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What really flavors our food?
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Sage, a decidedly natural flavor
According to the book The End of Food by Paul Roberts, processed foods rely so heavily on chemical flavorings that when we eat those foods our taste buds are fooled into actually preferring them. Cherry flavoring is more intense that real cherries. Vanilla flavoring has more impact than vanilla beans. Is this what we really want?
Consider this from The End of Food, “Benzaldehyde, which creates cherry flavor, is now more familiar than natural cherry while the compound diacetyl became ‘butter’ for many consumers of microwave popcorn – that is, before it was taken off the market in mid-2007 as a possible cause of lung disease.”
Not only are these flavors not real food, they often are decidedly NOT food. Think about vanilla flavor which often isn't from vanilla beans: synthetic vanillin, a source of vanilla flavoring comes from wood products, in fact, paper manufacturing residues. While wood may be an organic product, it’s not one that humans intentionally consume.
Over the five million years of human history, our bodies learned to detect poisonous plants and spoiled food by their odor. In Before the Dawn (an exploration of the history of our ancestors), Nicholas Wade says that modern humans are losing our sense of smell. “When people first started to abandon their way of life as hunters and gatherers some 15,000 years ago, they had much less need for two kinds of gene, the olfactory genes that mediate the sense of smell , and the genes that are used by the liver to detoxify the natural poisons with which wild plants defend themselves… Once people settled down and grew their food, they no longer depended on their noses to detect which fruits were ripe or which wild plants were relatively safe to eat.”
The loss of genes that make enzymes that are used by the liver to detoxify natural plant poisons have an unexpected effect in modern people: an increasing inability to metabolize drugs. As an aside, Wade explains, “This process explains much of the variability in the response to drugs, including why some people have severe side effects or require different doses. People who have lost the gene that breaks down a certain drug will maintain a high dose of it in their bloodstream, whereas those who still retain the gene will clear the drug rapidly.”
Traditional herbalists know that herbs are a much more gentle approach to treating the human body. We might also consider how flavoring our foods with herbs and appreciating natural, if somewhat more subtle flavors, will be better for us in the long run. We can be happy with “Yum, cherry” rather than “Wow! Cherry!” or “Delicious…sage” rather than “Wow! That has a lot of flavor but I don’t know what it is!”
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