I've read recently the book that the article references - Why Humans like Junk food - and it's a fascinating read - despite being poorly written.
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.
Reminding me of my favorite hunger hack: got into kitchen, chop onion or press garlic, toss into oil, fry. In ten seconds, I go from "dinner sounds like a hassle" to rooting through the cupboards, salivating madly.
It is really impressive when you think about it; the level of genius that goes into tricking our brains to like this synthetic mush is astonishing. But only the same way that the porn industry is astonishing in some ways - both appeal to a desire and then over-stimulate, and both are on tenuous morale standing.
What's morally tenuous about making food people enjoy? Gourmet chefs use the same science as Frito Lay. The only difference is that almost anyone can afford to have Doritos whenever they like.
Even though I eat a generally healthy diet, even I can't resist the pull of the Dorito... There's just something about salty, savoury, crispy, fatty and sometimes spicy treats that is so appealing.
I forget where I read it, but a while back Frito-Lay food scientists were actually able to eliminate the 'gold dust' from Doritos. Focus groups for the new chips -- that had the exact same taste and 'biology', just without the dust -- revealed that consumers hated them, because at some level we equate flavor with the dust (and thus lack of dust with lack of flavor.)
In my neuroimaging days we found a tight correlation between visual and taste regions, even when we were only asking about one quality and from only word stimuli.
I'm curious if they understood all these concepts when they created the chips or if they were developed afterwards and realized this is why we love them.
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.
[+] [-] machinagod|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] samatman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thatcherclay|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twoodfin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mikeb85|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmduke|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hfsktr|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] robg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twiceaday|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scragg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrZongle2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] HaloZero|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stonemetal|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DiabloD3|12 years ago|reply
I'm on Firefox, btw.
[+] [-] hxrts|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zwieback|12 years ago|reply