The Real Tastemakers Behind Artificial Flavors
And why strawberry flavoring doesn’t really taste like strawberries
When I get a chance to take my time grocery shopping, I sometimes like to peruse the aisles and read through the ingredient lists of my favorite food brands. At the beginning of the list are the usual suspects—water, sugar, flour, oils, etc. However, every so often, I’ll find an obscure ingredient like lecithin or butylated hydroxyanisole that I have to look up. Over time, I’ve realized that no matter how many ingredients I know or don’t know in a product, the list almost always ends with the same inevitably cryptic words:
Natural Flavors, Artificial Flavors
The terms seem rather… vague. And for what it’s worth, they could refer to any number of more than 3,000 different chemicals, mixtures, and extracts — so the flavor world in itself could also be called vague. What do the terms “natural flavors” and “artificial flavors” actually mean? What’s in them? And who’s making them?
During the early and mid-20th century, when refrigeration was commercially developed and rolled out into modern homes, convenience became an important selling point for processed, ready-to-eat, and frozen foods. However, the methods used to preserve foods against microbial decay for long-term refrigeration…
