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The Dorito Effect

nytimes.com

125 pointsleephillips66 comments

A significant portion of the blandness of some supermarket foods is the result of processing, with "pro-juiciness" treatments being some of the worst offenders. Chicken (even whole chickens for roasting) are injected with water, oil, and water-binding compounds to plump them up. The water mostly evaporates during cooking so the result is usually blander rather than juicier. Most hams sold today are cured by injecting them with brine, as opposed to traditional surface-based dry curing methods that are slower and result in less mass. The result is bigger hams with inferior flavor and a somewhat gelatinous texture. It is still possible to find traditionally cured hams, but you often have to go to a specialized butcher.

So, it's not just breeding that has prioritized factors other than flavor, but also how foods are processed. We pay by the kilogram, so producers have found ways to make the same animals weigh more.

That's at the root of corn-fed beef too! Feeding cows corn the last days of their lives before they get on the truck to be weighed and cut up, raises their weight by far more than the cost of the corn. Its just economics. And the farmers set the beef grades, so beef raised this way is Grade A regardless of how it tastes.

Honestly I greatly prefer corn fed beef to grass fed regardless of economics. Grass fed is nice once in a while, but I think the best is grass fed, corn finished. It gives the meat a much fattier taste, and I've found also gives you a much nicer maillard crust.

Where and how are you eating that you are able to sample and differentiate:

- corn fed - grass fed - grass fed, corn finished - other permutations ?

Genuinely interested ... I mean, I know where I can go to get either corn or grass fed, but I wouldn't assume that other variables are controlled for. And then the grass fed, corn finished ... no idea who I would submit that request to ...

They sell these varieties all at Whole Foods. Usually Grass Fes and Corn Fed at the butcher section and Grass Fed Corn Finished pre-packed on the side.

Chicken is injected with water combos not simply to plump them up, it's called a brine.

By all means buy your poultry without being brined, I prefer mine with it.

Here's a nice "why" people do this:

http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/cooking-tips-techniqu...

Brining and injecting water into birds to plump them up are not the same thing.

And either way I'd rather pay not $5/lbs or whatever for water.

I am from Brazil, here our economy depends greatly on commodity exports (meat, soybeans, iron, coal, and whatnot).

Producers of commodities, tend to export the best stuff, and sell the crap internally... It has an interesting result: the flavour (or quality, for non-edible products) of some stuff, is drastically different, for example two famous cases is chicken, and oranges, it happened once to each industry to be unable to export for some reason, and they dumped the export product in the internal market, people that bought the "export" chicken and oranges were very impressed, it tasted MUCH, MUCH better, also the export oranges are obviously different (they are bigger, heavier and have a more striking colour).

Unfortunately, I am not one of those people :( (I had girlfriends that tasted those, but when it happened I lived in a city that was too small to get those products).

Still, for many people that think that produce can not be THAT different, I can say, yes, it can, even when made by the same company, sometimes in the same farm.

Since it costs the same to ship a mediocre product as the best products, it makes sense to ship the nicest stuff since a premium can be charged for it.

Happens in the US too, for the same reasons. Our export avocados tend to be larger an nicer looking than the domestically circulated equivalents. However, they both taste the same.

That explains it! I lived in California, where all the grocery-store avocadoes were marked 'Florida'. And California is a major avocado-growing region! I suppose all their best ones ended up in Florida.

The same happens here in Florida with orange juice. Every grocery store carries many varieties of "California orange juice". Which seems silly, given that we have great oranges right here.

Same in California: I only see Florida orange juice in the supermarket.

Most definitely is, our farm is California too. If you wan't the best quality avocados go to a farmers market (esp around August).

Yes! There's actually a name for exactly this effect in economics, if anyone's interested: The Alchian Allen Theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchian%E2%80%93Allen_effect

The tragedy is that when those exports arrive on their destination (take mangos arriving in Portugal, for instance), due to necessity to prevent the fruit to get ripe in transit they alter it somehow and not for the best.

I'm used to the taste of fresh picked mango (and guava, banana and other tropical fruits) and it is a world of difference from the fruits that we get in the supermarket. They all taste like they were picked way before they properly matured and then when they reach their destination they add some ripening substance making the fruit look ripe but without the right taste and the aroma.

It's a tragedy, they pick the best fruits, mangle them to survive travel and deprive both the locals and the foreigners of the best produce.

Even much of the domestic food you eat in the US is quite old.

The average supermarket apple in the US is over a year old.[1] According to Martin Lindstrom in "Brandwashed" it's an average of 14 months old.

Food preservation is great and allows us to eat domestic apples year-round, but taste and texture suffers immensely.

1: http://www.today.com/food/apple-you-just-bought-might-be-yea...

It's hard to see how it could be economically efficient to have a year's worth of apples in the producer's inventory. Surely they should be trying to keep the capital tied up in inventory as low as possible?

The article nostromo links seems to talk about one year being the maximum age, not the average.

The same happens for American fruit & Japan. It was weird wandering around Japanese marketplaces and seeing Product of Oregon and Product of California signs on produce that were vastly superior to what I was able to buy in the US.

One thing that weirded me out about Japanese supermarkets is that the Australian beef I've found is totally inferior to any of the Australian beef I've seen in Australia. I wonder if preferences are different?

Japanese beef is a strange case. Because there is so little land, produce tends to be high quality, but very expensive. Australian beef is imported specifically to fill the "cheap beef" market, so sending the good stuff would defeat the purpose.

In Bangladesh, we had scrawny little chickens that you'd buy live at the market. When we moved to the U.S. I couldn't eat chicken for 6-9 months because it just tasted so bland and flavorless.

Curiously, in the U.S., chickens are bread for breast meat. Growing up here, I never really got a taste for dark meat until I was in my 20s. My grandmother always preferred it.

My wife, from South Korea, also grew up with non-U.S. chickens and also likes dark meat. She'll pretty much refuse to eat white meat unless there's no other option.

Now that my tastes have grown and become more sophisticated, I have a strong preference for dark meat now and I love to cook with it. I had a chicken breast sandwich recently, for the first time in years, and almost didn't finish it it was so dry and bland.

I'm hoping people at large don't figure this out so thigh meat stays cheap.

We get dark meat free range chicken thighs from a food delivery service in Baltimore. A bit expensive at $5 per pound, but unbeatably flavorful marinated in curry powder + brown sugar or garlic + red chili paste and grilled (with thai peanut sauce obviously). I don't even get the point of white meat chicken unless it's fried.

Chicken thighs are definitely the best. Don't know about 'free range $5' - I get them at WalMart and they're yummy.

Costco sells huge packages of deboned chicken thighs cheap. I use them these days instead of breasts, pan fried in salted butter and rosemary. About $2.50-3.50/lb.

Probably not as good as your free range, but cheaper for a dinner party.

The white meats can still be delicious, but they are definitely harder to cook properly.

You can find yellow-hair chicken and other breed at some Asian markets. I like the Asian markets, especially because it's trivial to get a variety of breeds and cuts, but it's much harder to get any sort of provenance info about their meat products, which is a little concerning.

Also, if you are willing to try other animals, you can get quite a bit more flavor out of quail and most duck I've gotten is fine. The problem with that is you will rarely, if ever, see these products fresh. I still haven't gotten into rabbit, some day.

For me personally, I've got about 5 different places I get meat from depending, including a CSA meat club.

Back home in South Carolina, we had apple trees in our front yard. Never used any pesticides or anything, just let them grow. Anyway, they were about half the size of grocery apples, almost completely covered in insect bites, and tasted like ass. Incredibly sour, strangely dry, and very little sweetness. So thank god for pesticides and Fuji apples.

You could have tried a different variety.

probably a "real" apple tree. Most apple varieties are created by grafting a branch of an existing variety onto a new tree. Thats why despite genetic variation, they taste pretty much the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafting

It's not my experience that apple varieties in the grocery taste "pretty much the same." Maybe you meant something else?

Apple trees are grafted because the best-tasting varietals don't form the most hardy root system. You put the good-tasting apple tree on top and the hardy strain on the bottom (to become the roots)

Each variety tastes the same (a golden delicious apple tastes like other golden delicious apples). The grafting does that among other things "Maintain consistency". A hardy root system that you mention is one.

I started looking into it because my dad has a giant apple tree thats much bigger than the ones I've seen in an orchard, but the apples taste surprisingly bitter.

I guess another reason they like grafting is the trees stay smaller and its easier to pick the fruit.

I live in BC, Canada, and here you can find apples, a large variety of berries, pears, plumbs... All growing in random open areas and all delicious and relatively pest free without any pesticides. Even though a lot of those aren't native they seem to do pretty well. Perhaps the fact they're not grown commercially in this area helps... I grew up in Israel where pests were definitely more of a problem but you could still grow many different fruits without using pesticides and I used to pick many fruit off trees for eating... (Mangoes, oranges, and many more). Some of those "large" grocery apples have no taste and a floury texture though we do get some local apples in season here that are good...

Monocultures is a big problem. If you have a good mix you're less likely to have serious issues. It can still happen but less likely. You also need to take care of your trees, prune them, water them etc. if you want to get good fruit... Just let them grow doesn't always work...

South Carolina is kind of outside the range of apple cultivation unless you plant a specialized heat-tolerant variety. We have apple trees in the back yard, which we grow without pesticides or fertilizer, and the results are "okay". Small, but tasty, not a whole lot of production. You're better off growing peaches here. We stock up on apples whenever we drive through the mountains of North Carolina, which are just right for apples.

You just brought back memories of getting home from school and slamming a plate of "deshi murgi bhuna" and rice.

I always found it interesting that the scrawny and flavorful chickens co-existed with the bland and plump ones. Haven't been back in a few years, so I wonder if this is still the case or if the "farm murgi" has taken over domestic consumption.

We moved out to a small acreage two years ago and raised our first batch of pastured chickens. Totally different tasting bird, I agree it's hard to go back to mass-produced after that.

I would argue though, that the breed of bird isn't as important as the method of production. I've had standard cornish rock cross that were pastured and they tasted amazing. I've also had heritage dual purpose breeds and more modern "forager" breeds like the freedom ranger.

All tasted excellent, even the cornish X which are what you would get at a grocery store. The feed and pasture make the difference.

edit: typo

We have "badges" for all kinds of things, ie free range eggs, organic produce, electricity usage etc. why does something equivalent not exist for flavour? might be a tad subjective, but certainly doable. Might be because a lot of people actually confuse organic produce for a flavour badge?! never been convinced by it though..

Free range chickens for example seem to taste much better, but I don't see you could have a pure flavor badge.

However, you could probably just create a new flavor(s) and only apply it to nutritious foods.

I'm guessing the difference you think you taste is mostly psychological. Free range only means that the chickens had access to the outside. That means they could still be raised in a warehouse that just has one small door that leads to a tiny outside area.

That's only the case if you don't actually know the farmer producing the chickens. The ones I am thinking about live out side most of the day and eat a lot of insects. They are often non standard breeds so it's a significant age, diet, exercise, and genetic difference and not just a meaningless 'feel good' label.

PS: IMO, there is alot of good things about cooking with factory farm chickens, but novelty is also nice.

The free range certification doesn't mean much. But I the difference between a corn diet and the natural meat diet of chickens causes a flavor difference in my opinion.

It's not straight forward that people will like traditionally produced food products better. In the case of beef for example most people prefer the taste of corn fed beef to grass fed even though corn is horrible for cows and grass is their natural food.

Hmmm, really?

When I moved to the US, I was put off by the taste of beef; I found that corn fed just didn't taste as good. I'm curious if you just prefer what you were brought up on?

The 2nd. My dad liked cold corn grits fried in lard for breakfast. Its totally disgusting. Unless its how you got your calories on the farm during the depression - then it was heaven-sent.

I make that anytime we have left over grits, although I usually use bacon grease. My kids love it too. It's all about what you're used to.

I was brought up on corn fed beef. I recently switched to grass fed beef after learning more about the effects of a corn diet on my health and cow health.

The truth is that I find grass fed beef very dry. Presumably because of the lack of saturated fats. It just doesn't taste the way my brain thinks a hamburger or taco meat should taste.

A great talk touching on this topic is "Law of the locust: a tale of swarms, cannibals, ageing and human obesity" <URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rV7zAGdbyA> (though I saw Dr. Simpson speak at Harvard, rather). He mentioned how the body craves protein and will over-consume carbohydrates to get enough; less so the reverse. It really messes things up when you have a starchy food laced with MSG so your body thinks from the savory umami flavor it's getting protein, but never does, so desperately eats more.... according to him Doritos are pretty much evil incarnate.

Speaking of Doritos I just noticed they finally came out with the Roulette ones near me. May have to risk the evil.

Very nice video.

It explains a lot about the low-carb (high protein) diet.

Thank you for sharing it.

I always ate food in not much large amounts, but one thing that impressed me is that when I switched my diet (when I could afford it...) to salad + cheese and meat, the amount of food I ate dropped a lot, even in unrelated meals.

It was great to go to a restaurant, eat a third of what other people were eating (it was a weight-based restaurant, so I could see that I ate a third of what other people ate, in weight of the food terms), and feel completely satisfied.

Even better, I could get back to work right away, or even go do something that require physical exertion (for example once I was late for something, and could eat, and then immediately run toward the place where I was supposed to go).

Soylent has proven to be exceptionally filling for me, more so than any other food. It actually gets rid of that ever-present background hunger for up to half a day.

I've lost a ton of weight on it, enough that I've gone down 3+ inches in pant size in a few months. Of course, being in a stressful situation such that I lost interest in eating, then getting out of said stressful situation so I didn't have as much of an urge to binge and stretch my normal appetite again, probably helped.

Spectacular talk. I used to think I know quite a bit about nutrition, but I learned a lot from it.

I can confirm this, lived on a ranch where we raised our own free range chickens. They had a noticeably more savory flavor. Not being brined, also helped not overpower their taste. Even the old roosters who's meat was so tough that you'd have to stew them for hours tasted better.

(it was also neat to see how neotenic and undeveloped the bones of store bought chickens are in comparison)

> According to a gruesome statistic from a 2013 article in Poultry Science, if humans grew as quickly as the Chicken of Today, “a three-kilogram (6.6-pound) newborn baby would weigh 300 kilograms (660 pounds) after two months.”

How is this an appropriate comparison? A quick google search attests that birds grow faster than mammals, and that humans grow especially slowly; I'm sure you could conjure up a similarly "gruesome" statistic with any wild bird.

I had to spend a good amount of mental effort trying to explain to my German teacher, in German, why American pork tastes so bad (or, rather, has no flavor). When I said, 'Schwein, das andere weisse Fleisch, wie poulet' (I'm in Switzerland), she figured it out immediately and was as disturbed as anyone should be.

Wait, is pork really considered white meat in the US? I've never seen white pork, but then again I think I never consciously ate pork in the US - all I know is that ham is absolutely terrible for my taste - but I think I've never had good ham outside German/Italian/Spanish- speaking countries. I'm Swiss btw.

It's marketed as "The Other White Meat".

Yes. The typical pork chop in the United States contains so little fat that it is closer to a chicken breast than a fatty cut of beef.

Ok, so the fat determines the way people think about it, but the meat's color is still red, right? If it were white I'd make a big circle around it since I'd assume it's spoiled.

More of a very light pink than red. I've definitely mistaken a pork chop for a chicken breast when glancing through my fridge.

I don't know about the US, but I've always thought that, just like chicken pork has both white and red meat. You can sometimes see it when you slice a pork loin [1].

[1] http://www.donaldrussell.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/i...

Can confirm. Doritos are amazing.

It's funny that she takes the opportunity to plug her former employer chef's work and an entirely different book at the end.

It makes it seem like that was her motivation for reviewing this book in the first place.

> her former employer

She was a research assistant 11 years ago for someone who is very famous already.

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