The End of Craving: Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well

by Mark Schatzker

Then there are “flavorings.” Long before the boom in artificial sweeteners and artificial fats, the flavor industry exerted a transformational effect on food, thanks to a device called a gas chromatograph, which became commercially available in the 1950s. The GC, as it is known, made it possible to capture and identify the flavor compounds that give foods their vivid character. One of the first moves industry made was to identify flavor compounds in butter and add them to margarine. Artificial berry flavorings, which had long tasted painfully fake, soon became astonishingly real. The mouth told the brain, “Berries!”—but all the stomach received was a little jumble of chemicals.