by Bee Wilson
To a cook, this list of ingredients is disturbing and alien. In the spring of 2004, a panel of food experts discussed junk food at the Manoir aux Quat’Saisons restaurant in Oxfordshire. Alice Waters was there, the chef of Chez Panisse in California. She mentioned with horror the passage about the strawberry milkshake in Schlosser’s book. Didn’t everyone know, Waters asked, that the ingredients of a strawberry milkshake were simply strawberries, milk, sugar, and a little ice cream?
Flavourists, not being cooks, would see this as the wrong way of posing the question. They would say: of course you can make a delicious strawberry milkshake if you have the finest organic strawberries at your disposal, the creamiest milk, the best cane sugar. To a flavourist, the challenge is to make a convincing strawberry milkshake using no strawberries or milk, and perhaps no sugar either. To aid them in this task, they need as many chemical tools as possible. It was partly the overwhelming number of different flavour components that gave the flavourists of the 1960s and 1970s such a sense of freedom. Their “library” of ingredients eventually ran into thousands. By 1986, it was calculated that between 3,500 and 6,000 flavours were used in British food, “depending on who is doing the counting.”109 Flavourings accounted for over 95 percent of all additives used.110
Moreover, the use of these flavours, in contrast to the use of preservatives, colours, and other additives, was hardly policed. In 1980, a former Unilever scientist boasted that in Britain “flavours are unique among food additives insofar as they have defeated all efforts to bring them under satisfactory statutory control.”111 He added, almost as an afterthought: “not that the public is thereby exposed to unnecessary hazard.” In the United States, there have been lists available of those flavourings “generally recognized as safe”; the first list contained approximately eleven hundred ingredients, but it has mushroomed since then.112 Until 1999, there was no European inventory of permitted flavourings.113 Anything went, and for the most part still does. Even now, there is no requirement, either in Europe or in the United States, for flavour companies to disclose the components of their flavours on food labels. Their presence is advertised only under the blanket term “flavour” or “artificial flavour.”
For pure-food campaigners, this enormous and seemingly unpoliced growth in flavourings was a dystopian horror, but to the flavourists, the infinite permutations of artificial flavours offered a bright new dawn in which flavours that were once the preserve of the rich were now within everyone’s reach. “What will the world taste like tomorrow?” asked big flavour firm Norda International, adding that its creation of new flavours meant that “there will be more to taste in the world tomorrow.”114 “Felton makes the world taste better” was the slogan for another international flavour company, which advertised itself with pictures of happy-looking, bright-eyed multiracial children, all enjoying the sheer goodness of synthetic flavouring in its various forms: a lurid soda pop, an artificial cake, a breakfast cereal, a strange green ice cream cone, and a giant swirly lollipop.115 The implication was clear: gone was the austerity of the postwar years; gone was the dreariness of boiled cabbage and corned beef. Thanks to the wonder of flavour technology, no one need stint themselves or their children any more. It was Space Invader crisps and cheap ice lollies all around. A flavour scientist named R. H. Sabine claimed that the new flavours were part of “improvements in standards of living.” The poor, who could not afford fresh fruit, could at least enjoy “the flavour of fresh fruit.”116 Never mind that this flavour lacked any of the nutrients of the real thing—who would deny those smiley children their share in the wonderful world of taste-sensation?
From today’s perspective, when manufacturers are generally keen to hide their white-coated food technicians away, to preserve the illusion that their products are all “natural,” it is startling to look back on this more shameless era, when food science was openly proud of its role in the future. Flavourists would talk brazenly of their role in undermining “natural” food. They also knew what their gold standard was. An industry textbook writes of the invention of cola flavour as “the dream of all flavourists: to create a new, non-existing taste with a world-wide success which by now lasts 100 years.” In flavourist’s terms, cola is the perfect flavour, carefully balanced between citrus top notes, a “sweet spicy, cinnamon, creamy vanilla heart,” and an earthy sourness underneath. “The cola flavour is an unequalled success story since the invention of cough syrup by Dr. Pemperton.”
In much of the trade advertising for the flavour industry of the 1970s, you find an open contempt for the food of nature—so messy, so expensive, and so hopelessly unreliable compared to the miracles in the flavourist’s test tubes. “Durkee improves on the fickle tomato,” boasted one advertisement.117 Synthetic flavours, by contrast, held out the promise of “relatively stable prices, freedom from quality variation and regular availability.”118 “In memory of our dear beloved raspberry,” reads a 1975 promotion for White Stevenson flavours. A real raspberry is shown dead, in a glass coffin. “But why worry,” it cheerily continues. “The raspberry still lives on in Reigate’s new Essence and Natura. With remarkable accuracy these products capture the flavour that was the raspberry.”119 Flavourists appear to have had something of a fixation with raspberries. Another 1970s advertisement, this time for Barnett & Foster, shows a white-coated scientist using a compass to measure a giant plastic model of a raspberry, as if trying to reduce its elusive flavour to an incorruptible formula.
“Felton makes the world taste better.” This optimistic 1970s’ advertisement stands in stark contrast to today’s worries about the effects of additives on children.
In real life, raspberries all taste different. That is their joy. A truly sweet raspberry, bursting with juice without being overripe, is all the more lovely for the knowledge of other, more disappointing raspberries: mouldy ones, or sour ones, or hard, mean, seedy ones. But flavourists don’t see it like that. A current textbook on flavourings complains that “common cultivated raspberries” often have a taste that is “just watery and acidic.” Raspberry flavouring, on the other hand, is the distillation of the most fragrant ripe rasberries ever tasted, with “a delicious fresh, fruity, green, floral, violet like perfume with some seedy woody background.”120 Broken down, the essential code for raspberry is as follows. For the floral violet perfume, mix in some alpha- and beta-ionone. For the fruity raspberry body, a touch of 1-(4-hydroxyphenyl) butan 2-one. For the fresh green top notes, a soupçon of (Z)-3-hexenal. If a jammy quality is desired, it can be supplied by the merest hint of 2,5-dimethyl- 4 hydroxy-furan-3(2H).
This is only a basic blueprint. The real trick was in the flavourist’s individual tweaking, which all came down to his particular aesthetic judgement. The Holy Grail was finding the precise raspberry flavour mix that would hook consumers and make them come back to your raspberry-flavour dessert rather than those of your competitors. The flavourist’s ultimate job was “to evoke pleasurable recognition in the mind of the taster,”121 because this recognition could make the difference between profit and loss for the firm he worked for (and in these advertisements and manuals, the flavourists are always a he; women, like children, exist to be seduced by the new flavours). Like the hautparfumier second-guessing the secret desires of his exclusive clientele, the top flavourist had to predict exactly what “raspberry” meant for possible consumers, some of whom may never have tasted a real one. He must know his market. For example, in the Netherlands, consumers like their dried packet chicken soup mixes to come flavoured with just a suggestion of curry. This wouldn’t work in England, where dried chicken soup, curiously, needs a base note of sage, perhaps a remnant of the old tradition of sage and onion stuffing.122 If asked about it, most consumers wouldn’t know that the sage was there; but they would miss it if it was absent.
Things didn’t always turn out quite so well. In 1970, Tudor crisps announced triumphantly that it had succeeded in creating the perfect kipper-flavoured crisps. For years, fish-flavoured crisps had b
een an impossible dream, perennially thwarted by technical difficulties. Fresh fish was just one of those flavours that didn’t translate into flavour powders. At last, in 1969, flavourists working for Tudor had a eureka moment: why not substitute kippers with their strong, salty, smoky taste, for fresh fish? After months of research and numerous taste panels involving adults and children, the perfect kipper crisp was finally formulated, using a combination of “fish concentrate and special smoked flavour.” A packet was designed showing a bright red fish. The crisps went on sale on 22 June in Scotland and 29 June in the north of England. Tudor’s marketing manager explained that he hoped they would be a hit among “kipper connoisseurs.”123 Foolish man. Just because the flavour of kipper crisps was technically accurate did not mean people wanted to eat them. Kipper lovers are generally traditional folk, who want their kipper flavour in a real kipper, not in a packet of crisps. Kipper crisps developed a modest following—and are still sometimes remembered by nostalgic children of the 1970s—but they were ultimately a failure, compared to the enduring British crisp flavours of smoky bacon, salt and vinegar, and cheese and onion.
A successful flavour was one that created brand loyalty. Lucas Seasonings boasted that it had “the sort of natural taste that raises a product above the rest and makes customers come back for more of the same.”124 Another firm called Spice & Flavour offered “tailor-made” seasonings, rubs, sauce mixes, brine flavourings, flavoured pie gelatines, pastry glazes, smoke flavours, breadings, batters, and specialized meat tenderizers. It argued that using its services “could mean the difference between Brand leader and also-ran.” Its ads played on the idea that consumers may buy a packaged product expecting a certain taste that it then fails to deliver. “He’s just been sold a pack of lies,” says one. We see a picture of a sad-looking old man holding up a package of what looks like chicken stew. Clearly it is not to his liking. “Flavouring is a subtle business. Often it’s the label that dictates the taste; tells you the taste you should expect, but don’t get. And that’s not right. Or good enough.” At this point, Spice & Flavour positions itself as the saviour. “Call in the favour detectors from Spice & Flavour Services. They’re experts. They analyse taste. Follow it. Anticipate it. Capture it.” The striking thing is the implication that Spice & Flavour is engaged in the science of detection, when its real business, clearly, is the science of deception. The business of adulteration has been turned on its head. All the howls of indignation, all the pleas for moral integrity and claims of scientific accuracy—the tools in trade of the nineteenth-century anti-adulteration campaigners—have been stolen by the adulterators themselves.
How did the flavourists justify their part in this? There were essentially three defences: pleasure, price, and chemistry. Pleasure, because as flavourists like to say, “the flavour and fragrance industry is solely aimed at enhancing the human striving for increased pleasure and sensual enjoyment. . . . Hedonistic aspects, therefore, form the basis of our industry.”125 If you should reply that the hedonistic enjoyment of food long predates synthetic chemicals, or point out that the enjoyment to be had in a synthetic soup mix, for example, is a pretty poor kind of pleasure, then the flavourists will hurl the question of price in your face. The science of flavour makes food much cheaper than it otherwise would be. The flavourists present their work as being essentially philanthropic, an argument that might be stronger were it not for the fact that the economic savings are more to the benefit of the manufacturer than the consumer. As one advertisement from 1975, directed at producers, not consumers, advised, use Ottens artificial bacon flavour and you’ll “laugh all the way to the bank.”126 Anyway, it’s all so unnatural, you reply; so horribly chemical. Now the flavourist plays his trump card. All flavours are chemical, he says. Consumers are wrong to mistrust “chemicals” in their food when all food is made up of chemicals anyway. In the words of one industry expert: “What is it that makes one food product insipid and almost flavourless and another exceptionally flavourful and appetizing? Let us not be in any doubt. In all cases, it is the presence, or absence, of chemicals.”127 So there.
We need to remember, these are chemists talking. Chemically speaking, there is no difference between the natural flavours in natural food and chemical re-creations of those components. Take vanillin. In 1873, the German scientist W. Haarmann found that it was possible to isolate vanillin, one of the most highly flavoured components in vanilla: C8HbO3 (4-Hydroxy-3-methoxy-benzaldehyde). Once isolated, this chemical could also be reproduced. Another German scientist, Karl Reimer, found that vanillin could be synthesized from guaiacol, a kind of yellowish, aromatic oil derived from creosote. Today, thousands of tonnes of vanillin are made, usually from byproducts of sulphite waste.128 For the flavourists, it would be wrong to be too squeamish about this. Vanillin is vanillin is vanillin, whether it comes from curving pods on a beautiful, orchidlike plant growing on the island of Madagascar, or from industrial waste. Its effects will be the same.
The law agrees. In Britain, flavours such as vanillin that occur naturally in food are called “nature-identical.” The label does not have to state where they actually come from. A flavouring counts as fully “artificial” only if it does not occur in nature at all, as is the case with another, stronger vanilla-substitute called ethyl-vanillin (often used in chocolate). Vanillin is now the most commonly produced flavour compound in the world, with an annual market of approximately 12,000 tonnes.129 It is not hard to see why, when you discover that real vanilla extract costs (at 2004 prices) around seventy-three U.S. cents per gallon whereas extract made from synthesized vanillin is around twelve cents. As a result, almost all cheap “vanilla–flavour” cookies and ice creams and cakes are actually flavoured with vanillin.
Does this matter? Can we accept the flavourist’s defence? To answer this, let’s consult the law on flavouring. Under European Union law, there are two basic rules governing whether flavourings should be allowed in food. The first is that “they present no risk to the health of the consumer.”130 On this count, vanillin is probably fine. There are no records of anyone ever getting vanillin poisoning, no matter how many fake vanillin cookies they consumed. As of 1980, the UK guidelines were for a maximum of 20,000 mg of vanillin to be added per kilo of food.131 This is extremely high, a sign of vanillin’s low toxicity. Compare this figure with the guidelines for piperine, one of the components of black pepper: a maximum of just 1 mg per kilo. It would be hard to make the case that vanillin poses health risks.
But what of the second EU rule? This states that the use of flavourings “must not mislead consumers.” The flavourists would exempt themselves from blame here, too, saying that so long as the label does not pretend that a food contains real vanilla, there is no deception in the use of vanillin. But can we be so sure? Vanilla expert Tim Ecott writes that the prevalence of vanillin is such that “many consumers have never tasted the difference” between vanillin and vanilla.132 To a real vanilla lover, there is a world of difference between vanillin, with its one-dimensional sweet, creamy taste, and a real vanilla pod, whose sweetness is tempered with a warm, winey woodiness. Vanillin is merely one of several hundred chemicals in vanilla. Yet to those who have never tasted anything else, manufactured vanillin seems like the one true taste. Ecott writes that “Tests conducted by flavour manufacturers have revealed that many people prefer artificial vanilla, simply because it is the taste they know.”133 The flavourists have succeeded in convincing the world’s taste buds that “vanillin” is actually “vanilla.”
Ultimately, the brave new world of flavouring is founded on deception. The better the flavours, the worse the deception. Human beings have nine thousand taste buds, which send us complex evolutionary signals about which foods are safe and good to eat. In manipulating these taste buds, the flavourist convinces the public that food is something other than what it really is. What makes it even worse is that the particular foods on which the flavourist has always practised the craft are the ones most lacking in nutritional val
ues, or the ones with the most to hide. There were even glimmers that the flavourists knew this was what they were doing. In 1972, the flavour industry announced an exciting new development called Interchicken, a method for injecting “flavour compositions” into “intensively reared poultry,” to make up for the blandness of these poor unhappy creatures. A trade report admitted that “it is well known that poultry slaughtered for processing after only 49 days is somewhat deficient in flavour compared with a bird held for a period of 112 to 120 days.” The answer? Inject the birds with flavours using “an electronic dispensing unit,” which dispersed flavour throughout the flesh. The flavour mix included “an autolysate produced from virgin yeast, a concentrate derived from New Zealand butter known as Butta Natura and chicken spice liquid based on extracts from a wide range of herbs and spices, all dispersed in soluble grade phosphate and citrate.”134 Interchicken went down well with test panels; it convinced them that a modern broiler could taste as good as a properly reared chicken.
As Eric Schlosser has said, the essential job of the flavourist is “to conjure illusions about processed food.”135 But back in the 1970s, these conjurors were not having it all their own way. While the flavourists were happily composing their ersatz music, campaigners both in Britain and the United States had begun to rebel against the manipulation.
Ralph Nader and the Chemical Feast
In 1973, a witty food industry executive coined a new term: “Naderphobia,” named after the attorney and consumer activist Ralph Nader. The symptoms of the illness were a heightened sensitivity and an abandonment of normal behaviour among otherwise happy-go-lucky businesspeople; in other words, a terror in the face of the damage that consumer activists could do to the food industry.136 Plenty of manufacturers were suffering from this malaise. Ralph Nader’s main target, famously, was the automobile industry. From 1965 onwards, Nader had attacked General Motors for producing cars that were “unsafe at any speed.” Since then, his advocacy of consumer causes had widened out to include drug companies, air pollution, and foods that were unsafe in any amount. In 1970, Nader’s Study Group published The Chemical Feast, a blistering attack on the American food supply and the FDA’s failure to police it.