Collection 5: "Food Product Design" by Eric Schlosser

Their distinctive taste does not stem from the type of potatoes that McDonald’s buys, the technology that processes them, or the restaurant equipment that fries them.

At the end of the list is a seemingly innocuous, yet oddly mysterious phrase: “natural flavor.”

In one pilot kitchen I saw a dapper chemist, a middle-aged man with an elegant tie beneath his lab coat, carefully preparing a batch of cookies with white frosting and pink-and-white sprinkles.

All of these aromas are made through the same basic process: the manipulation of volatile chemicals to create a particular smell.

The taste buds on our tongues can detect the presence of half a dozen or so basic tastes, including: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, astringent, and umami (a taste discovered by Japanese researchers, a rich and full sense of deliciousness triggered by amino acids in foods such as shellfish, mushrooms, potatoes, and seaweed).

Taste buds offer a relatively limited means of detection, however, compared to the human olfactory system, which can perceive thousands of different chemical aromas.

Aroma and memory are somehow inextricably linked.

The latest flavor innovations and corporate realignments are heralded in publications such as Food Chemical News, Food Engineering, Chemical Market Reporter, and Food Product Design.

The quality that people seek most of all in a food, its flavor, is usually present in a quantity too infinitesimal to be measured by any traditional culinary terms such as ounces or teaspoons.

The ubiquitous phrase “artificial strawberry flavor” gives little hint of the chemical wizardry and manufacturing skill that can make a highly processed food taste like a strawberry.

The distinction between artificial and natural flavors can be somewhat arbitrary and absurd, based more on how the flavor has been made than on what it actually contains.

When you produce it by mixing vinegar with amyl alcohol, adding sulfuric acid as a catalyst, amyl acetate is an artificial flavor.

Complex flavors are being made through fermentation, enzyme reactions, fungal cultures, and tissue cultures.

Like many in the flavor industry, he has an Old World, old-fashioned sensibility which seems out of step with our brand-conscious, egocentric age.

The aroma was uncanny, almost miraculous. It smelled like someone in the room was flipping burgers on a hot grill. But when I opened my eyes, there was just a narrow strip of white paper and a smiling flavorist.