think that means they’re getting the full richness of flavor found in the real lemon. But in fact, your “natural lemon flavor” might be nothing more than a single chemical, citral. (If you were getting all the flavor depth of the lemon itself, the label would likely read “lemon juice” or “lemon oil,” not “natural lemon flavor.”) Citral from lemon peel is chemically identical to the citral made artificially in a chemistry lab. If anything, the artificial version is likely to be purer than the natural stuff, which may bear traces of other compounds that tagged along during extraction. But consumers want natural, so natural is what they get, cost permitting.
One step down from “natural lemon flavor” is just plain “natural flavor,” a wording that indicates that the flavor compounds come from an actual plant or animal (rather than being made in a chemistry lab), but not a lemon. Natural vanilla flavor, for example, comes from vanilla beans; vanilla flavor made from “natural flavor,” on the other hand, usually contains vanillin, the main flavor compound, that’s been extracted from wood pulp. (The presence of vanillin in wood is why you’ll find vanilla notes in barrel-aged chardonnay or whisky.)
From a scientific point of view, these distinctions are much ado about nothing. Citral is citral, whether it comes from a lemon or a lab. Vanillin is vanillin (though extract of real vanilla beans also contains other flavor compounds that add extra richness not found in synthetic vanillin or the stuff extracted from wood pulp). And a strawberry dessert industrially flavored to simulate ripeness isn’t necessarily less healthy than the same dessert made with naturally ripened strawberries that contain the same flavor chemicals. Sure, the strawberries do contain fiber and some other nutrients, but as far as safety is concerned, it’s probably all good—at least in the short term.
There might be a deeper problem, though, that goes beyond the safety or palatability of individual chemicals. In the previous chapter, we saw how the body depends on flavor cues to select a nourishing, nutritionally balanced mix of foods. Some critics say that adding extra flavor chemicals to foods tampers with this finely evolved system and thus prevents our bodies from making wise nutritional choices. In essence, the flavor industry is marketing nutritional deceit, they argue, and this deceit contributes to the modern epidemic of obesity and poor nutrition. The journalist Mark Schatzker dubs this “the Dorito effect” in his book of the same name.
When I put this charge to Peppet and Daniher over lunch, they noted that they’re only delivering what consumers want. “There’s a little chicken-and-egg question,” says Peppet. “On the one hand, the food companies are bad because they get people to eat all this salt and fat. But on the other hand, the public wants salt and fat. There’s a question of what’s driving what.”
And besides, they said, there’s another side to the story. Added flavors don’t have to be bad. “If our customers are willing, flavor can help drive healthier products,” says Daniher. People now have the option to choose flavored, unsweetened waters—which use flavorings our brains associate with sweetness—instead of sugarladen soft drinks. Some yogurt manufacturers have also reduced added sugar by 40 percent by substituting flavorings, instead. “That, to me, is a positive use of a flavor,” he says.
In today’s world, designing flavors is almost exclusively the task of professional flavorists, plying their trade in secret within commercial flavor houses or other large food companies. But if one visionary Frenchman has his way, within a few decades we may all be concocting flavors in our own kitchens from chemical raw materials.
If you ordered up a mad scientist character from Central Casting, you’d probably end up with someone who looks like Hervé This: about sixty years old, with a tonsure of longish, unkempt gray hair, wearing a white lab coat with the collar sticking up in the back, and an air of earnest, intense—though slightly distracted—enthusiasm. But that crackpot exterior belies This’s iconic stature in the food world. He’s a household name among avant-garde chefs, a highly respected food scientist, and director of the food division of the French Academy of Sciences. Oh, and he’s also the man who coined the term “molecular gastronomy”—the application in the kitchen of precise scientific techniques and ingredients normally found in the laboratory—which has become the hottest field in culinary artistry.
But molecular gastronomy is last year’s obsession. This (it’s pronounced “teece,” by the way) has moved on to a concept far more radical in scope: building foods not from plants and animals, but from what he calls “pure compounds” such as powdered proteins and sugars, and assembling custom-designed flavors from individual molecules, just as Brian Mullin does at Givaudan. He calls the approach “note-by-note cooking,” by analogy with a composer assembling avant-garde music note by note from a synthesizer. “For note-by-note cooking, no meat, no vegetables, no fruits, no fish, no eggs,” This says in a BBC news report. “Only compounds, and you make the dish.”
In part, This thinks the world will be driven by necessity to cook this way. As the world’s population rises and fossil fuels and fertilizer become scarcer and more expensive, farmers may find it difficult to grow enough normal food—chicken, cabbage, and rice—to meet the demand. But the things we think of as inedible—This likes
to flourish a handful of grass clippings from his lawn—are full of nutritious compounds like proteins and sugars, if only we could get at them. So why not extract the pure compounds and use them as ingredients? You get the extra benefit of a longer shelf life and, perhaps, energy savings from shipping powdered ingredients instead of fresh ones, which are mostly water. (Some skeptics, however, question whether it takes more energy to extract and dry the pure compounds than you’d use in shipping the fresh, wet originals.)
There’s a positive side to This’s vision, too. Why restrict our culinary flavor palette to the particular combinations of flavors that nature happens to have packaged together? “If you have beef and carrots, you can eat beef and carrots,” he told one reporter. “But if you have the 400 compounds in beef and the 400 compounds in carrots, you can make 160,000 combinations. It is like the infinite possibility of making colour from the three primary colours.”
Is it realistic to expect that you or I, alone in our kitchens, could actually mix and match pure compounds to make note-by-note dishes in this way? After all, professional flavorists need years of full-time training to understand how to combine flavor molecules into a convincing final product, whether they’re mimicking something from the real world like a strawberry or inventing something never tasted before, like Red Bull. The rest of us can’t hope to match that level of sophistication. We’ll have to start with baby steps: a few bulk compounds for nutrition, rounded out with a simple set of flavor molecules. Can we concoct something tasty from those rudiments, or is mere satisfaction of hunger the best that note-by-note cooking can offer?
I figure there’s only one way to know for sure: try it out for myself. A little searching turns up a handful of note-by-note recipes, either from This himself or from an annual note-by-note cooking contest sponsored by his university, AgroParisTech. I’ll try one of This’s basic recipes, a flavored protein pancake that he calls a “dirac.” (One of This’s quirks is that he likes to name his dishes after famous scientists, in this case the Englishman Paul Dirac, who predicted the existence of antimatter.)
I’m no test chef, so to give the recipe the best chance of success, I also enlist the help of a real pro: Maynard Kolskog, a research chef and instructor at one of Canada’s most highly regarded culinary programs at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, just a few miles from my house. Kolskog has a special interest in cuisine that pushes the boundaries, and he’s long been an admirer of Hervé This, so he seems eager to sign on to the experiment even though we’ve never met.
First up, the dirac. This’s recipe is simple: three parts what he rather unappetizingly calls “coagulating proteins”—powdered egg white, gluten, pea protein, basically anything that will set up when cooked—mixed with two parts water and some oil and flavored to taste (colored, too, if you like—This favors a bright pistachio green), then fried like a pancake. I meet Kolskog in his research kitchen, where he’s assembled the needed ingredients, and we get started.
Our first version, using This’s recipe calling for a 3:2 ratio of powdered egg white protein and water, makes a pallid pancake so dense and stiff that after we fry the thing, Kolskog can’t even cut it with a metal spatula. “Ooh, that’s dreadful,” he says. It makes me think of a yoga mat; Kolskog likens it to the weather stripping you’d use to seal a window. For our second attempt, Kolskog suggests more water—a lot more water—and more oil beaten into the batter. He also adds some sugar to the mix. This time, we end up with a light, frothy batter that fries into a much fluffier pancake. “It’s better, eh?” says Kolskog when we taste the result. “It’s almost edible. That has a little potential.” He can imagine using the dirac as a bed on which to rest a slice of smoked salmon, or something equally flavorful.
But by itself, the dirac is a little boring—at least partly because the flavor is so simple. We developed some mildly interesting Maillard flavors as the pancake browned, especially after Kolskog added a little more sugar in the second version. But the main flavor ingredient didn’t deliver what I’d hoped. We’d opted for one of This’s favorite flavorings, a compound called 1-octen-3-ol, or mushroom alcohol. I love mushrooms, so I was looking forward to the result. Unfortunately, on its own the mushroom alcohol’s flavor made me think not so much of mushrooms but of a forest floor on a rainy fall day. Pull aside the top layer of intact leaves to expose the moldering, decaying stuff underneath. That’s 1-octen-3-ol. If it smells like mushrooms, they’re rotting ones.
The mushroom alcohol would no doubt have worked well as a minor note in a more complex flavor. But now we’re back to the same old problem of expertise—to make a worthwhile flavor, I’d have to combine at least several—possibly many—compounds, and I just don’t have the training or experience to do that. That’s the big advantage of working with real fruits, vegetables, herbs, and meats: a strawberry, or a fillet of salmon, comes ready loaded with a complex mix of flavor compounds—a mix, moreover, that we’ve already learned to like.
Still, there’s no reason a cook like me couldn’t gradually learn more sophisticated flavorings. As a start, a little bit of This’s pure-compound approach might be worth working into my existing recipes. Now that I’ve got a bottle of mushroom alcohol on hand, for example, a few drops might add an interesting dimension to the flavors already present in a venison stew. A drop or two of limonene could add a fresh, citrusy lift to a cream sauce or a hollandaise. In fact, tweaking nature, rather than replacing it entirely, is what got This thinking about note-by-note cooking in the first place. He’d noticed that adding a few drops of vanillin—the principal flavoring in vanilla beans, and a key part of the flavor added during barrel aging of booze—made a cheap whisky taste like a more expensive one. (I tried that, too, and I’m not convinced. Maybe I needed a cheaper whisky. A better bet, for my money, would be a drop or two of smoky 4-ethylguaiacol.) An interesting technique, then. But the future of food? Nah. At least, I hope not. I still prefer the real thing, for the most part. And that’s where we’re headed next—to the farm, to see how our food acquires its flavor.
Chapter 7
THE KILLER TOMATO
Near the southwest fringe of the University of Florida’s campus in Gainesville sits a nondescript single-story building of whitewashed brick. A long walk from the massive football stadium and the modern, glass-and-steel high rises of the medical center, the little building looks like it could house a maintenance shop for the campus groundskeepers, or perhaps a storage area for recyclable trash. But for anyone who loves the flavor of a good tomato—and who doesn’t?—this could be the most important building on campus.
The supermarket tomato is the poster child for the failure of modern agriculture to produce food with decent flavor. Picked too green, shipped and gassed, the pale pink, styrofoamlike spheres are a faint echo of the sweet, juicy, luscious fruit they could be. Just ask anyone with a sunny backyard tomato patch or access to a good farmer’s market. Everybody likes to complain about what’s happened to commercial tomatoes. But in that little building in Gainesville, Harry Klee is actually doing something about it. Klee, a horticultural scientist who’s spent the past decade and a half trying to uncover the secrets of tomato flavor, knows exactly what’s wrong with the supermarket tomato—and he knows how to fix it. Someday in the not too distant future, thanks to Klee, all of us could be enjoying much tastier tomatoes, even from the supermarket, without having to pay a fortune for them.
In his office off the main lab room, Klee—a tall, graying man with a long, thin face, flyaway eyebrows, and a slight cast in his left eye—explains that tomato flavor has been sacrificed to tomato breeders’ success in boosting yields, because growers get paid for yield, not for flavor. “Breeders have developed modern varieties that basically yield too much,” he says in his pleasant tenor voice. “Think of the leaves as factories that produce sugars, and think of the fruits as consumers. Since 1970 versus today, the modern variety yields 300% more. That’s a lot. What the breeders have done, they’ve made plants that ar
e producing so many fruits that the leaves can’t keep up with the fruit.” As a result, he says, modern commercial tomatoes are starved of the ingredients that make a tomato tasty: sugars and the volatile odor compounds that deliver a rich tomato flavor. “These modern varieties are literally sucking all the nutrients out of the leaves, and they still can’t get enough. So the modern varieties have less volatiles, less sugars, less acid, everything. What’s in the modern fruit? Water. So the varieties that the modern consumer is given just don’t have the capacity to taste as good as an heirloom grown in your backyard.” At first sight, the problem looks intractable. The only way a plant can afford to put more sugar and volatiles—that is, more flavor—into each tomato is to make fewer tomatoes. Flavor and yield, it seems, are on opposite sides of the seesaw: if one goes up, the other must come down. Or must it?
Tomatoes are just one of the many crops that don’t taste like they used to, at least in popular belief. But where Klee and a few other researchers have clearly shown that modern commercial varieties of tomatoes lack the flavor of older heirlooms, we know much less about other crops. In fact, there’s precious little hard evidence to show that most fruits and vegetables actually did taste better in the past.
If anyone should know, it’s probably Alyson Mitchell, a food chemist at the University of California, Davis. UC Davis is smack in the middle of California’s Central Valley, where a huge share of America’s fruits and vegetables are grown, and it’s been a mecca for agricultural research for a century. Yet long-term studies of flavor just aren’t available. “There’s a lot of speculation—and probably rational speculation—that we are not growing foods with the same flavor,” says Mitchell. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand this. When I was a little girl, here in California, we used to go out into the field and pick peaches. And those peaches tasted so delicious. As time goes on, and we buy peaches in the grocery store, the flavor and aroma impact is just not the same. But if you ask my daughter ‘What does a peach taste like?’ she doesn’t have the same historical memory of what a peach tastes like. We don’t have that library. The data’s just not available to make those kind of comparisons.”