The Nacho Dorito
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Putting theories behind food appreciation, like Vanishing Caloric Density, the Umami flavor (MSG, garlic and Friends) and flavor familiarity (vanyloids are present in breast milk) - on the context of foods your familiar with, changes your perspective when you're tasting any kind of food, allowing you to deconstruct what are you experiencing: "Ho, I like this because it's greasy, and it salty, and it has loads of umami from the garlic".
It allowed me to deconstruct a common action, changing it from an immediate appreciation to a more rational, pondered thought process.
That wasn't my claim. My claim was that they're using much of the same chemical and culinary science. For example: salt = good, more salt = usually better! Similarly, people can and do gorge themselves on gourmet food. God knows I've done so myself a few times.
You don't get sick of them, or full from them...
I invite you to test this claim with a 17oz bag!
Plenty of people find themselves completely satisfied with a reasonable quantity of Doritos. It's also an enjoyable experience for them. This food engineering is designed to make that experience more enjoyable. They're not physically addictive in any meaningful sense. If your threshold for "moral tenuousness" is the potential to cause harm because you've produced something tasty enough that people have more than is healthy for them, then you'd have to string up a whole bunch of brewers and winemakers, too. Which would be too bad.
You mention that we would have to string up a whole bunch of brewers and winemakers, but we do currently. Brewers, winemakers, and cigarette companies are all heavily regulated and taxed because they have the potential to cause harm. Is Four Loko, which is designed for overconsumption, morally tenuous? Probably. Four Loko is on a different level than Doritos because the health effects are much worse, but the same principle applies. Clearly Doritos should not be illegal, but maybe they should be disincentivized, because...
We have an obesity epidemic. More people in this country are overweight than not overweight. It's becoming a national health crisis, and costing us a lot of money. Type 2 diabetes, renal failure, and the like are preventable.
I think this article sums up my feelings on the whole situation. We have a health problem, and the cheapest, tastiest products make the problem worse. https://medium.com/health-the-future/918b3d08f21f
As much as I agree with the sentiment of responsible companies (with my upvote), IMHO the reality is that consumers are the ones calling the shots.
Demand is like a vacuum suction. When there is a demand there will be supply, even if some don't choose to provide on moral grounds, others will fill in. No demand, no supply.
The only responsibility that companies have is to make money, and that is done via making products consumers want. If consumers want to buy only from the responsible companies, all viable companies will be responsible.
They aren't all responsible because we don't all vote with our wallets that way.
Look at the demand for health food these days even causes McDonald's to offer salads. Change demand, and you change supply.
> We have an obesity epidemic. More people in this country are overweight than not overweight. It's becoming a national health crisis, and costing us a lot of money.
Each individual is responsible for his/her own health. We can't legislate unhealthy lifestyles away. We can only educate and motivate people to learn more and take control of their own health, starting from not visiting the highly popular junk food isles.
I can't really dig too much deeper because I am at work but it really seems unlikely that they would pay for a powder that isn't needed.
The original product was made at the Casa de Fritos at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Using surplus tortillas, the company-owned restaurant cut them up and fried them (as in traditional Mexican chips called totopos) and added basic seasoning, resembling the Mexican chilaquiles, but in this case being dry. Arch West was the Vice President of Marketing of Frito-Lay at the time, and noticed the popularity. He made a deal with Alex Foods in 1964, the provider of many items for Casa de Fritos at Disneyland, and produced the chips for a short time regionally, before it was overwhelmed by the volume, and Frito-Lay moved the production in-house to its Tulsa plant.
Sounds like the chips came first. It wouldn't surprise me if the additional flavors of doritos were experiments studying the phenomenon, and plunged back into reformulations of the original.
I'm on Firefox, btw.