American agriculture is one of the wonders of the world--a saving wonder. To quote Mark Schatzker, whose study of the fast-food industry (The Dorito Effect) offers a remarkably well-balanced view of what's happened to American nutrition:
"A standard acre of American farmland is now producing more than three times as much rice than it did in 1948, four times as much corn, three times as much potatoes, two and a half times as much wheat, and two times as much soybeans. Hens lay twice as many eggs, pigs are 25 percent bigger yet 25 percent younger, and a beef cow is just half as old but produces 60 percent more meat. Decade after decade, we are squeezing out much more from the same parcel of turf."
Thanks to the green revolution pioneered by an American visionary--Norman Borlaug--and the enterprise of our farmers and ranchers, more than a billion people around the world are thought to have been saved from starving to death.
All we seem to have lost is flavor--and good health. In the early 1960s, as Mr. Schatzker notes, the American obesity rate was 13.4 percent. Today it is 35 percent. With a concomitant rise in diabetes, mortality rates, and other epidemics related to nutrition, or rather poor nutrition.
Flavor, however, of a kind, can be restored by artificial additives, which tend to be addictive. See the example of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, and the craving for Doritos he developed while awaiting his trial (and execution). First it was Cheetos he grew dependent on, but when he discovered Doritos, to quote one memoir by his captors, "he never went back." He called them Doris and would go through a family-sized bag in 10 minutes.
Such is the power of fake food. Mr. Schatzker calls this the Dorito Effect, which he defines as "what happens when food gets blander and blander and flavor technology gets better."
The result is that we have devoted a whole science and industry to spicing up our food. Doritos may have started out with only 11 ingredients, but by now the list has grown to encyclopedic length. As a headline in the not so fictional The Onion put it, "Doritos Celebrates One Millionth Ingredient." Enough became more than enough--it became ridiculous--some time ago. Along the way, our spice merchants created a sauce that "made the sizzle louder and more intense," and a cedar-plank flavor for salmon that had never touched a cedar plank. Anything to imitate real taste.
What to do?
Mr. Schatzer suggests shopping for real food with real flavor, but acknowledges: Even if every one of us from the lower middle class right up to the 1 percent spent more on food to pay for those heirloom tomatoes, strawberries, corn, wheat, and chicken, we still wouldn't have heirloom flavors in the quantity we need. Or at a price anybody but a hedge-fund operator or your average everyday billionaire could afford.
Conclusion: We've been trapped. By our own taste buds.
Editorial on 05/28/2015