Food Scientists Are Getting Fed Up with Picky Eaters

https://www.wsj.com/articles/emulsify-this-food-scientists-are-getting-fed-up-with-picky-consumers-1539352923

by rhayabusa • 8 years ago

46 63 8 years ago

wsj.com

DecayingOrganic• 8 years ago

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paulcole2• 8 years ago

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jwilk• 8 years ago

If you don't want to be tracked by Facebook, there's https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-ft-wsj/ which fakes the referrer.

chabes• 8 years ago

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think it’s great that processed food manufacturers are trying to replace synthetic ingredients with actual food. I don’t see a problem here.

perlgeek• 8 years ago

It would make sense if the deciding factor would be consumer's health. Instead, it's the appearance of being "natural", which is not in itself better than something synthetic or modified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

evincarofautumn• 8 years ago

A good example of this is meats like bacon and pepperoni cured with “celery juice powder” or “celery extract” instead of “nitrates”, when the former contains just as much of the same carcinogenic nitrate salts they would’ve used, but it’s “natural”.

fenwick67• 8 years ago

I think consumers are honestly trying to be healthier, but the amount of effort required to understand food science is way too high.

What consumers are told is healthy vs unhealthy changes from year to year. First, saturated fat was considered bad for you so they were removed in favor of trans fats. Then trans fats were considered unhealthy so manufacturers replaced them with palm oil. Then we found out palm oil isn't great, so they use coconut oil instead. Who knows if that will hold up.

Ultimately consumers want a pattern they can follow to get healthier foods. "Natural" or "organic" are these patterns for some people. I don't know what a good alternative would be.

fortenforge• 8 years ago

What exactly is the benefit of replacing Red #40 with red cabbage extract?

mrj• 8 years ago

Well, potentially quite a lot of benefit:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/food-dyes-linked-to-allergies-a...

toast0• 8 years ago

Some of the numbered red dyes are a migraine trigger for my wife. Naturally sourced dyes don't seem to trigger that reaction, although I'm sure that some people are sensitive to cabbage extract as well.

I'm a bigger fan of not adding colors to things that don't need it, but I still appreciate naturally sourced colors.

maxerickson3• 8 years ago

There are also people allergic to yellow food dyes (for example, tartrazine).

Of course, there could be a downside if there are more people that are allergic to the replacement. But the replacement is still a benefit to people allergic to the original ingredient.

tomp4• 8 years ago

Red cabbage has been experimentally tested for far longer, and by far more people, than Red #40. I'm inclined to trust it more.

sowbug• 8 years ago

The point of the article is that that is a popular opinion.

Whether it's an informed opinion is another matter.

w3238982• 8 years ago

Sometimes it's just dumb. Nitrides are no more hazardous than maillard reaction products like acrylamide, yet we're sabotaging our pastrami because of it. Totally irrational.

Having a culture where people consider organic Pop tarts to be somehow healthy is a problem. It's superstition and leads nowhere good.

ardit33• 8 years ago

From Albania here, (2nd world European country, aka still developing).

Due to its mediterranean weather (1), everything raised locally tastes better. Local food is full of flavor, and things made artisan-ally and locally are still good. Even something simple like a 'Tiramisu' tastes better there, most likely because things are still made to be consumed within a day, and not last for ages. Other countries are similar (Greece, Southern Italy, Croatia, Macedonia).

eg. The difference in taste between a home made jam, and one bought in a supermarket is huge. (mainly for the supermarket one having to have a much longer shelf life, and having additives added).

Unfortunately modernization has reached the country and things are getting more 'standardized' and getting that western level of blandness as well.

Ironically: Fresh locally produced and prepared food is a real luxury in western countries, and a normal commodity in poorer ones.

1) Warm weather is important. eg. Hothouse/greenhouse tomatoes or cucumber are never as flavorful as field raised and ripped ones. The more north you go, the blander/crappier the food gets, mostly due to the weather.

21• 8 years ago

The more north you go, the blander/crappier the food gets, mostly due to the weather.

It's more complicated than that. Cultural reasons are a huge factor in why Western food is so bland:

Serving richly spiced stews was no longer a status symbol for Europe's wealthiest families — even the middle classes could afford to spice up their grub. "So the elite recoiled from the increasing popularity of spices," Ray says. "They moved on to an aesthetic theory of taste. Rather than infusing food with spice, they said things should taste like themselves. Meat should taste like meat, and anything you add only serves to intensify the existing flavors."
The rest of Europe soon adopted this new style. "It's a redefinition of what elegant is," Freedman says. "It's sort of like — in fashion — for a while having more frills, more jewelry was fashionable. But then someone said that a basic black dress with some pearls is much better."

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/26/394339284/ho...

dyarosla• 8 years ago

I do believe the parent did mean specifically the base taste is less bland, independent of cultural factors. For someone who hasn’t experienced the taste difference one might think ‘really, how much better can a tomato taste?’- but no the difference really is substantial, esp when comparing, say, a North American tomato and one from southern Europe.

nemetroid• 8 years ago

Warm weather is important. eg. Hothouse/greenhouse tomatoes or cucumber are never as flavorful as field raised and ripped ones. The more north you go, the blander/crappier the food gets, mostly due to the weather.

It's not quite that clear-cut. For example, strawberries are sweeter and less bland when grown in cooler climates [1]:

Increased in growth temperatures resulted in decreased fruit quality including soluble solids (SSC), titratable acids (TA), SSC/TA ratio, and ascorbic acid (AA) content in the fruit.

Swedish tomatoes are, on the other hand, of course crap when compared to southern European tomatoes. But from what I've read that's suspected to have more to do with light than temperature.

1: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5ace/a1295f3898659fb0afdfab...

jaclaz• 8 years ago

Not-so-southern Italy here, only to add a data point I just got (for free) two crates of fruit (small apples) from a farmer nearby because they were too small (below "standard") to be sold to the usual wholesaler.

These apples (besides their small size) are simply delicious, but they wouldn't be sold in a supermarket as they are not "pretty" and do not represent the "ideal" apple that people expect.

yellowapple3• 8 years ago

Some western countries (or portions thereof) have locally-grown food as the norm, too. California, for example, certainly imports quite a bit of food, but also is a major food exporter (and for some produce is the only significant exporter worldwide, let alone in the rest of the US). Being able to grow practically any kind of fruit or vegetable or grain was something I took for granted growing up in the Central Valley, as I did the ability to grow one's own food (my family didn't grow any staples ourselves, but we did have an orchard that gave us more fruit than we could hope to eat, at least when it was in season).

I agree that locally-grown tastes better. Yeah, there are skeptics that claim it's just our imagination or whatever, but if you're shipping food thousands of miles over land and sea, by the time it reaches your plate it's inevitably going to have gone through wild climate swings and mechanical stress that are bound to affect the flavor, even if subtly. And that's assuming the food started out identically; locally grown cultivars/varieties of crops are often different from the ones grown further away (and in fact, a lot of fruits and vegetables grown for worldwide distribution are specifically bred to better survive transit; locally-grown-and-consumed crops don't need to account for that and can focus on size or flavor or texture or whatever other quality might be desirable for a local market).

yipbub2• 8 years ago

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I don't know a good alternative for WSJ, but I don't know a good alternative for me either.

tomp4• 8 years ago

Then they came for monosodium glutamate. Even though food companies say it is harmless, they eventually pulled it from many products, because that’s what the customer demanded.

So? If there isn't a good reason for it to be in the food, then it probably shouldn't be. On the other hand, if there is a good reason (e.g. the food lasts longer), then I see no reason why not let the market decide what they prefer.

In general, it's not entirely unreasonable to not trust companies. They're mainly after high profits, so unless there is "market pressure" (such as customers not/wanting certain ingredients) they will just continue poisoning us in different ways (lead in gas, nicotine/smoking, trans fats, etc). It also doesn't help that e.g. orange juice is advertised as "all natural pure oranges" but tastes like a high school chemistry lab trash bin.

cwyers4• 8 years ago

Monosodium glutamate is there as a flavoring, just like any number of seasonings. Nobody says that thyme or oregano shouldn't be in food unless they help preserve it longer. There's no evidence whatsoever that it's harmful to anyone, and it's a common part of Asian cooking. The furor over MSG is that it has kind of a funny name and people are still in a tizzy about the racist panic over "Chinese restaurant syndrome" from a few decades ago.[1]

1) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/may/21/chinese...

rafiki68• 8 years ago

Yes and no. MSG is what gives food that amazing umami flavor. It's in more foods than we realize. It's the same as adding any other spice. It's important to revert to a scientific approach to understanding why something shouldn't be in food.

w3238982• 8 years ago

A guy at work thought msg was a neurotoxin. I'm like, "uh, no, it's an amino acid,a normal constituent of every protein you eat..." This is a guy with a master's in a technical field. I honestly don't know how we got here.

bonestamp2• 8 years ago

I agree and I think professionals in most industries are frustrated with their customers as customers are becoming more educated and discerning. This seems reasonable and inevitable. From freelancers to fortune 500s like General Mills they're basically saying, "Why won't people just take what we give them?"

I think the answer is actually pretty simple, the producer (be it food, software, hardware, home goods, etc) often compromises quality, security, health, etc for the sake of a little more profit.

To some degree, they're right... they are usually the expert and what they make will be better than what the customer wants in some ways (ex. longer shelf life). But of course consumers are more aware of this dynamic, and they're pushing back for more of the quality, health, etc.

So ya, I agree... the market should decide a lot of where that line will be drawn. Many of these ingredients may not be proven to be unhealthy, but I think people are starting to realize how much we also don't know. While sensitivity to a certain ingredient may not have been found in a 2,000 candidate study, maybe it does affect 1 in 2001. If there are better alternatives, then that might be a worthy exploration. The producer who finds a better alternative will have a market advantage.

Of course, where it is discovered that an ingredient or a process is high risk (such as trans fats) then I think it's reasonable for the FDA to regulate it.

mcphage• 8 years ago

On the other hand, if there is a good reason (e.g. the food lasts longer), then I see no reason why not let the market decide what they prefer.

There is a good reason for it to be in food, and a good reason for it to not be in food. As it happens, the reason for it to be in food is that it makes food taste better, and the reason for it to not be in food is because people were falsely told it was unhealthy. So the market is deciding, but as a result of fear-mongering and racism, not based on what makes for better food. That’s still the market deciding, and that’s just how the market works sometimes.

ummonk• 8 years ago

If I want vitamin B12 I don't need to eat fortified cereals. I can just eat beef or tuna.

exabrial• 8 years ago

I truly think this is because picky eaters are easy to market to; they pay attention to flashy advertising rather then hard science. We have an entire generation of people that think GMOs are somehow harmful and also ignore the tremendous environmental impact of so called organic foods. The same people taking birth control are reaching for grass fed hormone free milk and beef.

rafiki68• 8 years ago

I think it's a cognitive reaction to safety. Fear is certainly there due to the unknown. People will retreat to what they feel is safe and easy to understand i.e. "natural" food. Little do they know natural food is GMO! The crops that survived today did so by natural genetic mutations for the crops that had the best ability to survive. Humans just took advantage of that fact and sped up the process a bit to our advantage.

Vinnl2• 8 years ago

Of course humans also took it upon themselves to define what "best ability to survive" is.

Not saying that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's certainly a difference between GMO and regular evolved food.

Edit: Well, thinking about it a bit more, of course selective breeding is humans picking what "best ability to survive" is as well...

tomp4• 8 years ago

This is not a very good argument. You could easily repurpose it to claim that nuclear weapons are nothing to be feared... After all, radioactive uranium and even nuclear reactors happen naturally, humans just optimise the process a bit!

DoreenMichele2• 8 years ago

Humans have been breeding plants and animals to try to enhance specific traits for a really long time, well before it could be done in a lab.

Watermelon was originally called that because it was used as a natural form of canteen. Hundreds of years ago, the inner fruit was not sweet and tasty. It was consumed solely for purposes of hydration.

https://assets.atlasobscura.com/articles/where-are-watermelo...

https://www.vox.com/2015/7/28/9050469/watermelon-breeding-pa...

_nalply• 8 years ago

Could this be a food industry backed opinion piece?

The lobbyist could then say: Look, people misunderstand things like dihydrogen monoxide. What should we do with the ingredient list? Perhaps we should have the freedom not to mention scary sounding ingredients?

rafiki68• 8 years ago

I'm all for conspiracy theories, but we have to use some reasoning here. I don't doubt the food industry does this, but the reality is there's a happy middle ground. Maybe that middle ground could be using common names for things. Food science has made food cheaper and more accessible and that's a good thing. Our food isn't killing us. We are healthier and living longer than ever in history. I do think people who are marketing more expensive food that is marked up tremendously due to an unscientific reason are the real beneficiaries here.

muro• 8 years ago

Look at what Monsanto did with bribes to scientists to say GMO is ok

DoreenMichele2• 8 years ago

Nah, just start requiring a 14 page fold out on all food like we do on medication. Then you can explain that dihydrogen monoxide is perfectly safe, assuming you don't inhale it into your lungs or similar provisos. Although dihydrogen monoxide poisoning is possible, it is quite rare and known cases tend to be limited to military recruits force fed excessive amounts of it in training due to a track record of under consuming it impairing their functioning.

The law can include an exception for sufficiently small items. The 14 pages of info can go on a website and the item in question can have a URL and QR code.

(Do I need a sarcasm tag here? Inquiring minds want to know.)

rafiki68• 8 years ago

I feel the underlying cause of this is the continuing stupidification of Western Societies. It ties in well with the fact that most people just aren't well equipped to navigate complex issues and are easy prey for unscrupulous marketers. Companies take advantage of that fact just as much as politicians do. It's easy to tell people to be afraid of complex sounding ingredients just as much as it's easy to tell voters to be afraid of complex scientific phenomena like climate change. And then you can push your unscientific agenda (whether it's climate change denial or it's marketing your food as natural and your competitors as poison and thus charging your customers double or more for it).

heurist2• 8 years ago

People are about as smart as they have always been. The world is just getting more complicated around them.

rafiki68• 8 years ago

Not true. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2146752-we-seem-to-be-g...

maxerickson3• 8 years ago

Things are improving though, not getting worse. The evidence is that people on average are more intelligent, and educational attainment has increased (maybe completing a particular grade has been watered down, but it wasn't so long ago that lots of people stopped school at 6th grade...).

rafiki68• 8 years ago

Hmm, really? https://www.newscientist.com/article/2146752-we-seem-to-be-g...

philip1209• 8 years ago

"If there’s a label on the food, that’s a warning label, because that means it’s been processed: real food doesn’t need a label."

- Robert Lustig, M.D., M.S.L.

(source: https://peterattiamd.com/roblustig/)

analog31• 8 years ago

I wonder if there are different levels of picky eaters. For me, there are some things I like better than other things, but I will eat or try something if nothing better is around.

For some people it is an extremely strong aversion -- something that they can't really control, and that would not be influenced by food science or rational arguments.

SteveGerencser• 8 years ago

I freely admit to being a picky eater. And I even understand why I became that way. It doesn't change the fact that I rarely sample things I have never had before.

Growing up we were constantly told to eat everything on our plates because there were kids starving somewhere else. And I was forced to sit at a table and stare at food I absolutely hated the taste or texture of for hours. Watched it get cold. Get even worse tasting. And still I sat. As I became an adult I was able to eat what I wanted and refuse things that I didn't. I developed a taste for things I like, and constantly work to refine those flavors. I cook all the time, I use smokers, grills and ovens, we hand raise our own cows, pigs, birds and fish along with a large garden that I eat very little out of but my wife loves. I love looking for the ultimate version of the particular food that I enjoy eating.

But I still have no desire to try anything "new" not out of ignorance, but because I don't have to.

Al-Khwarizmi• 8 years ago

If the food industry were more responsible and didn't do everything it can to reduce costs at the expense of selling crap, maybe there wouldn't be so many "picky eaters".

Obviously no common citizen can track a list of 20 ingredients and know which of them are the worst offenders and which are harmless. But there is a clear correlation between processed products containing lots of weird-sounding ingredients and products that taste bland, upset the stomach and/or are unhealthy. So in absence of detailed knowledge about what each individual ingredient is, it's a perfectly rational and sensible decision to prefer the food with fewer, and well-known, ingredients. I have a scientific education, know what dihydrogen monoxide is, and still do that, because I don't trust the industry and regulations enough* when it comes to eating an unknown ingredient. And the industry can cry me a river.

*And this is in Europe, where at least there is some more regulation... in the US, the same applies multiplied by 10.

cwyers4• 8 years ago

There's quite a few comments in here about how food scientists shouldn't have put so many things in foods to begin with. Well, look. There's a handful of reasons anything ends up intentionally added to large-scale industrial foods:

1) To improve taste, 2) To improve texture (or to preserve texture for products -- emulsifiers and binders added to keep dressings from separating, for instance), 3) To improve shelf life and preserve the food, 4) To stand in for something more expensive (artificial vanilla in place of the real thing, or HFCS in place of sugar that has import tariffs on it), or 5) To improve health outcomes. (Think of cereals fortified with vitamins, or iodized salts -- iodine deficiency was a major health threat until the introduction of iodized salt).

Yes, things that improve taste aren't always good for you -- they're often refined carbs or fats or both. But it turns out that in order to get a bottle of ranch dressing that can sit on the shelf for weeks before being purchased, last for months in your fridge, and still have a creamy integration of oil and water (things that want to separate!) without having to be stirred or shaken every use. If you don't want to buy that ranch dressing, that's fine. You can make your own, or make a vinaigrette. But there's not some vast conspiracy to add chemicals to food. And people add thickeners and emulsifiers to food when they cook at home all the time. "Xanthan gum" is not any less healthy for you than agar-agar or gelatine, and it's used for basically the same thing, it just has different properties. (Gelatin is removed from commercial broths and stocks all the time because it makes it unappealing to pour out of the carton at room temperature, for instance. This is one reason making your own stock and broth yields better soup.)

And the upshot of all of this is that we've made lots of foods cheaper, more plentiful and less time-consuming to prepare than at any other point in human history. That's had real effects on society -- not all of them good, see our obesity epidemic in the US, but on the whole, you can see what people were doing, it wasn't a plot to give us TEH CHEMICALS, it was an effort to give a civilization unparalleled amounts of food security and let people specialize in life outside of the home. (There's an entire tangent about the intersection of technical and social progress, and the interaction between convenience foods and women being freed from being homemakers to entering the workforce and being independent.)

Is all of it good? No. Would it be good for people to become more educated and make better decisions about what to eat here? Yes. But that's not what the article is talking about. There's parallels to medicine here -- on one hand, the pharma industry is clearly devoted to profits above all else, and they do all sorts of infuriating things in both the market (slightly altering drugs in order to make new ones that are just as effective but still under patent, jacking up the price of insulin, etc.) and in science (there's tons of scientific studies you can't trust because pharma companies will run a bunch of studies and file drawer the ones that don't help them). It would be better if people could make more informed decisions about health, if the market wasn't distorted to misalign the incentives of consumers and producers, if there was more transparency and better science. But the opposition to commercially-funded pharma studies is not principled and it does not improve your health outcomes. It's stuff like the anti-vax crusade that is letting diseases largely eradicated come back, and Gweneth Paltrow selling folk remedies to the gullible and clueless. The same thing is true in nutrition -- people who are decrying chemical additives in food or pitching you on fad diets are not trying to help you fight against large agribusiness, they are exploiting your skepticism of large agribusiness in order to enrich themselves at your expense. MSG is fine. "Nitrate free" cured meats have more nitrates (but naturally occurring ones, from celery!) than ones not so labelled. Produce labelled as "organic" often come with more pesticides than regular produce because of how you have to grow organic produce and still get high yields, meaning that they can be less safe for many people. A general rule of thumb is that if you don't trust a company when they're putting xantham gum in your food, you shouldn't trust what they're replacing it with, either, even if the name sounds more natural or some food blogger is telling you that xanthan gum causes sterility or whatever.

cwyers4• 8 years ago

I forgot one reason from the list -- to improve color.

Food Scientists Are Getting Fed Up with Picky Eaters

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