Swallow This

by Joanna Blythman

  Flavourings also come as custom-made blends tailored to one product. A biscuit manufacturer can source, for instance, a ‘custard cream’ flavouring, an ‘oatmeal cookie enhancer’, or a ‘bun spice’ flavouring. A caterer or ready meals company can turn some pre-sliced frozen potatoes into a plausibly authentic and aspirational tartiflette – the classic Savoyarde dish – by merely adding some powdered tartiflette flavouring ‘prepared from bacon notes, Reblochon and cooked onions with crème fraiche’. A lazy chef can use a carbonara flavouring powder: ‘This 100% natural flavour will give a desired taste of Parmesan, bacon and crème fraiche to food creations’. For the romantic and naive, there are long, lyrical, composite flavourings, such as coconut chocolate almond vanilla, and white chocolate macadamia nut, or Crazy Caprese Mediterranean blend.

  From Polynesian plum, pina colada, prickly pear and pumpkin pie to banana, beer, butterscotch and broccoli, no flavour, however notional, appears to be beyond the endeavour of flavour engineers. The sheer scale and ambition of their mission is so uncoupled from the realm of fact that it takes the breath away. Flavour chemists clearly believe that there is no flavour in nature that they cannot capture. Their confidence in their trade is absolute. According to FlavorFacts, an industry body:

  Flavorists work in a combined field of art and science, using a ‘flavor palette’ the same way a painter uses color or a sculptor uses texture. There are a range of flavor ingredients that impart tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory), smells, and physical traits (‘heat’ and ‘cold’), and we experience these flavors and traits at different points while we eat. Flavorists refer to these as ‘notes,’ with the ‘top note’ being the first thing you taste, and the ‘bottom note,’ the last. Flavorists can mix and match from their palette to make a seemingly unlimited number of flavor combinations.

  But these chemists who are playing around with our taste buds need a reality check. Whether ‘natural’ or artificial, flavourings never manage to replicate the real thing. A croissant made with butter flavouring and margarine doesn’t taste the same as one made with real butter. Pistachio ice cream made with pistachio flavouring can never be confused with one made with a generous quantity of crushed fresh nuts. A drink concocted with lime flavouring is not at all like one made with zingy fresh lime juice. This much is apparent to anyone who eats real food and therefore has benchmark natural flavours against which to judge the man-made pretenders.

  Of course, flavour chemists don’t see taste that way. For them, any natural flavour is nothing more or less than an assembly of volatile chemicals, such as phenols, terpenes and esters, which excite the nose and activate the taste buds. Once the most dominant of these heady compounds has been isolated, and their chemical structure fathomed, they can then be synthesised to produce flavourings that capture their essence. Find them, name them, copy them – what could be simpler?

  Currently, there is a grand total of 2,500 ‘approved flavouring substances’ or aromatic chemicals that can be legally used to flavour food in Europe. Four hundred of these are under evaluation for safety, and so could eventually be removed. This process takes years, if not decades. The list features substances such as 1-isopropyl-4-methylbenzene, 2,6-dimethylocta-2,4,6-triene, 2-methyl-1-phenylpropan-2-ol, cyclohexanol, 3-(1-menthoxy)propane-1,2-diol, 9-octadecenal, 1-isopentyloxy-1-propoxyethane, 3,4-dihydroxybenzoic acid, cinnamyl butyrate, 3-[(4-amino-2,2-dioxido-1H-2,1,3-benzothiadiazin-5-yl)oxy]-2,2-dimethyl-N-propylpropanamide, lenthionine, and another 2,490 of that ilk.

  The approved list might not whet the appetite, yet it catalogues some of the chemical components of many mouth-watering flavours. Allyl hexanoate, for instance, smells like pineapple, ethyl decadienoate like pears, while benzaldehyde and limonene conjure up bitter almond and orange, respectively. In the flavourist’s jargon, they are ‘tastants’, chemicals that stimulate the sensory cells in our taste buds. Chemicals such as these are the building blocks from which food industry chemists construct the flavourings that end up in our food and drink. A typical strawberry flavouring for a milk shake, for example, is composed of around 50 such chemicals. ‘We can get compounds like hydrogen sulfide and dimethyl sulfide that generate the sulfuric flavor of aged Cheddar, or a mixture of esters – ethyl benzoate, ethyl butyrate, etc. – that give off a fruity flavor like in Parmesan’, one ‘sensory coordinator’ explains. Dimethyl sulfide, 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline and 2-acetyl-2-thiazoline, for example, evoke cooked flavours, whereas strong, nutty flavours might come from 2- and 3-methylbutanal. Amyl acetate flags up banana, benzaldehyde does the same for cherry.

  If creating flavourings was only a matter of mix and match, or cut and paste, then flavourists would be redundant in their droves overnight, but aping the flavours of the natural world is hard. Nature’s flavours are intricate, and composed of not one but many of these aromatic chemicals. In a high-grown coffee, for instance, there are hundreds of flavour notes, including berry, citrus and jasmine. In cocoa, more than 600 flavours have so far been identified. To date, some 10,000 flavours have been identified in nature, and it’s a dead cert that there are many more just waiting to be discovered.

  Any natural flavour is an elaborate thing, with legions of odoriferous chemicals acting in synergy to create that distinctive taste and fragrance fingerprint. It’s one thing to be able to identify the major chemicals that underpin a certain flavour and aroma, quite another to formulate a flavouring that does justice to the sheer complexity and well-ordered intelligence of the real thing. Flavour engineers can tinker all they like with the proportions and combinations of chemicals to come up with more convincingly real flavours, but they can only get so close.

  A further stumbling block in flavour construction, or ‘taste modulation’ as the trade likes to call it, is that the flavours in natural food come all wrapped up in natural macro- and micronutrients – proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals – that taste good. Natural foods are holistically conceived packages, with every element supporting several more and contributing to the common good. But in industrial food manufacture, many of the bulk ingredients in the recipe are already so corrupted and traduced by excessive processing – industrially refined vegetable oil, lifeless, nutritionally denuded bulk starches and fillers, for instance – that they bring precious little to the table in taste terms, or worse, make everything taste bad.

  Low-fat products represent a particularly tough challenge for flavour chemists. Many flavours are lipophilic, that is, they are most concentrated in fat. Fat is flavour’s friend, so if manufacturers decrease the fat in foods, flavour release happens more quickly and dissipates faster in the mouth. Less fat also diminishes creaminess, smoothness and viscosity. This is why low-fat milk doesn’t taste as good as full-fat. Manufacturers also like to earn brownie points by reducing levels of sugar and salt in their products, but this results in a taste gap that flavouring helps to hide. And while real flavours fade or intensify over time, man-made flavourings maintain the same profile right up until the ‘use-by’ or ‘best before’ date. In the words of one flavour chemist, a flavouring must ‘withstand whatever process it faces and [can] deliver the character you want over the life of the product’.

  The task of the flavour chemists then, is not so much to concoct a chemical blend that has the refinement of the real thing, but to come up with a larger-than-life flavouring, a ramped-up version of reality that’s fit for the job of disguising the vapidity of other industrialised ingredients.

  So although the chemical industry is keenly focused on capturing and reproducing natural flavours, it is embarked on an impossible mission. At best, its efforts are akin to an amateurish counterfeiter’s maladroit copy of a work of art. Others are so patently fake they are laughable; about as authentic as a mouthful of scented candle or whiff of air freshener. Indeed, candles, air fresheners and processed food flavourings can have aromatic chemicals in common.

  Those people most preoccupied with avoiding the products of the processed food industry may draw the co
nclusion that it is best to avoid anything with the word ‘flavouring’ on the label, even if that means only eating plain salted crisps, and avoiding any beverage that has the weasel word ‘drink’ (code for ‘with flavouring’) in its name, but many more of us seek refuge in the cosseting adjective ‘natural’. Natural flavouring sounds like a reasonable compromise, implying some sort of qualitative difference. If only. Even FlavorFacts, a promotional body of the flavouring industry, squashes that illusion: ‘There isn’t much difference in the chemical compositions of natural and artificial flavorings’, it says. How can this be?

  Natural and artificial flavourings do have a different genesis. Natural flavourings must be made from flavours chemically extracted from natural sources – plants, minerals and animals – just as you might expect. Artificial flavourings, on the other hand, are born in the laboratory.

  There are two sorts of artificial flavourings. ‘Nature identical’ flavourings have the same chemical formula as their natural model, but are synthesised from chemicals. For example, Citral, or to give it its chemical name, 3,7-dimethyl-2,6-octadienal, has a strong lemon zest aroma, and whether it is distilled from lemon grass oil, or chemically synthesised in the lab, it has the same molecular structure. A wholly ‘artificial’ flavouring, on the other hand, does not come from natural aromatic materials, and its chemical structure is not found anywhere in nature.

  A classic example here is the artificial vanilla flavouring, ethyl vanillin. Probably the most extensively used flavouring in food manufacture, its cloying, heavy-handed faux vanilla presence finds its way into cakes, biscuits, sweets and ice cream. This artificial vanillin is usually chemically synthesised from sawdust, petrochemicals or wood pulp, with not a vanilla pod in sight. But it gives manufacturers more bang for their bucks, being ‘roughly three times more taste-intensive’ and much less costly than real vanilla.

  If the distinction between natural and artificial flavourings seem clear enough, if not crystal clear, be prepared to be confused, or even bemused, by this further distinction in the ‘natural’ flavouring category. Food manufacturers get to choose from three kinds of ‘natural’ flavouring: FTNSs, FTNFs and WONFs. They themselves bandy these acronyms around freely, but even in their unabbreviated form they don’t ring a bell with the rest of us. And why should they? You won’t see them on ingredients listings.

  FTNS stands for ‘From The Named Source’, so a basil FTNS will have started out with real basil in some form – probably dehydrated and frozen – while an artificial basil flavouring will never have seen a leaf of the pungent herb. FTNF stands for ‘From The Named Fruit’; such flavourings are particularly marketed as useful ‘add-backs’ for fruit juices to ‘replace’ the aromas of the fruit that have been destroyed in the production process.

  WONF, which stands for ‘With Other Natural Flavourings’, is a trickier concept. Although these are sold by one name – blackcurrant, vanilla, hazelnut, cranberry, or whatever – such flavourings have been blended or ‘enhanced’, as the industry diplomatically puts it, with a mixture of other natural flavourings. To a member of the public looking at the ingredients list on a ‘black cherry ice cream’ for instance, the difference is far from obvious. Unless the label reads ‘natural black cherry flavouring’, there will certainly be other flavourings swirling around in the tub. Even when a flavouring is a FTNF, and described, for example, as ‘natural black cherry flavouring’, five per cent of it can come from chemicals not found in cherries to ‘standardise’ the taste.

  At one trade show, I was given a sensory tutorial on natural honey flavourings at the stand of a company known for its cutting-edge products. Out from a locked drawer came diminutive phials of clear liquid. My tutor dipped those little flexible cardboard strips used at perfume counters into the liquid then wafted them under my nose. Had I been asked to identify them blind, I would probably have correctly plumped for honey, but I would have been unable to differentiate between the natural honey flavouring and the WONF version. But the weird and instructive thing about this experience was that although these heady clear substances made me recall honey, they were like no honey I have ever smelt or tasted. Rather, they reminded me of those scratch-and-sniff games where children are encouraged to identify an odour. They were bigged-up, exaggerated presences, and being around them was like being stuck in the front row of an opera where you can’t help noticing the thickness of the singers’ make-up.

  The naturalness of ‘natural’ flavourings becomes even more debatable when you consider how they are made. When pressed to give examples of the methods used, flavour companies volunteer time-honoured methods, such as distillation and infusion, which evoke images redolent of Patrick Suskind’s fragrant novel, Perfume. But the processes permitted for making natural flavourings are considerably broader, and more hi-tech, than such examples might lead you to believe.

  In European law, a ‘natural flavouring substance’ can be obtained:

  by appropriate physical, enzymatic or microbiological processes from material of vegetable, animal or microbiological origin either in the raw state or after processing for human consumption by one or more of the traditional food preparation processes listed.

  So making natural flavourings can include using microorganisms, such as bacteria, advanced fermentation techniques that involve genetic modification, and enzymes to speed up the chemical process. For instance, modern biotechnology can create a ‘natural’ mature cheese flavouring by blending young, immature cheese with enzymes (lipases or proteases) that intensify the cheese flavour until it reaches ‘maturity’ – within 24 to 72 hours. This mature cheese flavouring is then heat treated to halt enzymatic activity. Hey presto, mature-tasting cheese in days, not months. By comparison, traditional Cheddar is not considered truly mature until it has spent from nine to 24 months in the maturing room.

  The production method for making natural flavourings can also entail extraction using solvents – propane, butane, methyl acetate, ethanol, acetone, nitrous oxide, hexane, ethyl methyl ketone, dichloromethane, propan-2-ol, diethyl ether, butan-1-ol, propan-1-ol and 1,1,1,2-tetrafluoroethane are all considered suitable for this purpose. Such solvents, we are assured, must be used ‘in compliance with good manufacturing practice’ and any residues or derivatives left in the flavouring must be ‘technically unavoidable’ and in quantities that present ‘no danger to human health’. It’s quite clear, however, that in some circumstances, flavouring chemicals can be a health hazard, as the US Government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) points out:

  Flavoring chemicals are very volatile, so they evaporate into the air from their liquid or solid form and can be easily inhaled. They can also be inhaled in the form of a powder if airborne dust is created in the production process. Many of these chemicals are highly irritating to the eyes, respiratory tract, and skin.

  We’re not just talking the odd sneeze here. As the CDC notes, exposure to flavourings is known to have caused severe lung disease in some workers routinely exposed to them. In fact, respiratory problems are a known occupational hazard for those whose job is on the flavouring line of crisp, popcorn and pretzel factories. And if exposure to flavourings can have such damaging effects on the people who work with them, what might it do in the long term to those who consume food and drink containing them? As always, the official line – that flavourings pose no risk to human health when ingested in small quantities – is scarcely reassuring. Safe limits for consumption of flavourings are based on statistical assumptions, often provided by companies who make food additives. And although they can refer to a long list of official risk assessments for individual additives, no independent regulatory body appears to be researching the potential cocktail effect of such additives on people who consume large quantities of processed food. Yet, as the CDC acknowledges, ‘much remains unknown regarding the toxicity of flavoring-related chemicals’.

  Consumers in Europe are gradually becoming as suspicious of the word ‘flavouring’ as they are of the
word ‘colouring’. In Germany in 2013, the highly respected consumer protection group, Stiftung Warentest (the German equivalent of Which?) was taken to court by the leading German chocolate brand, Ritter Sport, for suggesting that the vanilla flavouring in its hazelnut chocolate bars was not truly natural because it was made using chemicals. Ritter Sport won an injunction against Stiftung Warentest, but this high-profile dispute put the ‘realness’ of natural flavourings in the spotlight and left many German consumers wondering if, in practical terms, there is any significant difference between artificial and natural flavourings.

  Anticipating a time when the term ‘flavouring’ might become irredeemably discredited – whether prefixed by natural or not – the food manufacturing industry is quite keen to elbow that troublesome word off its labels. So the push is on to replace flavourings with products that also enhance taste, but have less unsettling names. Two legal terms have now been established for these: ‘flavouring preparations’ and ‘foods with flavouring properties’. These shiny new categories of up-and-coming flavour boosters include substances referred to on the ingredients list as ‘natural extracts’ and ‘natural concentrates’, which sound like something you’d eat on a yoga retreat. Where once your lunchtime couscous salad, prawn mayo sandwich and diet lemonade would have had ‘flavouring’ on the label, extracts and concentrates increasingly replace it. Move over lemon flavouring, and let’s hear it for lemon juice extract or concentrate. But as the European Flavouring Association makes clear, these preparations can be produced using the same techniques as natural flavourings, ‘from plant, animal or microbiological source materials by means of physical or biotechnological [GM] production processes’. So, this apparent move into naturalness isn’t quite as decisive as we’d like to think.

  To be fair, most of us would probably prefer, for instance, that an intensely savoury, meaty, added ‘umami’ taste came from yeast extract – a food with flavouring properties – rather than from MSG, the controversial artificial flavouring, linked with allergic reactions. But the rationale for adding flavours, whether that’s in the form of natural or artificial flavourings, flavouring preparations, or foods with flavouring properties, is identical: they create a fake taste.