Savor Flavorby Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley, on
Gastropodwww.gastropod.com
MUSIC
MH: Fantasy flavors could be Juicy Fruit, Red Bull, root beer,
blue raspberry these are delicious flavors that are consumer known
but they just don't really exist in the world. Meaning you can't
just go and squeeze a root beer flower.
MUSIC
NT: That was Michelle Hagen. Shes a flavorist at Givaudan, which
is the largest flavor and fragrance company in the world.
CG: Wonder what a flavorist is? Stay tuned. This episode well be
getting the history and science of artificial flavors, from
long-forgotten grapes that inspired that weird fake grape Jolly
Rancher flavor to the designer microbes fermenting the flavors of
the future.
NT: Its just another day at the office for Gastropod, the
podcast where we bring you the best in food science and history. Im
Nicola Twilley - CG: And Im Cynthia Graber. Before we get into
flavor, we have a favor to ask of you all.
NT: Next month were doing an entire episode on cocktails! So we
want your favorite cocktail stories. Delicious new creations,
signature drinks, the ones that flopped..
CG: Oooh, do I have a cocktail recipe that flopped.
NT: Record us a voice memo on your phone and email it to us, or
leave us a message at 310.876.2427.
CG: And now, in this episode, I ask Nicky the question youre all
wondering. What in the world is the difference between a natural
and an artificial flavor?
SKITTLES MUSIC
NT: To answer that questions, I kind of need to go back Im going
to have you open a couple of packets of Skittles. The first is a
normal package of original Skittles.
CG: Which I have right here.
POURING IN
NT: We are going to do two separate experiments that will help
us get at the nature of flavor. Because I think a lot of people
think flavor is sort of identical to taste. But taste is a sense.
Sour sweet salty bitter. Theres debate about how many different
tastes we can sense and how it works. But it's fundamentally
different from flavor. Flavor is a lot more than just taste. And
its a perception not a sense. Which means it happens in your
brain.
CG: Okay, so lets start that off, first I tasted a purple
Skittle. It has that fake sweet grape candy flavor I expect it to
have.
NT: So now youve ground-truthed Skittles, now I want you to
close your eyes, pick one at random from the regular batch.CG: Okay
Im picking one at random.NT: And then when you put it in your
mouth, Id like you use your other hand to hold your nose as firmly
as you can.CG: This is going to be challenging to tape at the same
time.NT: Your third hand, your fourth hand holding the recorder. Do
exactly the same thing and then tell me what flavor your Skittle
is.CG: Okay my nose is plugged. I can't even say that. Now I'm
going stick to the Skittle in my mouth.NT: Don't unplug your nose
until it's fully gone.(CHEWING)CG: I can't chew and breathe at the
same time.(LAUGH)NT: It is tricky.CG: Okay I'm going to unplug my
nose.NT: What flavor was that Skittle?CG: Well now that I unplugged
my nose I actually have a different guess. Because there is little
left in my mouth. I would have guessed maybe I don't know orange
red it just was really sweet. And now that I unplugged my nose I
think maybe if the green one.It was hard to tell. When I unplugged
my nose I got more of a tart sense, with my nose plugged all I got
was sweetness. I couldn't really tell.
NT: And that is the point of the experiment. Upwards of 70
percent of flavor consists of smell. By the way, if you listeners
try this at home, it helps to be in the same room. Because I was in
Brooklyn and Cynthia was in Somerville, I had no idea which flavor
she had picked either.
CG: We will never know.
NT: Lost to history. But it doesnt matter. The point is, a lot
of what you think of as flavor is actually something called
retronasal olfaction. So normal olfaction, thats smelling through
your nose. The retronasal kind happens through another passage at
the back of your mouth. Youre not normally aware of doing this, but
when youre chewing on food, little puffs of the aroma chemicals are
going up a passage that runs from the back of your mouth all the
way up to your nose.
CG: That is why when I had my nose plugged, those puffs of
Skittle flavor werent going anywhere.
NT: Exactly, and all you got was the taste sweet. Its the same
reason why food tastes blah when you have a cold. Okay, now on to
experiment number 2.
CG: More Skittles!
NT: A special packet that I brought you all the way from
England. Its called confused Skittles, and the deal is - they are
all the wrong color.
CG: So the lemon one is not yellow, and orange is not orange,
etc.
NT:. So why don't you help yourself to a confused Skittle.CG:
Okay - should I do the purple one again?NT: Yeah do the purple one
what are you expecting?CG: I'm expecting it to take just like the
other one I tasted earlierNT: Right and let me knowCG: okay, so
maybe I shouldnt have done purple. Because Im expecting it to taste
like the one I tasted before and it's different.NT: No, tell me
what flavor it isCG: I have no idea. it's definitely not grape or
that fake grape flavor it's not the same thing that I just ate. But
I don't know what it is.NT: See, and that is precisely the point of
these confused Skittles. Is that without the cue of knowing that
purple means grape youre kind of stuck for knowing exactly how to
describe what it is that the flavor is.
CG: Listeners, you can replicate this at home with regular
Skittles by closing your eyes and having a friend chose the Skittle
youre going to eat.
NT: The point of it is to show that even though flavor is a
little bit based on taste, and a lot based on smell, it also is
shaped by all your senses including vision.
CG: But I have a question. Im convinced by this experiment that
I cant tell the difference among artificial flavors if my eyes are
closed. But I am not convinced this is true for real food as well.
If I had a blindfold on and somebody handed me two glasses of
juice, would I really not be able to tell the difference between
orange juice and apple juice?
NT: Its actually harder than you think, when you cant see.
Theres this famous experiment that I like that showed all these
celebrity wine critics believed they were drinking red wine when
they were actually drinking white wine with some food coloring
added. It was how it looked. And all of them believed they could
tell the difference between white and red wine on taste alone. That
the color didnt make a difference. I mean, of course, theyre wine
critics, this is what they do. But it turned out they couldnt.
CG: Fascinating. So it really is like chefs say, you start to
eat with your eyes before you ever take a bite.
NT: Flavor is a truly multi-sensory perception. And you can put
the Skittles away now.
CG: Thank you. Okay. Thats flavor. But what about flavors? I see
flavors listed on ingredients in the grocery store. What are
those?
NT: Obviously food has flavors. When you eat a strawberry, you
are tasting or really, as we now know, mainly smelling the
chemicals that make it strawberry flavored. As it happens, there
are more than 350 different chemicals that make up that strawberry
flavor.
CG: So I put the strawberry in my mouth, I start chewing, and
those 350 chemicals, theyre going up into my nose for me to feel
like it tastes like strawberry.
NT: Little puffs of methyl butanoate, ethyl pentanoate, and
gamma decalactone.
CG: That is some impressive pronunciations. Clearly youve been
practicing.
NT: Dont ask me to do all 347 please.
CG: But theres no flavoring on the label a strawberry box,
obviously.
NT: Yes, and thats because for a flavor to have to be listed on
a label, it has to have been added to the food its not just in it,
like those chemicals are naturally in a strawberry.
CG: Okay, so what about those added flavors? I mean, I doubt
that theyre adding 350 flavor chemicals to a strawberry
Starburst.
NT: Or a Skittle for that matter. And this gets us to artificial
flavor. For most of human history, honestly, if you wanted a
strawberry flavor thing, you would have just had to use a
strawberry. But that all changed in the 1800s. Two things happened
that, on the surface, seem to have nothing to do with food. But to
go back in time to invention of the very first artificial flavors,
I sat down with Nadia Berenstein. Shes getting her PhD at the
University of Pennsylvania in the history and sociology of
science.
NB: My dissertation is about the history of synthetic flavors
and of flavor science in the United States from about 1880 to
1970.
NT: So the first thing to know is that until the 19th century,
there was no organic chemistry. People thought that was no way to
recreate any of the basic, carbon-based chemicals of life in the
lab. And then one German guy made urea.
CG: Its funny that a major change in science came about because
someone created the main component of urine - usually its made in
our kidneys.
NB: Yes. He says I can make urea without a kidney either of man
or dog. I can synthesize it here in my laboratory from other
chemicals. So that's part one of the story. Part two is coal.
Industrialization. Organic chemistry is carbon chemistry. And coal
processing, coal industrialization, produces all of these
byproducts such as coal tar basically that are carbon-rich.And what
these are are just raw materials for this burgeoning organic
chemical industry that is proceeding by transforming all of these
waste products these carbon-rich waste products into other kinds of
valuable things. Such as dyes, drugs, perfumes, and artificial
flavors.
CG: What do byproducts of coal have to do with artificial
flavors? Okay, they have chemicals left over from processing coal
and so. So what? Are you saying that coal by-products taste like
strawberries?
NT: Weirdly enough, yes. Diluted, a lot of these by products
carbon-based molecules called aldehydes and esters they smell
fruity.
CG: But why did anyone get the idea to taste them - and then
even put them in food?
NT: Yeah. I actually asked Nadia exactly that question.
NB: that's a great question. So chemists, alchemists, the whole
history of working with materials chemically has always paid close
attention to the smell and taste of substances. This is a way,
especially before modern chemistry, this is one of the main ways
that you know what something is, by the way that it smells or
tastes. So the taste and odor and aroma of different chemicals has
always been part of the chemical record, of chemical practice. What
happens in the late 19th century is that somebody realizes that
chemicals can have a commercial value for these properties, for the
ways that they are sensed.
CG: When do they become part of food - what are the very first
artificial flavors used in?
NT: Nadia told me no one knows exactly when the very first
artificial flavored foods were sold, or even what they were, but
the first time they ever get mentioned in the newspapers is in
1851. Theyre enough of an exciting novelty at that point to be
included in the very first Worlds Fair, the Crystal Palace
exhibition in London.
NB: It is this kind of giant Victorian enterprise of bringing
together all of this stuff from all over the world. And this
includes really valuable things like the Koh-i-Noor diamond and
also just sort of miscellaneous manufactured items. Sailors
valentines so like artwork that is made by sailors out of
seashells. They've got model dinosaurs that you can sit in and have
dinner. I mean basically the Crystal Palace exhibition has
everything. And one of the things that it has are these exhibits by
producers of synthetic perfumes. And this is where the first
artificial fruit ethers enter the historical record.
NT: They were displayed in the chemicals section, in the form of
little lozenges, like hard candy. They had pineapple, pear, apple,
and grape flavor.
CG: I can imagine why this would have been astounding. In the
mid 1800s in London, it would have been nearly impossible to get
your hands on some pineapples. But how did it get from this
novelty, a wonder of the world really, to getting into peoples
everyday diets?
NT: That has to do with another big shift that is happening in
the late 1800s. NB: In the middle of the 19th century, late 19th
century, with just great advances in sugar refining, huge increases
in the role of sugar in Western diets, there is kind of this mass
consumer economy for sweetness. And artificial flavors artificial
fruit ethers, like the ones that I described kind of come in to
accompany sugar on its quest to encompass more and more of people's
daily calories.
NT: So those early artificial fruit flavors were used in all
kinds of sweet things: candy, soda, ice-cream, and cordials.
CG: What did people think of these new flavors? Were they
suspicious or were they kind of wowed by them?
NT: Again, thats exactly what I asked Nadia.
NB: Well it is hard to know exactly. As always in the historical
record the voices of just every-day people are notoriously absent.
But what we do know is that they caught on relatively quickly. I
look at the United States in particular so I know that they were
used and sold in the United States starting in the 1860s and
1870s.
NT: Nadia actually showed me tables of formulas for mixing up
different artificial flavors raspberry, melon, black cherry, even
gooseberry. But whats interesting about this, for me, is youre not
analyzing a raspberry or a gooseberry and trying to recreate their
flavor. Youre just mixing different proportions of a basic set of
about twenty chemicals. Youre working backwards in a way, just
combining the chemicals you have and waiting until you can say, oh
wait, this smells like a raspberry.
CG: But we already established that a berry, a strawberrys
flavor is made up of 350 different chemicals.
NT: More even!
CG: So I imagine that theres no way that these first artificial
flavors can be anything like the real thing.
NT: They werent. But they really couldnt be. People just didnt
have the tools at that point to analyze all the flavor chemicals in
a strawberry.
NB: In the late 19th century you already have people doing
nutritional chemistry, you can identify proteins, fats,
carbohydrates. In the 19-teens you have vitamins are first
identified and discovered and there is a lot of research into
vitamins and synthesizing vitamins.But flavor chemistry kind of
lags behind. Studying precisely the chemicals that contribute to
the odor, flavor, aroma of different foods. And theres a few
different reasons for this. One is that it's really hard to do.The
proportion of chemicals in food that contribute to, that produce
flavor are really small tiny amounts. The other thing about flavor
chemicals is that they tend to be very volatile. Theyre unstable,
theyre reactive. And trying to isolate this small amount of these
particular chemicals that are contributing to our perception of its
flavor is a super rough task.
NT: And that actually brings me to something important that
happened at the turn of the century. In 1906, this law was passed,
the Pure Food Act. It was the first piece of food regulation in
America, and it distinguished between artificial and natural
flavors for the first time.
CG: Why did this get passed? What were people so concerned about
at the time?
NT: Yeah, its an interesting phase in American history because
America was just becoming majority urban. People were moving to
cities, away from where their food was grown, and that gap between
producer and consumer, that was starting to grow for the first
time. There were all sorts of food scares and food scandals and
fears about whether the bread or milk or meat you were buying in
the city was what it said it was.
NB: So the 1906 pure food law. People usually remember this law
as the thing that came out of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Right?
It shut down these horrible meat-packing plants. It was this law
that instituted food inspections. That was there to protect public
health. But it also aimed to protect the general public, consumers,
from fraud. And from these increasingly sophisticated chemicals
that were being developed by industry to make food appear better
than it was, so to speak.
NT: Chemicals like artificial flavors.
NB: So the 1906 law is the thing that kind of institutes in the
regulatory landscape this distinction between genuine and
imitation. The thing is, though, with most flavor additives being
classed as imitation including vanillin synthetic vanillin, which
many many manufacturers of vanillin protested was exactly the same
molecule as that found in vanilla beans. If you included it in your
vanilla extract you would have to disclose the fact that this is
imitation vanilla, not the real thing.
CG: Vanilla and vanillin: thats an interesting one. Vanillin is
the name for the main chemical component of vanilla. And it is used
absolutely everywhere these days. Ninety-five percent of the time
you think youre eating something that is vanilla flavored, its
actually vanillin. And it does not come from a vanilla bean.
NT: Actual vanilla contains a ton of different flavor chemicals
hundreds, like strawberries. But lets do a taste test and see if
you can tell the difference.
CG: So I am standing in my kitchen, and I made three containers
that have completely plain drinkable yoghurt. Theres nothing in it
other than milk and cultures. In one I mixed in some artificial
vanillin, in one I mixed in some vanilla extract, and in one I
mixed in vanilla bean. And Im going to do it all blindfolded and
see if I can taste the difference. I mixed the vanilla extract and
the vanilla bean separately in case I could tell by the texture,
the grittiness.
NT: I like this, science.
CG: So, lets see, Ill pick up this one here, try not to look at
it. Its a little bitter because I put a lot of vanilla in, but its
got a really rich vanilla scent, and I am going to guess that was
the real deal.
NT: Okay.
CG: Im going to try the one in the middle. Im not getting as
strong a smell. Which means the first one I think was the vanilla
bean. I taste the alcohol, and it tastes pretty flat. I have to say
my real vanilla extract is pretty old, but Im going to guess the
second one is the artifical one. So now Im going to go for the last
one. Between two and three, let me see - no actually, now that Ive
tasted number three -
NT: Yeah?
CG: And went back and tasted number two again, I think number
two has kind of a rounder more rich flavor to it -
NT: And three is like what?
CG: I think three just has that straight vanilla kind of vanilla
ice cream flavor. Lets see if I was right. Ooooh! I was!
NT: Woo-hoo! I think thats true. In my experience at least you
really can tell the difference between vanilla that has been
extracted from seed pod versus vanillin. Its one note,
literally.
CG: It really is. Now that I know and I was tasting back and
forth, the one with the vanilla bean has the richest smell to it.
But the two with the vanilla extract, the one that has the real
vanilla extract, its just a more complex flavor to it. Theres more
to it, more depth to it.
NT: They are different, but both of them have one identical
molecule in common: vanillin. Vanillin is the same, whether it
comes from a vanilla bean or not. Its the other stuff in the bean
that make the difference.
And this distinction became crucially important after the 1906
law. Because the people who made these artificial flavors had to
show that the flavor molecules in their products were the same as
you would find in the real thing. And that led to some interesting
discoveries. Like grape. Remember back to that grape-skittle
flavor?
CG: The one that tasted really sweet and fake and like grape
jelly.
NT: Thats the one. That flavor comes from a chemical called
methyl anthrinalte. Back at the end of the 1800s, people had
isolated this chemical from orange blossom, bizarrely enough, and
realised it reminded them of grapes. And they figured out how to
make it cheaply from coal tar, and then it became the go-to grape
flavor. Its still the one we use today. But it didnt come from
grapes, and they had no idea whether you could find this chemical
in real grapes. Which was a problem.
NB: In the early 1920s chemists at the USDA trying to enforce
the Pure Food Law, recognizing that a lot of artificial flavor
manufacturers are selling this chemical in compounds that are
grapes flavored, try to come up with methods for detecting it in
food.So to do this they analyze things that they know are
adulterated and they also analyze genuine grapes juice. And they
find that in grapes juice from genuine grapes, there is quite a bit
of methyl anthrinilate. So this chemical that a synthetic chemical
that is used in these artificial grapes flavors ends up being
discovered, confirmed to be in actual grapes.I love this story in
particular because the grapes that people were eating at the
beginning of the 20th century included a lot of these Vitis
labrusca varieties.
NT: Vitis labrusca are the native American variety of grapes.
Concord is the most famous, but also Catawba, Delaware, Isabella,
and so on. And, in an era before widespread refrigeration, most
Americans who had eaten grapes would have eaten these native
grapes. NB: The grapes that we usually find in grocery stores now
the red and green seedless from California and Chile these are not
varietals that have this chemical in them. So in a certain sense
when you have a grape Jolly Rancher you are tasting this spectral
grape of the past. This sort of spectral grapes orchid. All of
these American varieties of grapes that we are no longer familiar
with but which the chemical continues to be associated with our
idea of grapes flavor.
CG: So not only is fake grape kind of not fake, but its even
more American than what we think of now as grapes. But I have to
say, the grapes shes talking about include Concord grapes. Some of
us who grew up with Manischevitz have never forgotten them.
NT: For when only the most authentic grape will do. But this
story gave me an excuse to ask Nadia about one of my favorite urban
myths, which is that fake banana tastes so weird and not like
bananas because it actually tastes more like a kind of banana that
you cant taste anymore. The Gros Michel banana, to be specific.
That was the only kind you could buy. But then it went extinct in
the 50s from a nasty fungal disease. And now we eat the Cavendish
variety.
NT: You know like a lot of urban myths, there is a kernel of
truth. I think. I haven't had a Gros Michel banana but according to
what I have read about it it does have more of this amyl acetate,
isoamyl acetate kind of candy-like flavor, kind of like banana
circus peanuts, I think is the candy that has this fake banana
flavor, the thing that we think of as fake banana flavor.
NT: Hmm. So I guess a maybe on that myth. Fake banana candy
might actually taste like extinct real bananas after all!
CG: That makes me wish I could go back in time and try those
bananas. But you know the situation with flavor today is far
different from fifty, a hundred years ago. The big difference is
that, today, flavors are added to all sorts of foods. Especially
processed foods. Howd we get from adding flavors to candy to - I
dont know - adding them to all sorts of different foods.
NT: Im in CVS, some HoHos. Sugar is the first ingredient. Soy
flour, mono and diglycerides. Natural and artificial flavor.
CG: Fage total all-natural Greek yoghurt. And the ingredients
are, cherries, cane sugar, water, corn starch, cherry juice
concentrate, lemon juice concentrate, natural flavor, xanthan
gum.
NT: Some Red Bull. This is the yellow edition tropical - it even
says artificially flavored on the front. Ingredients: carbonated
water, sucrose, glucose, citric acid, taurine, sodium citrate,
caffeine, blah blah blah, and natural and artificial flavors.
CG: Naked 100% Juice Smoothie Green Machine. A blend of five
juices with added ingredients. Apple juice, mango puree, pineapple
juice, banana puree, kiwi, spirulina, natural flavors.
NT: Honey Bunches of Oats, with real strawberries. Natural
flavor.
CG: 365 Cheese Puffs. Natural butter flavor.
NT: I know I promised to explain the difference between natural
and artificial flavors. We will get to that in just a few minutes.
But first, lets talk about why there are so many added flavors in
our foods in the first place. Its tied to major changes in how and
where food was made. And Nadia says it all starts in the 1930s.
NB: In the 30s when you have the increasing sophistication of
food processing and food manufacturing. When you're making more and
more foods in factories, so spiced meats, baked goods, sodas,
candies, all kinds of you know, the beginning of frozen foods,
right suddenly flavor becomes a problem. They need to make sure
that each item that comes out of their factory taste the same. That
it tastes the same around the country, that it tastes the same all
year long. And they find that all kinds of crazy things start
happening to the flavors of foods once they are being manufactured
in factories. Flavors change. A lot of things develop these off
flavors that are kind of mysterious.And so what food manufacturers
need is a way of controlling the flavor in their foods, right. And
so flavor becomes this technical and scientific problem.You really
can't have a national or a global food system that is based on
processed foods without flavor chemicals, without flavor chemistry.
It is just a cornerstone of it. Without this flavor additives the
whole system falls apart.
NT: Artificial flavors start off as a way to get us to eat more
sugar. Then they become a way to make us eat more factory food.
CG: And now its time for you to explain the difference between
natural and artificial flavors. From what I understand, Nicky,
natural flavor in, say, strawberry yoghurt, doesnt mean that the
flavor comes from strawberries. So what is the difference between
natural and artificial?
NT: Well, in 1906, like we said, if your flavor chemical was the
same chemical that naturally occurred in a strawberry then it was
not imitation. It was real. But as the century went on, the FDA
decided that needed an update. The latest version was originally
drafted in the 70s. And it spells out the difference between
natural and artificial flavor in the most delightful government
speak. A natural flavor or natural flavoring has to come from a
spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible
yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat,
seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products
thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather
than nutritional.
CG: Good job.
NT: And artificial is something that doesnt come from any of
those.
CG: So, like I said, the natural flavor in a strawberry yoghurt,
it could be from a type of grass.
NT: Or a piece of wood. Thats one of the most common sources of
vanillin wood pulp.
CG: Speaking of vanillin - we cant ignore everyones favorite
source of vanillin: beaver butt. I mean, I know it isnt beaver butt
exactly, its a chemical produced in a beavers anal gland. Thats a
source of vanillin, too, as I understand it.
NT: It certainly is, and it would qualify as a natural flavor.
Apparently beaver butts smell really nice.
CG: You ever smell one?
NT: Not me, thank god, but thats what naturalists have said. But
its actually super unlikely that your vanilla flavor is being made
from beaver butt secretions because milking beavers anal glands is
slow work, and the resulting flavor would be wildly expensive.
CG: Hence the wood pulp.
NT: And actually a lot of vanillin is made from guiacol, which
is a petrochemical. But, just to be totally clear, the vanillin
from wood pulp, the vanillin from guiacol, and the vanillin from a
beavers butt is exactly the same chemical. Exactly the same. Its
just how you label it natural or artificial.
CG: So why would a food manufacturer choose one over the other,
fake vanillin over natural vanillin?
NT: Yeah, so I decided it was time to actually talk to a
flavorist. And I called Michelle Hagen, who is a senior flavorist
at Givaudan.
CG: You heard her at the start of the episode, she was talking
about root beer flowers.
NT: And she told me that the biggest factor in deciding between
natural and artificial flavor is cost.So, for example, Michelle
said that theres one particular chemical that flavorists add to
graham crackers to get that signature grahamy flavor. Its $25 a
pound when you extract it from plants. And its only $6 a pound made
using the wonders of organic, carbon chemistry.
MH: Yeah, cost is the main driver for us. The only other thing
is maybe purity. So a synthetic material is more pure. Because you
do get some impurities when you have a naturally derived
material.
CG: Then why bother using natural flavors at all? Are they more
environmentally sustainable, or are they beneficial in any way?
NT: Well, Michelle says sometimes those impurities make the end
result more interesting. So she kind of likes the challenge of
working with naturals. Whether or not it is more environmentally
sustainable varies by the chemical and how much processing you have
to do to purify it from whatever youre starting with. But the real
reason to work with naturals is because consumers want it.
MH: So I create mostly for the US beverage market, and I would
say 99% of the time our customers, and their customers, which are
the consumers, demand natural flavors. I haven't made an N&A
flavor in four years.
NT: N&A, by the way, is industry shorthand for artificial
flavors, because they have to be labeled natural and artificial
flavors on the packet, n&a.
CG: OK, thats the difference between using natural and
artificial flavors according to the legal definition. But theres
another way of thinking about natural. Like a natural flavor is a
flavor that is more like nature, right, its more true to life. And
things have come a long way since the early 1900s. There are way
more advanced scientific technologies to tease apart what chemicals
are in any particular natural object. So are the flavors Michelle
creates more complex than those one-note Skittles or that original
pineapple flavored hard candy at the Crystal Palace? Is anyone
getting closer to a real pineapple flavor made in a lab?
MH: I would say for an average flavor you are looking at 40 to
70 different ingredients.So for pineapples, for example, they are
one of my favorite flavors to create. Theyre very complex. And they
have nuances that are fruity, creamy, jammy, there is a floral
nuance in pineapples. There is a greenness to pineapples. And there
is even a woody aspect that kind of denotes that pulpiness. So they
are really complex.So when we set out to create a pineapple flavor
we have many challenges to hurdle. Is the flavor natural or
artificial. Is it a liquid or a powder. We have to consider
stability, solubility, cost. And then you go into the application,
right? So is it in yogurt, is it in chewing gum, does that base
have fat, does that base have protein?So we have to skew these
pineapple profiles to taste delicious in every circumstance I
mentioned.
NT: Wow so every pineapple is sort of a specific project
depending on all of those factors. I mean you must've created
thousands of pineapples then?
MH: Yeah I have hundreds. Within the company I know there are
thousands, maybe even 10,000.
NT: So, yeah, to answer your question, Cynthia, science has
definitely advanced and pineapple flavor tastes a lot more
pineappley than it used to. But whats interesting about that is
that we still arent making an exact, true to life, one to one copy
of a real pineapples flavor. Our technology is amazing, we can find
hundreds of aroma chemicals in fruit, but our noses are still
better. So if you make a pineapple just based on what the machine
says is in the pineapple, you wont capture everything that our
palate expects. And thats where the art of the flavorist comes
in.
Nadia actually described this essay in a 1950s Givaudan catalog.
It was written by a flavor chemist just after the new technology
was introduced, the tools to finally break down a food into its
individual flavor components. Whats funny is that flavorists
immediately realized they couldnt rely on the machine read out
alone. So they built a special sniffer so that they could use their
noses to sample the smells right alongside the machine. Apparently
they used to get terrible nosebleeds from sniffing so much.
CG: Hazard of the job.
NT: But, even though this essay is 60 years old now, this
description really captures how a flavorist has to use science
*and* art, their own noses, to create, say, a strawberry
flavor.
NB: What a flavor chemist does, in addition to working with this
chemical analysis, he does this sensory analysis of the strawberry.
So there is a bunch of different notes he says kind of working like
a perfumer. So theres a fruity note, theres a note that he calls
green butter. There is one that is sweet, one that is balsamic, one
that he calls rose honey, fresh hay, and then this sour and citrus
note. So basically you combine what you know about what is actually
in strawberries and what you know about chemicals that have these
sensory properties to create this sort of ideal version of the
strawberry that is ineffably strawberry-like, that might be tweaked
to suit the particular needs of your client.
NT: Michelle told me she still works the same way today. The
machine is like a guide and a fact-checker, but her nose is the
boss.
CG: But some things have changed in the flavor world. In fact we
are at the beginning of a major shift right now - theres some brand
new biology that is changing how we make flavors altogether.
NT: Its tied to what Michelle was telling us about not using
artificial flavors in her work any more, just because consumers
dont want them. Companies are trying to get what they call a clean
label that means it doesnt use words like artificial or long
chemical names that people cant pronounce. Because people think
that those things are unhealthy. Whereas the word natural even if
its the exact same chemical youre talking about, well that just
sounds a lot better.
CG: And heres where yeast comes in. You may think that yeast is
just useful for brewing beer or turning milk into delicious
cheese.
NT: Which it is, as we discussed a couple of episodes ago.
CG: Of course. But yeast can do all sorts of other things, too.
Scientists have figured out how to tweak yeast by introducing
chunks of DNA, and those chunks are copied from animals or plants.
And these new designer yeasts make all kinds of useful products.
They make medicines like insulin and rennet to curdle our cheeses.
You may have also heard of research into using algae to produce
fuel for our cars. These are engineered microbes, too.
NT: Youre actually pretty much guaranteed to have eaten cheese
made using rennet from this engineered yeast. The stat I have is
that in 2008, ninety percent of cheeses in the US and the UK were
made using rennet that had been produced by a genetically modified
yeast.
CG: This whole field of redesigning organisms usually microbes
like yeast to produce new outputs, its generally called synthetic
biology. Now scientists are tweaking yeasts for a new product:
flavor.
NT: We talked to Christina Agapakis, shes a synthetic biologist
who just joined Gingko Bioworks. Theyre one of a handful of
companies that are building these designer yeasts to produce flavor
and fragrance chemicals. Heres how the process works.
CG: So lets say somebody asked you to design a microbe that was
capable of producing a coconut flavor. How would that work can you
take us through the steps?
CA: Sure. So I guess we would first start I looking at how
coconuts makes labor. So when you look at the biology of coconuts
and the enzymes that exist in coconuts that create all those
different molecules that create the coconut flavor, what we would
do is look at those genes that code for those enzymes. Try to
understand them. And then make them in our foundry. And put them
into a yeast and see how they work in the yeast. How can we kind of
try to shape the yeast metabolism to be a little bit more like
coconut metabolism. So we have the same enzymes that are producing
the molecules and the great flavor of coconut inside of the yeast
that we can then ferment and brew coconut flavor.It's basically as
the microbe ferments as the yeast grows and is fermenting the
sugars what they're doing is, they'll make alcohol or whatever the
kind of typical byproduct of the fermentation. But as another
byproduct you have the molecule that you want to be making. Whether
it's the rose oil or vanilla extract or any kind of as theyre
fermenting as theyre growing you're producing that molecule. so
really it is like it's like brewing beer. And in a way flavored
beer.
NT: Flavored beer is my least favorite kind of beer. But
seriously this is a big step forward for science. Scientists have
known how to transfer single genes from a plant or animal into
another one, but this is different.
CA: What makes the ability to create flavors is the ability to
do it with more genes. To understand how those genes work together.
To be able to fit them all together in a more complex system. So to
make a flavor you might need five or ten different enzymes that are
creating a whole pathway and are really shifting the metabolism of
the yeast. Whereas to make insulin its a single gene that makes a
protein. And so that's a much simpler process biologically and one
that simpler to do this kind of engineering approach.
NT: At Gingko, the first of these cultured flavors and fragrance
chemicals that theyve announced is a rose oil for perfumers. They
have other ones in the pipeline for the food industry. Meanwhile,
theres Evolva, a Swiss company, theyve already put a
yeast-fermented vanillin on the market. And a group in Austria just
announced they have managed to engineer yeast to produce the key
flavor chemical in grapefruit.
CG: But why are they all bothering to making these cultured
flavors if we already have natural and synthetic ways to make, say,
vanillin?
NT: I was curious about that too. So I a visited Gingko Bioworks
they cal it their Foundry where they build the yeasts that are
going to make the flavor. I talked to Patrick Boyle. Hes one of the
founders there and his job title is Organism Designer.
PB: So what were interested in doing is, can we design a
fermentation process so we can culture those ingredients instead
and eliminate some of the harsh chemical steps, as well as kind of
relieve some of the supply issues that come from using really rare
plant to extract things from. And youd be surprised how much of
that is involved with flavor. You know, you can kind of look at the
kind of history of the spice trade and looking at how resource
intensive that can be and how constraining that can be. Part of
what we're interested in here is can cultured ingredients be a way
to prevent us from really expanding unsustainable farming
practices. So many many more exotic plants that flavors and
fragrances are extracted from are hard to grow and hard to grow
without using a lot of water.
CG: Christina also told us that because they can get the yeasts
to produce a number of flavor enzymes, they can create a richer,
more nuanced taste. Its got some of those impurities Michelle
mentioned. Itll be closer to the real thing.
NT: More of the wide varieties of flavors you tasted in that
real vanilla, versus the one-note vanillin. And in a weird way, it
might actually democratize some of the worlds most expensive, rare
flavors. Like saffron, for example. Having a yeast make saffron is
a lot cheaper than collecting the stamens of thousands of tiny
crocus flowers.
CG: I can only imagine. But lets say cultured vanillin becomes
wildly popular. What does that mean for vanilla farmers in
Madagascar and Mexico?
PB: The vanilla bean producers have been around for a very long
time, and artificial vanilla has been on the market for a very long
time. So I think it's clear that both industries can co-exist. If
we could grow more vanilla bean we certainly would.
NT: So there are some sustainability benefits, maybe price
benefits too. But the real attraction for companies looking to use
these cultured flavors is that they are considered natural not
artificial, for the purposes of labeling.
CG: Really? Even though they are made from genetically modified
yeasts?
NT: Yes. The thing is theres no yeast left by the end of the
process. They just do their job, make the flavor, and die. Like in
brewing. Or like in all the genetically modified yeasts that make
rennet that makes our cheese.
CG: I know Christina made the process sound simple - figure out
which DNA the yeast need and insert the right bits. But of course
science is not nearly that straightforward. She said this process
takes a long time.
NT: Yeah. Gingko have been working on their first one, this rose
oil, for more than a year at this point. Patrick told me the main
issue is just yeast variations that dont work. That dont produce
the flavor. Patrick and Christina test hundreds at a time, each
with tiny differences in the DNA.
CA: The main kind of exciting thing that we can do at the
foundry is really be able to test many different variants. So we
wouldn't have just one and hope for the best. We would be able to
test like okay if we little bit more of this gene and a little bit
less of this gene, a little bit more of this enzyme, what's the
final smell going to be like what's that flavor in the end.
NT: OK, so this episode is all about artificial flavors. And
weve discovered that the line between artificial and natural
flavors is actually kind of blurry. At least the way the FDA
defines it. You can get natural strawberry flavor that is made
using super intense harsh chemicals in a big industrial factory
from ingredients that have never been anywhere near a strawberry in
their lives. And these brand new designer yeast flavors are natural
too. So I went looking for something that is a truly artificial
flavor. In the industry, theyre called fantasy flavors.
MH: It's the reason I get out of bed. I love fantasy flavors.
Okay, lets say apple. Everyone has an opinion on what a crisp apple
should taste like, so it is carved in our brains since we crunched
into an apple from our third grade lunch. But a fantasy flavor is
sort of undiscovered and it has no boundaries. You can do anything
you want, call it anything you want.So if you think about
bellbottoms in the 70s if you translate that into a fantasy flavor
think of Juicy Fruit. That is kind of fantasy flavor. You
essentially have an orange flavor with this very large upfront
isoamyl acetate, ethyl butyrate note.
NT: Isoamyl acetate, for those of you who dont have a chemical
dictionary to hand, is that fake banana flavor we encountered
earlier. And cast your mind back to the 350 flavors in a strawberry
ethyl butyrate is one of them. Michelles point is that Juicy Fruit
is a fantasy flavor. It takes something that people are familiar
with orange and then adds these other notes you wouldnt expect to
find in an orange to transform it into something new. Another
example is Red Bull.
MH: So its something that is kind of familiar, like black
cherry, and then you add this very large medicinal guarana flavor
and then you have got Red Bull.So one way of looking at it is
something that is kind of known, you put a spin on it, you add a
zinger. You kind of move it into an uncultivated space. In our
world we call that the white space. Doing something that no one has
ever done before.
NT: That expression white space. I love it. Theres an infinite
number of fantasy flavors still waiting to be created. Its
expanding flavor-space in our minds.
CG: Theres all the fantasy flavors, sure, but there are also
extinct flavors too. All those plants weve lost, the original
ancestors of the grains and fruits and vegetables that we eat
today.
NT: Yeah, and Christina, at Gingko - she thinks that might
actually be possible using this new science.
CA: The science behind trying to understand extinct flavors.
There's the kind of Jurrasic Park fantasy, you can find may be
embedded in amber you'll find some plant tissue and then you can
extract the DNA. That's possible perhaps. But maybe not from
actually the Jurassic. But maybe a few thousand years ago.But
there's also ways that we can use evolutionary biology, collaborate
with evolutionary biologists to think about looking at plants that
exist now, close relatives of things that may have gone extinct.
You could reconstruct a lot of the biology and the genetics of the
lost plants and try to work from there. That's what I'm thinking
about, but I dont know if it's possible. And that can happen in the
future that something am excited about.
NT: Its amazing, when you start thinking as well when our
ancient ancient ancestors were figuring out farming, what they
would have tasted when they sort of first began domesticating those
foods. Because so many things are unrecognizable now. And yeah, we
have the wild relatives but sort of getting back to you know you
could imagine a bread course that gave you the taste of wheat over
time.
CA: Wow.
NT: I'm having fun with this.
CG: I can imagine, how was it pronounced, teosinte - the
original relative of corn you know what it was like when they first
started breeding and creating big corn kernels to water so much
what reading now but that tasted like.
CA: I love that, I'm taking notes.
NT: We will come to the first ancient wheat tasting.
CG: As weve learned over the course of this episode, artificial
flavors started off as a vehicle for this new explosion of sugar.
They almost helped smuggle more sugar into our diets. And then the
flavors became crucial in our new industrialized food system.
Processed foods shipped long distances needed those flavors added
back in.
NT: And those flavors could have been either natural or
artificial. In fact, in a lot of ways, artificial versus natural
doesnt really matter. Theyre the same chemical, made in the same
factories, just from different source materials. The bigger story
is that over the past 100, 150 years, the flavors that are
naturally in our fruit, veggies, meat have become blander.
Meanwhile, our diets, at least in rich countries, have overall
become more flavorful but a lot of that flavor is coming from added
flavors. The story of inventing artificial flavors and how weve
used them, its kind of this parallel track to the story of where
our food system went wrong. At the same time we were robbing our
apples of any flavor hello, Red Delicious apples we were making
Doritos Locos Explosion Flavor crazy bomb.
CG: But today there are new uses for these flavors. Like helping
insect or pea protein - both of those seem to be pretty sustainable
sources of protein that some people dont like the taste of them
necessary, so these flavors could help them become more tasty and
easy to integrate into our daily diets.
NT: So its less that artificial flavor is bad and natural flavor
is good, or even that all added flavor is necessarily bad or good.
Its all in about we use it. And whats fascinating is that when you
look at the flavor business, it can tell us a lot about our
relationship with food. Thats why Nadia is studying this,
really.
NB: When you are creating a synthetic strawberry flavor, a
synthetic peach flavor, in a certain way of thinking about it,
youre replicating the sensory qualities of the natural world. Youre
looking out there and you are saying that this is what these things
are like. And we are going to figure out a way to reproduce this
chemically. On the other hand what youre doing is youre replicating
people's desires, people's appetites. Which are not necessarily
always completely coherent with what is actually possible
naturally. So I think that the really skilled flavor chemists and
flavorists have this sense of all of the effective qualities that
we expect from actual foods and flavors.That we are not just
looking for a strawberry that resembles a strawberry or a cherry
that resembles a cherry. Theyre looking for something that
replicates our desires, our memories, the field of association we
have when we think of refreshment or summer or sweetness or nature
itself. You're producing a synthetic version of our expectations of
what it means to consume nature.
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CG: Thats it for the world of artificial flavor. Come back in
two weeks and youll hear me visit the first American escargot farm.
Thats snails. Actually, thats gastropods.
NT: The actual kind, not the podcast kind.
CG: To help us explore the weird and wonderful world of
artificial flavors we had a lot of help. We couldnt have done it
without Christina Agapakis and Patrick Boyle of Gingko
Bioworks.
NT: Side note, Christina recently launched an online magazine
called Method which is all about how scientists actually do science
as opposed to the way it gets written up and smoothed out once the
results of an experiment are in. I think you all would find it
pretty interesting.Its a perspective thats missing from the
mainstream media. Links on our website. Thanks also to Nadia
Berenstein, and to Michelle Hagen of Givaudan. We have links to
their work and more about what they do online too. Check them
out.
CG: There are lots of goodies in our episode notes this week.
Including one of my favorites, a history of Manischevitz wine and
the Concord grape.
NT: As always, you should get in touch and tell us what you
thought. But please also get in touch with your cocktail stories.
And, if you or your company wants to sponsor an episode, well, then
we really want hear from you.
CG: You can always reach us at contact at gastropod dot com. You
can follow us on Twitter at gastropodcast, find us on Facebook, and
give us lots of stars on iTunes.
NT: Yes please! And thats it from us. Til next time.
MUSIC