The Nacho Dorito

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/01/dining/nacho-graphic.html/#

by sethbannon • 13 years ago

74 21 13 years ago

scragg• 13 years ago

I love this flavor... reading this article makes me wish I had a bag right now.

machinagod• 13 years ago

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.

samatman• 13 years ago

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.

MrZongle2• 13 years ago

This article read like a commercial.

hxrts• 13 years ago

reads like a syndicated article

Mikeb85• 13 years ago

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.

thatcherclay• 13 years ago

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.

twoodfin2• 13 years ago

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.

rthomas62• 13 years ago

Really. Price is the only difference between gourmet chefs and Doritos. Oh, come on. Frito Lay doesn't make food people enjoy, they make food people crave. You don't feel satiated after eating a lot of Doritos, and as this article points out, Doritos are engineered that way on purpose. You don't get sick of them, or full from them, or long-lasting enjoyment out of them. You just get an overloaded reward center in your brain, a lot of empty calories, and a blood sugar spike. Gourmet food typically strives for the opposite: intense and complex flavors, long-lasting enjoyment, and a pleasant full feeling. To keep with OP's analogy, saying Doritos and real food are the same is like saying porn is the same as being in a great relationship, except anyone can afford porn.

HaloZero• 13 years ago

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.

stonemetal• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doritos

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.

jmduke• 13 years ago

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.)

hfsktr• 13 years ago

I remember reading that (probably on imgur). I looked it up but first result wasn't promising: http://wafflesatnoon.com/2013/05/07/doritos-powder-hoax/

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• 13 years ago

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.

scotth• 13 years ago

The article directly contradicts your claim.

twiceaday• 13 years ago

How would this not lead to a significant mouth-feel change?

zwieback• 13 years ago

Nacho Doritos - I don't even know why they make other chips anymore.

DiabloD3• 13 years ago

This page isn't rendering correctly, text is overlapping with images. Good job NYT.

I'm on Firefox, btw.

The Nacho Dorito

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