Mark Schatzker > Quotes

“The food problem is a flavor problem. For half a century, we've been making the stuff people should eat--fruits, vegetables, whole grains, unprocessed meats--incrementally less delicious. Meanwhile, we've been making the food people shouldn't eat--chips, fast food, soft drinks, crackers--taste ever more exciting. The result is exactly what you'd expect.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Cinnamon, I realized, is the flavor equivalent of being hugged by your grandmother.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Can these foods [low-fat, vitamin-enriched, etc] even be called "healthy"? Perhaps we should think about it this way: If you cut a batch of pharmaceutical-grade cocaine with chai, you could say with some degree of honesty that it is "healthier," "less addictive," and "now with chai!" But would you say it's "good for you"?”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Goats' refusal of young blackbrush shoots, furthermore, is outright. They want nothing to do with it. Provenza pointed at his hand, then his arm and body, and said, "Every organ and every cell has receptors similar to what's in your nose and on your tongue." Creatures communicate within their environment the same way they communicate within their own bodies -- through chemical trigger substances that bind to receptors and produce responses. "It's all part of a feedback system," Provenza said, "that tells the body what's good and what isn't."

Goats are not stupid after all. They don't bumble through the world eating what they were born to like. They experience need states, satisfaction, and delight along with aversions to strong a mere hint of something can make them turn away in disgust. Flavor is what nutrition feels like to a goat.

If goats had a word for delicious, it would have two meanings. The first would be: I like this. The second would be: This is what my body needs. For goats, they are the same thing.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Yes, part of the problem is junk food. There’s more of it, and it’s more alluring than ever. But nonjunk food is a bigger problem. It isn’t as flavorful as it used to be, which has the inverse effect of making junk food yet more enticing. Even worse, we’re turning real food into junk food.Thanks to its off-putting insipidness, we coat it in calories, drench it in dressing, and dust it in synthetic flavor. The more bland it becomes, the harder we try to make it seem real.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Flavor factories churn out chemical desire. We spray, squirt, and inject hundreds of millions of pounds of those chemicals on food every year, and then we find ourselves surprised and alarmed that people keep eating. We have become so talented at soaking our food in fakeness that the leading cause of preventable death - smoking - bears a troubling resemblance to the second leading cause of preventable death - obesity.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Are humans nutritional idiots? Our palates aren't just out of tune with our bodily needs. Our palates are out to kill us.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Modern food may be the most compelling lie humans have ever told.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“...the question of portion size. When I ate Doritos or a Big Mac, I dept on eating and eating, and later experienced McRegret. So why when I ate a fourteen-week-old barred rock [heirloom breed chicken] or a grapefruit did I find it tremendously delicious and yet tremendously satisfying? If these foods tasted better, shouldn't I have just kept on gorging?

Fred Provenza believes the difference comes down to what he calls "deep satiety." "Fundamentally," he told me, "eating too much is an inability to satiate." Wen food meets needs at "multiple levels," it provides a feeling of "completeness" and offers a satisfaction that's altogether different from being stuffed.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Humans look just like livestock now. We achieve a state of buttery plumpness before we've even reached sexual maturity. We experience powerful cravings for food that is slowly making us sick. We are...programmed to eat the wrong food. We aren't born calorie zombies, but that's what we have become.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Eat Dark Chocolate and Drink Wine And craft beer, too. These foods don’t prevent or cure disease all on their own, but they are the mark of palates in tune with good food. Think of them as gateway foods to a healthier palate.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Their [plant secondary compounds] healthful effects in humans, however, are not well understood, in part because things in nature like coriander and basil can't be patented so there isn't a lot of money being thrown at them, and in part because long-term studies that measure small effects of low doses are expensive and don't yield the kind of unambiguous, major effects you get with pharmaceuticals, but mainly because preventions are never as exciting as cures.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“We eat for one reason: because we love the way food tastes. Flavor is the original craving.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“In nature, flavor never appears without nutrition. No morsel of food should pass your lips before you have asked the following question: Where did the flavor come from? If it came from the plant or animal you’re eating, keep eating. If it was applied by a human with a PhD in chemistry, put it down.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“The Dorito Effect, very simply, is what happens when food gets blander and flavor technology gets better.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Just like with the Memphis fried chicken, I didn’t enjoy the Doritos, not the way I enjoy good chocolate or a ripe peach. The only payoff was the first bite—an entertaining crunch and a brief spike of flavor that all faded to mush. Desperate to regain the thrill, I would reach in and grab another chip. It wasn’t that putting a Dorito in my mouth felt good. It was more like not eating them felt bad.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Eat in restaurants that employ actual chefs who cook using dead plants and animals, not low-paid laborers who pour sauces out of plastic buckets and flavor powders out of bags. Patronize restaurants that honor the flavor of the ingredients they use and don’t mask them in seasoning.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Music can tear you to shreds and stitch you back together better than new.”
― Mark Schatzker, The End of Craving: Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well

“So let’s review all the ways the Dorito Effect appears to be turning us into nutritional idiots:

• Dilution. As real food becomes bland and loses its capacity to please us, we are less inclined to eat it and very often enhance it in ways that further blunt its nutrition.

• Nutritional decapitation. When we take flavors from nature, we capture the experience of food but leave the nutrition—the fiber, the vitamins, the minerals, the antioxidants, the plant secondary compounds—behind. In nature, flavor compounds always appear in a nutritional context.

• False variety. We naturally crave variety in food—it’s one of nature’s ways of making sure we get a diverse diet. Fake flavors make foods that are nutritionally very similar seem more different than they actually are.

• Cognitive deception. Fake flavors fool the conscious mind. A mother enticed by a Dannon Strawberry Blitz Smoothie as an after-school snack for her eight-year-old child will taste it and reasonably believe the product contains strawberries, even though it contains none.

• Emotional deception. Flavor technology manipulates the part of the mind that experiences feelings. Fake flavors take a previously established liking for a real food and apply it, like a sticker, to something else—usually large doses of calories—creating a heightened and nutritionally undeserved level of pleasure.

• Flavor-nutrient confusion. By hijacking flavor-nutrient relationships, fake flavors, by their very nature, set a false expectation. A major aspect of obesity is an outsized desire for food, one that very often cannot be extinguished by food itself. By imposing flavors on foods without the corresponding nutrients, are we creating foods that are incapable of satiating the people who eat them? So many of the foods we overconsume—refined carbs, high-fructose corn syrup, sugar, added fat—would not be palatable without synthetic flavor. We gorge on them because they taste like something they are not.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“A half century after Nidetch’s Mallomar binges, scientists had developed a technology that could see cravings erupting, like solar flares, inside the human brain. In early 2008, a research team at the Lewis Center for Neuroimaging at the University of Oregon measured just such a craving in a nineteen-year-old college student we will call Debbie. Debbie had her head inside a very large, very expensive round magnet called an MRI scanner when an image of a chocolate milk shake was flashed before her eyes for two seconds. As soon as Debbie saw it, certain parts of her brain became “activated,” which is to say they drew in lots of blood as millions of neurons were fired. These regions—the left medial orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and three other small, curly pockets of gray matter—are all associated with “motivation.” And the functional MRI (fMRI) showed them glowing a bright yellowy orange, like coals in a hot fire, indicating those parts of her brain were churning through quite a lot of blood. She was experiencing “incentive salience,” the scientific term for a Frankenstein craving, or a heightened state of “wanting.” Debbie got what she wanted.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Comb farmers’ markets and specialty food shops for chickens no younger than nine weeks—and preferably twelve to eighteen—that have access to pasture in warmer months and are fed green feed when it’s too cold to go outside. (If you can get your hands on a bird older than eighteen weeks, make chicken and dumplings, but have some tissue on hand to sop up the tears of joy.)”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“The rise in obesity is the predictable result of the rise in manufactured deliciousness. Everything we add to food just makes us want it more. And no matter how hard we try, we can't make our outsized desires go away. If anything, we're lucky, inexplicably so, that only 8.3 percent of women and 4.4 percent of men have a BMI consistent with total food addiction. But remember the children...The percentage of slender Americans will gradually work its way down to zero. (82)”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Eat Meat from Pastured Animals It costs more, but it’s healthier and you will eat less of it. Choose grass-fed beef that’s at least twenty-two months old—not the ultralean cheap stuff—and pasture-raised pork.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“They drive our behaviors and control our moods. If music is emotion expressed in the medium of sound, flavor is emotion expressed in the medium of food.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Obesity is so rampant that it seems contagious. It’s an epidemic now, and it’s spreading to other countries— the British are gaining, the Chinese are gaining, even the French are gaining— which makes it a pandemic. There are frantic efforts to make it stop. Weight Watchers and Overeaters Anonymous were just early tactics in a long war that would go on to include the Pritikin Principle, the Scarsdale Medical Diet, Slimfast, the Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, The Zone, Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, the Blood Type Diet, the Mediterranean Diet, the Master Cleanse, the DASH diet, the Cabbage Soup Diet, the Paleo Diet, and the Raw Diet. Americans have eaten fat- burning grapefruits, consumed cabbage soup for seven straight days, calculated their daily points target, followed the easy and customizable menu plan, dialed the 1- 800 number to speak to a live weight- loss counselor, taken cider vinegar pills, snacked strategically, eliminated high- glycemic vegetables during the fourteen- day induction phase, achieved a 40:30:30 calorie ratio, brought insulin and glucagon into balance, sought scientific guidance from celebrities, abstained from the deadly cultural practice known as cooking, tanned and then bled themselves to more fully mimic the caveman state, asked that the chef please prepare the omelet with no yolks, and attained the fat- burning metabolic nirvana known as ketosis. It has all been a terrible, amazing failure.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Eat a variety of real foods, including things you think you might hate, like broccoli, collard greens, liver, and mackerel. (Trust me: All are delicious.) Recognize that your palate is a growing, living thing. It can and it will change. What you liked when you were nine years old is not what you will like as an adult. Nibble new foods. Try something ten times before you know for sure you don’t like it. Above all, eat foods you find deeply satisfying.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Don’t Pop Vitamin Pills There is no scientific evidence that vitamin supplements improve health and every reason to believe they empower a bland, high-calorie diet. Even worse, if your body is in need of vitamins, popping a tasteless pill could set up an unintended flavor preference just as Fred Provenza did with his coconut-loving sheep. Eat real food whose flavor tells the gripping story of its nutrition.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Hedonism, as any puritan can tell you, never leads to virtue. If we could all set pleasure aside and eat what’s good for us, our problems would all go away. (Good luck with that.)”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“presence of chemicals that fool your tongue: monosodium glutamate MSG disodium guanlyate disodium inosinate torula yeast yeast extract hydrolyzed protein autolyzed yeast saccharin (Sweet Twin, Sweet’N Low, Necta Sweet) aspartame (NutraSweet, Equal, Sugar Twin) acesulfame potassium (Ace-K, Sunett, Sweet One) sucralose (Splenda) neotame (Newtame) advantame stevia”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Flavor-wise, chicken started moving in the wrong direction when the high-energy diet appeared, so much so that Julia Child sounded the alarm in 1961.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor