Savor Flavor

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Fantasy flavors could be juicy fruit, red boule, root beer, blue raspberry.

These are delicious flavors that are consumer-known, but they just don't really exist in the world, meaning you can't just go and squeeze a root beer flower.

That was Michelle Hagen.

She's a flavorist at Givaudin, which is the largest flavor and fragrance company in the world.

Wonder what a flavorist is?

Stay tuned.

This episode will be getting the history and science of artificial flavors, from long-forgotten grapes that inspired that weird fake grape Jolly Rancher flavor to the designer microbes fermenting the flavors of the future.

It's just another day at the office for Gastropod, the podcast where we bring you the best in food science and history.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber.

Before we get into flavor, we have a favor to ask of you all.

Next month, we're doing an entire episode on cocktails.

Yay!

So we want your favorite cocktail stories: delicious new creations, signature drinks, the ones that flopped.

Ooh, do I have a cocktail recipe that flopped?

Okay, so record us a voice memo on your phone and email it to us, or leave us a message at 310-876-2427.

And now in this episode, I ask Nikki the question you are all wondering.

What in the world is the difference between a natural and an artificial flavor?

To answer that question, I I kind of need to go back to the beginning.

So I am going to have you open a couple of packets of Skittles.

The first is a normal package of original Skittles, which I have right here.

We're going to do two separate experiments that will help us get at the nature of flavor.

Because the thing is, I think a lot of people think that flavor is sort of identical to taste, but taste is a sense.

And sour, sweet, salty, bitter, there's a lot of debate about how many different tastes we can sense and how it works, but it's fundamentally different from flavor.

Flavor is actually a lot more than just taste, and it's a perception, not a sense, which means it happens in your brain.

Okay, so let's start this off.

First, I taste a purple Skittle.

It has that fake sweet grape candy flavor that I expect it to have.

Okay, so now you've ground truth Skittles.

Now I want you to close your eyes.

Okay.

Pick one at random from the regular batch.

Okay, I'm picking one at random.

And then, when you put it in your mouth, I would like you to use your other hand to hold your nose

as firmly as you can.

This is going to be challenging to tape at the same time.

Okay.

Yeah, your third hand you're going to use you to exactly.

Your fourth hand you'll be holding the recorder.

And do exactly the same thing and then tell me what flavor your Skittle was.

Okay, my nose is plugged.

I can't even say that.

Now I'm going to stick the Skittle in my mouth.

Don't unplug your nose until it's fully gone.

I can't chew and breathe at the same time.

It is kind of tricky.

Okay, I'm going to now unplug my nose.

What flavor was that, Skittle?

Well, now that I unplugged my nose, I actually have a different guess because there's a little bit of it left in my mouth.

I would have guessed maybe,

I don't know, orange, red.

Like, it just tasted really sweet.

But now that I unplugged my nose, I think maybe it's the green one.

It was hard to tell.

Like, once I unplugged my nose, even though I thought I had swallowed it all down, I got much more of a kind of tart tart sense than with my nose plugged, all I got was kind of sweetness, and I really couldn't tell.

And that is actually the point of the experiment.

Upwards of 70% of flavor consists of smell.

By the way, if you listeners try this at home, it helps to be in the same room.

Because I was in Brooklyn and Cynthia was in Somerville, I had no idea which flavor she had actually picked either.

We will never know.

Lost to history.

But it doesn't matter.

The point is, a lot of what you think of as flavor is actually something called retronasal olfaction.

Okay, so normal olfaction, that's smelling through your nose.

The retronasal kind happens through another passage at the back of your mouth.

You're not normally aware of doing this, but when you're chewing on food, little puffs of the aroma chemicals in that food are going up a passage that runs from the back of your mouth all the way up to your nose.

And that is why when I had my nose plugged, those little puffs of Skittle flavor weren't going anywhere.

Exactly, and all you got was the taste.

Sweet.

It's the same reason why food tastes so blah when you have a cold.

Okay, on to experiment number two.

More Skittles.

A special packet that I brought you all the way from England.

Thank you.

It's called Confused Skittles.

And the deal is they're the wrong color.

So the lemon one is not yellow, and the orange isn't orange, and so on.

Why don't you

help yourself to a confused Skittle?

Okay.

And

should I do the purple one again, or should I just choose any one?

Yeah, do the purple one.

What are you expecting?

I'm expecting it to taste just like the other one I tasted earlier.

Right.

So let me know.

Okay, so because it's, maybe I shouldn't have done purple, because I'm expecting it to taste just like the one I tasted before, and that's obviously different.

So let me actually.

Well, no, tell me what flavor it is.

I have no idea.

I mean, it's definitely not grape.

It's not, or that fake grape flavor.

It's not the same thing that I just ate.

But I don't know what it is.

See, and that is precisely the point of these confused Skittles: is that without the cue of knowing that purple means grape, you're kind of stuck for knowing exactly how to describe what it is that the flavor is.

Listeners, you can replicate this at home with regular Skittles by closing your eyes and having a friend choose the Skittle you're gonna eat.

The point of it is to show that even though flavor is a little bit based on taste and a lot based on smell, it's also shaped by all of your other senses, including vision.

But I have a question.

I'm convinced by this experiment that I can't tell the difference among artificial flavors if my eyes are closed.

But I am not convinced this is true for real food as well.

If I had a blindfold on and somebody handed me two glasses of juice, would I really not be able to tell the difference between orange juice and apple juice?

It's actually harder than you think when you can't see.

There's this famous experiment that I like that showed all these celebrity wine critics believe they were drinking red wine when they were actually drinking white wine with some food coloring added.

It was how it looked.

All of them believed they could tell the difference between white and red wine on taste alone, that the color didn't make a difference.

I mean, of course, they're wine critics, this is what they do.

But it turned out that they couldn't.

Hmm, fascinating.

So it really is like chefs like to say, you start to eat with your eyes before you ever take a bite.

Flavor is a multi-sensory perception.

And you can put the Skittles away now.

Thank you.

Okay, that's flavor.

But what about flavors?

I see flavors listed on ingredients in the grocery store.

What are those?

Well, obviously food has flavors.

So when you eat a strawberry, you're tasting, or really, as we know now, mainly smelling, the chemicals that make it strawberry-flavored.

As it happens, there are actually more than 350 different chemicals that make up that strawberry flavor.

So I put the strawberry in my mouth, I start chewing, and those 350 chemicals, they're going up into my nose for me to feel like it tastes like strawberry.

Little puffs of methyl butanoate, ethylpentanoate, and gamma decalactone.

That is some impressive pronunciation.

Clearly, you've been practicing.

Don't ask me to do the other 347, please.

But there is no flavoring on the label of a strawberry box, obviously.

Yeah, and that's because for a flavor to have to be listed on a label, it has to have been added to the food.

It's not just in it, like those chemicals are naturally in a strawberry.

Okay, so what about those added flavors?

I mean, I doubt they're adding 350 flavor chemicals to a strawberry starburst.

Or a Skittle for that matter.

And this gets us to artificial flavor.

Okay, so for most of human history, honestly, if you wanted a strawberry flavor thing, you would have just had to use a strawberry.

But that all changed in the 1800s.

Two things happened that on the surface seemed to have nothing to do with food.

But to go back in time to the invention of the very first artificial flavors, I sat down with Nadia Berenstein.

She's getting her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in the history and sociology of science.

My dissertation is about the history of synthetic flavors and of flavor science in the United States from about 1880 to 1970.

So the first thing to know is that until the 19th century, there was no organic chemistry.

People thought there was no way to recreate any of the basic carbon-based chemicals of life in the lab.

And then one German guy made urea.

It's kind of funny that a major change in science came about because someone created the main component of urine.

Usually it's made in our kidneys.

Yes, he says, I can make urea without a kidney, either of man or dog.

I can synthesize it here in my laboratory from other chemicals.

So that's part one of the story.

Part two is coal industrialization.

Organic chemistry is carbon chemistry.

And coal processing, coal industrialization produces all of these byproducts, such as coal tar, basically that are carbon-rich.

And what these are are just raw materials for just a burgeoning organic chemical industry that's proceeding by transforming all of these waste products, these carbon-rich waste products, into other kinds of valuable things, such as dyes, drugs, perfumes, and artificial flavors.

What do byproducts of coal have to do with artificial flavors?

Okay, they have chemicals left over from processing that coal and so on, but so what?

Are you saying that coal byproducts taste like strawberries?

Weirdly enough, yes.

Diluted, a lot of these products, carbon-based molecules called aldehydes and esters, they smell fruity.

But why did anyone get the idea to taste them and then even put them in food?

Yeah, I actually asked Nadia exactly that question.

That's a great question.

So

chemists, alchemists, the whole history of working with materials chemically has always paid really close attention to the smell and taste of substances, right?

This is a way, especially before modern chemistry, this is one of the main ways that you know what something is by the way that it smells or tastes.

So the taste and odor and aroma of different chemicals has always been part of the chemical record of chemical practice.

What happens in the late 19th century is that somebody realizes that chemicals can have a commercial value for these properties, for the ways that they are, the ways that they're sensed.

When did they become part of food?

What are the first artificial flavors used in?

Nadia told me that no one knows exactly when the very first artificial flavor foods were sold or even what they were.

But the very first time they ever get mentioned in the newspapers is in 1851.

They're enough of an exciting novelty at that point to be included in the very first World's Fair, the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London.

It's this kind of giant Victorian enterprise of bringing together all of this stuff from all over the world.

And this includes really valuable things like the Kohenur Diamond and also just sort of miscellaneous manufactured items, sailors' valentines, so like artworks that are made by sailors out of seashells.

They've got model dinosaurs that you can sit in and have dinner.

I mean basically the Crystal Palace exhibition has everything

and one of the things that it has are these exhibits by producers of synthetic perfumes.

And this is where the sort of first artificial fruit ethers kind of enter the historical record.

They were displayed in the chemicals section in the form of little lozenges, like hard candy.

They had pineapple, pear, apple, and grape flavor.

I can imagine why this would have been astounding.

In the mid-1800s in London, it would have been nearly impossible to get your hands on some pineapples.

But how did it get from this novelty, I mean, a wonder of the world really, to getting into people's everyday diets?

That had to do with another big shift that was happening in the late 1800s.

So, in the middle of the 19th century, late 19th century, with just great advances in sugar refining, huge increases in sort of the role of sugar in Western diets, there's kind of this mass consumer economy for sweetness.

And artificial flavors, artificial fruit ethers like the ones that I described, kind of come in to accompany sugar on its quest to encompass more and more of people's daily calories.

So those early artificial fruit flavors were used in all kinds of sweet things, candy, soda, ice cream, cordials.

What did people think of these new flavors?

Were they suspicious or were they kind of wowed by them?

Again, that is exactly what I asked Nadia.

Well, it's hard to know exactly.

As always in the historical record, the voices of just everyday people are notoriously absent.

But what we do know is that they caught on relatively quickly.

I look at the United States in particular, so I know that they were used in and sold in the United States starting in the 1860s and 1870s.

Nadia actually showed me tables of formulas for mixing up different artificial flavors, raspberry, melon, black cherry, even gooseberry.

But what's interesting about this for me is you're not analyzing a raspberry or a gooseberry and trying to recreate their flavor.

You're just mixing different proportions of a basic set of about 20 chemicals.

You're working backwards in a way, just combining the chemicals you have and waiting until you can say, oh, wait, this smells like a raspberry.

But we've already established that a berry, or you know, a strawberry, that the flavor is made up of 350 different chemicals.

More even.

So I imagine there's no way these first artificial flavors can be anything like the real thing.

No, they weren't.

But they really couldn't be.

People just didn't have the tools at that point to analyze all the flavor chemicals in a strawberry.

In the late 19th century, you already have sort of nutritional chemistry.

You can identify proteins, fats, carbohydrates.

In the 19 teens, you have vitamins are first identified and discovered, and there's a lot of research into vitamins and synthesizing vitamins.

But flavor chemistry kind of lags behind, right?

Studying precisely the chemicals that contribute to the odor, flavor, aroma of different foods.

And there's a few different reasons for this.

One is that it's really hard to do.

The proportion of chemicals in food that contribute to their, that produce flavor are really small, tiny amounts.

The other thing about flavor chemicals is that they tend to be very volatile, they're unstable, they're reactive, and trying to isolate this sort of small amount of these particular chemicals that are contributing to our perception of its flavor is a super rough task.

And that actually brings me to something important that happened at the turn of the century.

In 1906, this law was passed, the Pure Food Act.

It was the first piece of food regulation in America, and it distinguished between artificial and natural flavors for the first time.

Why did this get passed?

What were people so concerned about at the time?

Yeah, it's an interesting phase in American history because America is just becoming majority urban.

People were moving to cities, away from where their food was grown, and that gap between producer and consumer, that was really starting to grow for the first time.

There were all sorts of food scares and food scandals and fears about whether the bread or milk or meat you were buying in the city was what it said it was.

So the 1906 Pure Food Law, people usually remember this law as

the thing that came out of Upton Sinclair's the jungle, right?

It shut down

these horrible meat packing plants.

It was this law that instituted food inspections that was there to protect public health.

But it also aimed to protect the general public, consumers, from fraud and from these increasingly sophisticated chemicals that were being developed by industry to make food appear better than it was, so to speak.

Chemicals like artificial flavors.

So the 1906 law is the thing that kind of institutes in the regulatory landscape this distinction between genuine and imitation.

The thing is, though, with most flavor additives being classed as imitation, including vanillin, So synthetic vanillin, which many manufacturers of synthetic vanillin protested, was exactly the the same molecule as that found in vanilla beans.

If you included it in your vanilla extract, you would have to disclose the fact that this is imitation vanilla, not the real thing.

Vanilla and vanillin, that's an interesting one.

Vanillin is the name for the main chemical component of vanilla, and it is used absolutely everywhere these days.

95% of the time you think you're eating something vanilla-flavored, it's actually vanillin, and it does not come from a vanilla bean.

Actual vanilla contains a ton of different flavor chemicals, hundreds like strawberries.

But you know what?

Let's do a taste test and see if you can actually tell the difference.

So I am standing in my kitchen and I made three

containers that have completely plain drinkable yogurt.

There's nothing in it other than milk and culture.

And in one, I mixed in some artificial vanilla.

In one, I mixed in some vanilla extract.

And in one, I've mixed in some vanilla bean.

And I'm going to do it all blindfolded and see if I can guess what I'm tasting.

I mixed the vanilla extract and the vanilla bean separately in case I could tell by the texture, the grittiness.

I like this.

Science.

So let's see.

I'm going to

pick up this one here.

Try not to look at it.

I'm not looking that looking.

Well, it's a little bitter because I put a lot of vanilla in, but I got a really rich vanilla scent in it.

And I am going to guess.

I'm going to guess that was the real deal.

Okay.

I'm going to try the one in the middle.

I'm not getting as strong a smell.

It Means that I think the first one probably had the actual vanilla bean, which has a really strong smell.

So let's see.

I taste the alcohol in it, and it tastes pretty flat.

I have to say that my

real vanilla extract is pretty old, but I'm going to guess that the second one I tasted is the artificial one.

So now I'm going to go for the last one.

Between two and three, let me see.

No, actually, now that I've tasted number three

and went back and tasted number two again, I think number two has kind of a rounder, more rich flavor to it.

And three is like what?

I think three kind of just has that sort of vanilla ice cream kind of straight vanilla flavor.

Let's see if I was right.

Ooh, I was.

Woo!

So you really can.

I mean, I think that's true.

I mean, I think, in my experience at least, you really can tell the difference between

vanilla that has been extracted from a seed pod versus vanillin.

It's, you know, it's one note.

I mean, literally.

It really is.

Yeah, it's a lot.

Now that I know, and I was just tasting back and forth, the one with the vanilla bean really has kind of the richest smell to it.

But with the two ones with the vanilla extract, the one that has the, you know, the real vanilla extract does have, it's just a more complex flavor.

There's just more to it, kind of more depth to it.

So they are different, but both of them have one identical molecule in common, vanillin.

Vanillin is the same, whether it comes from a vanilla bean or not.

It's the other stuff in the bean that makes the difference.

And this distinction became crucially important after the 1906 law because the people who made these artificial flavors had to show that the flavor molecules in their products were the same as you would find in the real thing.

And that led to some interesting discoveries.

Like grape.

Remember back to that grape Skittle flavor?

Yeah, the one that tasted really sweet and fake and like grape jelly.

That's the one.

That flavor comes from a chemical called methyl anthranilate.

And back at the end of the 1800s, people had isolated this chemical from orange blossom, bizarrely enough, and they realized it reminded them of grapes.

Then they figured out how to make it cheaply from coal tar, and then it became the go-to grape flavor.

It's still the one we use today.

But it didn't come from grapes.

And actually, they had no idea whether you could find this chemical in real grapes, which was a problem.

In the early 1920s, the chemists at the USDA trying to enforce the pure food law, recognizing that a lot of artificial flavor manufacturers are kind of selling this chemical in compounds that are grape flavored, try to come up with methods for detecting it in foods.

So to do this, they analyze things that they know are adulterated, and they also analyze genuine grape juice.

And they find that in grape juice from genuine grapes, there's quite a bit of methylanthranolate.

So this chemical that's sort of a synthetic chemical that's used in these artificial grape flavors ends up being discovered, confirmed to be in actual grapes.

I love this story in particular because the grapes that people were eating at the sort of beginning of the 20th century included a lot of these labrusca, vitis labrusca varieties.

Vitis labrusca are the Native American variety of grapes.

So Concorde is the most famous, but there's also Catawba, Delaware, Isabel, so on.

And in an era before widespread refrigeration, most Americans who had eaten grapes would have eaten these native varieties.

The grapes that we usually find in grocery stores now, like the red and green seedless from California and Chile, these are not varietals that have this chemical in them.

So in a certain sense, when you have a grape jolly rancher, you're kind of like tasting this like spectral grape of the past, right?

This sort of like spectral grape orchid, all of these like American varieties of grapes that we're no longer longer familiar with, but that have the sort of chemical has been, continues to be associated with our idea of grape flavor.

So, not only is fake grape kind of not fake, but it's even more American than what we think of now as grapes.

But I have to say, the grapes she's talking about include conquered grapes, and some of us who grew up with Manashevitz have never forgotten about them.

For when only the most authentic grape will do.

But you know, this story gave me an excuse to ask Nadia about one of my favorite urban myths, which is that fake banana tastes so weird and not like bananas because it actually tastes more like a kind of banana that you can't taste anymore.

The Gromichel banana, to be specific.

That was the only kind you could buy.

But then it went extinct in the 1950s from a nasty fungal disease.

And now we eat the Cavendish variety.

You know, like a lot of urban myths, there is a kernel of truth.

I think I haven't had a Gromichel banana, but according to what I've read about it, it does have more of this amyl amyl acetate, isoamyl acetate, kind of candy-like flavor, kind of like banana circus peanuts, I think is the candy that has this, like, this kind of fake banana flavor, the thing that we think of as fake banana flavor.

Hmm.

So I guess a maybe on that myth, fake banana candy might actually taste like extinct real bananas after all.

That makes me wish I could go back in time and try those bananas.

But you know, the situation with flavor today is far different from 50, 100 years ago.

The big difference is that today, flavors are added to all sorts of foods, especially processed foods.

So how'd we get from adding flavors to candy to, I don't know, adding them to all sorts of different foods?

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You know that point in the afternoon when you just hit a wall?

You don't have time for self-care rituals or getting some fresh air, so maybe you grab a beverage to bring you back.

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Time for a tea break?

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I'm in CVS.

Some ho-ho's.

Sugar is the first ingredient.

Soy flour, mono and diglycerides, natural and artificial flavor.

Phage total all-natural Greek yogurt.

And the ingredients are cherries, cane sugar, water, cornstarch, cherry juice concentrate, lemon juice concentrate, natural flavor, zanthan gum.

Some red bulls.

This is the yellow edition, tropical.

Oh, it even says artificially flavored on the front.

Ingredients, carbonated water, sucrose glucose, citric acid, taurine sodium, citrate, caffeine, blah, blah, blah.

And natural and artificial flavors.

Naked 100% juice smoothie.

Green machine, a blend of five juices with added ingredients.

Apple juice, mango puree, pineapple juice, banana puree, kiwi, spirulina, and natural flavors.

Honey bunches of oats with real strawberries.

Natural flavor.

365 cheese pups.

Natural butter flavor.

I know I promised to explain the difference between natural and artificial flavors, and we will get to that in just a few minutes.

But first, let's talk about why there are so many added flavors in our foods in the first place.

It's tied to major changes in how and where food was made.

And Nadia says it all started in the 1930s.

In the 30s, when you have this sort of increasing sophistication of food processing and food manufacturing, when you're making more and more foods in factories, so spiced meats, baked goods,

sodas,

candies, all kinds of, you know, the beginnings of frozen foods, right?

Suddenly flavor becomes a problem.

They need to make sure that each item that comes out of their factory tastes the same, that it tastes the same around the country, that it tastes the same all year long.

And they find that all kinds of crazy things start happening to the flavors of foods once they're being manufactured in factories.

Flavors change, right?

A lot of things kind of develop these off-flavors that are kind of mysterious.

And so, what food manufacturers need is a way of controlling the flavor in their foods, right?

And so flavor becomes this technical and scientific problem.

You really can't have a national or a global food system that is based on processed foods without flavor chemicals, without flavor chemistry.

It's just like a cornerstone of it.

Without flavor additives, the whole system falls apart.

Artificial flavors start off as a way to get us to eat more sugar.

Then they become a way to make us eat more factory foods.

And now it's time for you to explain the difference between natural and artificial flavors.

From what I understand, Nikki, natural flavor in, say, strawberry yogurt doesn't mean that the flavor comes from strawberries.

So what is the difference between natural and artificial?

Well, in 1906, like we said, if your flavor chemical was the same chemical that naturally occurred in the strawberry, then it was not an imitation.

It was real.

But as the century went on, the FDA decided the law needed an update.

The latest version was originally drafted in the 70s, and it spells out the difference between natural and artificial flavors in the most delightful government speak.

A natural flavor or natural flavoring has to come from a spice, fruit, or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf, or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional.

Good job.

And artificial is basically something that doesn't come from any of those.

So, like I said, the natural flavor in strawberry yogurt, it could come from a type of grass.

Or a piece of wood.

That's one of the most common sources of vanilla in wood pulp.

And speaking of vanillin, we cannot ignore everyone's favorite source of vanillin, beaverbutt.

I mean, I know it's not beaver butt exactly.

It's a chemical produced in a beaver's anal gland.

That's a source of vanillin, too, as I understand it.

It certainly is, and it would qualify as a natural flavor.

Apparently, beaver butts smell really nice.

You ever smelled one?

No, not me, thank God.

But that's what naturalists have said.

But it's actually super unlikely that your vanilla flavor is being made from beaver butt secretions, because milking beavers' anal glands is slow work, and

the resulting flavor would be wildly expensive.

Hence the wood pulp.

And actually, a lot of vanillin is made from guaiacol, which is a petrochemical.

But just to be totally clear, the vanillin from wood pulp, pulp, the vanillin from guacol, and the vanillin from a beaver's butt is exactly the same chemical.

Exactly the same.

It's just how you label it, natural or artificial.

So why would a food manufacturer choose one over the other, fake vanillin or natural vanillin?

Yeah, so I decided it was time to actually talk to a real-life flavorist, and I called Michelle Hagen, who's senior flavorist at Givaudin.

You heard her at the start of the episode.

She was talking about root beer flowers.

And she told me that the biggest factor in deciding between natural and artificial flavor is cost.

So, for example, Michelle said there's this one particular chemical that flavorists add to Graham crackers to get that signature Grammy flavor.

It's $25 a pound when you extract it from plants, and it's only $6 a pound made using the wonders of organic carbon chemistry.

Yeah, cost is the main driver for us.

The only other thing is maybe purity.

So a synthetic material is more pure, because you do get some impurities when you have a naturally derived material.

Then why bother using natural flavors at all?

Are they more environmentally sustainable or are they beneficial in some way?

Well, Michelle says sometimes those impurities make the end result more interesting.

So she kind of likes the challenge of working with naturals.

Whether or not it's more environmentally sustainable varies by the chemical and how much processing you have to do to purify it from whatever you're starting with.

But the real reason to work with naturals is because consumers want it.

So I create mostly for the U.S.

beverage market, and I would say 99% of the time our customers and their customer, which are the consumers, demand natural flavors.

I haven't made an NNA flavor in four years.

NNA, by the way, is industry shorthand for artificial flavors because they have to be labeled natural and artificial flavors on the packet.

NNA.

Okay, that's the difference between using natural and artificial flavors according to the legal definition, but there's another way to think about natural.

Like a natural flavor is a flavor that's more like nature, right?

It's more true to life.

And things in science have come a long way since the early 1900s.

There are way more advanced scientific technologies to tease apart what chemicals are in any particular natural object.

So are the flavors Michelle creates more complex than those one-note Skittles or, I don't know, that original pineapple-flavored hard candy at the Crystal Palace?

Is anyone getting getting closer to a real pineapple flavor in the lab?

I would say for an average flavor, you're looking at 40 to 70 different ingredients.

So for pineapples, for example, they're one of my favorite flavors to create.

They're very complex, and they have nuances that are fruity, creamy, jammy.

There's a floral nuance in pineapples.

There's a greenness to pineapples.

And there's even a woody aspect to pineapples pineapples that kind of denote that pulpiness.

So they're really complex.

So when we set out to create a pineapple flavor, we have many challenges to hurdle.

Is the flavor natural or artificial?

Is it a liquid?

Is it a powder?

We have to consider stability, solubility, cost.

And then you go into the application, right?

So is it in yogurt?

Is it in chewing gum?

Does that base have fat?

Does that base have protein?

So we have to skew these pineapple profiles to taste delicious in every circumstance I mentioned.

Wow, so every pineapple is sort of a specific project, depending on all of those factors.

I mean, you must have created thousands of pineapples then.

Yeah, I have hundreds within the company.

I know there's thousands, maybe even ten thousand.

So I guess, yeah, I mean, to answer your question, Cynthia, science is definitely advanced and pineapple flavor tastes a lot more pineapple-y than it used to.

But what's interesting about that is that we really still aren't making an exact, true-to-life, one-to-one copy of a real pineapple's flavor.

Our technology is amazing, we can find hundreds of aroma chemicals in fruit, but our noses are still better.

So, if you make a pineapple just based on what the machine says is in the pineapple, you won't capture everything that our palate expects.

And that is where the art of the flavorist comes in.

So, Nadia actually described this essay in a 1950s Givodin catalogue.

It was written by a flavor chemist just after this new technology was introduced.

The tools to finally break down a food into its individual flavor components.

And what's funny is the flavorists immediately realized they couldn't rely on the machine readout alone.

So they built a special sniffer so that they could use their noses to sample the smells right alongside the machine.

Apparently they used to get terrible nosebleeds from sniffing so much.

Hazard of the job.

But even though this essay is 60 years old now, the description really captures how a flavorist has to use science and art, I mean their own noses, to create, say, a strawberry flavor.

What a flavor chemist does, in addition to working with this chemical analysis, he does the sensory analysis of a strawberry.

So there's a bunch of different notes, he says, kind of working like a perfumer.

So there's a fruity note, there's a note that he calls green butter, There's one that's sweet, one that's balsamic, one that he calls rose honey, fresh hay, and then this like sour and citrus note.

So basically, you combine what you know about what's actually in strawberries and what you know about chemicals that have these sensory properties to create this sort of ideal version of a strawberry that is ineffably strawberry-like that might be tweaked to suit the particular needs of your client.

Michelle told me she still works the same way today.

The machine is like a guide and kind of a fact checker, but her nose is the boss.

But some things have changed in the flavor world.

In fact, we are at the beginning of a major shift right now.

There's some brand new biology that's changing how we make flavors altogether.

It's tied to what Michelle was telling us about not using artificial flavors in her work anymore, just because consumers don't want them.

Companies are trying to get what they call a clean label.

That means it doesn't use words like artificial or long chemical names that people can't pronounce.

Because people think those things are unhealthy.

Whereas the word natural, I mean, even if it's the exact same chemical you're talking about, well, natural just...

it just sounds better.

And here is where yeast comes in.

You may think that yeast is just useful for brewing beer or turning milk into delicious cheese.

Which it obviously is, as we discussed a couple episodes ago.

Of course.

But yeast can do all sorts of other things, too.

Scientists have figured out how to tweak yeast by introducing chunks of DNA, and those chunks are copied from animals or plants.

And these new designer yeasts make all kinds of useful products.

They make medicines like insulin and they make rennet to curdle our cheeses.

And you may have also heard of research into using algae to produce fuel for our cars.

These are engineered microbes, too.

You're actually pretty much guaranteed to have eaten cheese made using rennet from this engineered yeast.

The stat I have is that in 2008, 90% of cheeses in the US and the UK were made using rennet that had been produced by a genetically modified yeast.

In this whole field of redesigning organisms, usually microbes like yeast, to produce new outputs, it's generally called synthetic biology.

Now scientists are tweaking yeasts for a new product, flavor.

We talked to Christina Agapakis.

She's a synthetic biologist who just joined Ginkgo Bioworks, and they are one of a handful of companies that are building these designer yeasts to produce flavor and fragrance chemicals.

Here's how the process works.

So let's say somebody asked you to design a microbe that was capable of producing a coconut flavor.

How would that work?

Can you talk us through the steps?

Sure.

So, I guess we would first start by looking at how coconuts make flavor.

So, when you look at the biology of coconuts and the enzymes that exist in the coconut that create all of those different molecules that create the coconut flavor, what we would do is look at those genes that code for those enzymes, try to understand them, and then make them in our foundry and put them into into a yeast and see how do they work in the yeast.

How can we kind of try to shape the yeast metabolism to be a little bit more like coconut metabolism?

So we have those same enzymes that are producing the molecules and the great flavor of coconut inside of a yeast that we can then ferment and brew coconut flavor.

It's basically as the microbe ferments, as the yeast grows and is fermenting the sugar, what they're doing is they'll make alcohol or whatever the kind of typical byproducts of fermentation, but as another byproduct, you have the molecule that you want it to be making, whether it's the rose oil or vanilla extract or, you know, any kind, you know, as they're fermenting, as they're growing, you're producing that molecule.

So really, it is like, if you're, it's like brewing beer and in a way, flavored beer.

Flavored beer is my least favorite kind of beer.

But seriously, this is a big step forward for science.

Scientists have known how to transfer single genes from a plant or animal into another one, but this is different.

What makes the ability to create flavors is the ability to do it with more genes, to understand how those genes work together and to be able to fit them all together in a more complex system.

So to make a flavor, you might need five or ten different enzymes that are creating a whole pathway and are really shifting the metabolism of the yeast.

Whereas to make insulin, it's a single gene that makes a protein.

And so that's a much simpler process biologically and one that's simpler to do in this kind of engineering approach.

At Ginkgo, the first of these cultured flavors and fragrance chemicals that they've announced is a rose oil for use in perfume.

They have other ones in the pipeline for the food industry.

Meanwhile, there is Evolva, a Swiss company.

They've already put a yeast-fermented vanillin on the market.

And a group in Austria just announced that they've managed to engineer yeast to produce the key flavor chemical in grapefruit.

But why are they all bothering to make these cultured flavors if we already have natural and synthetic ways to make vanilla?

I was curious about that too.

So I visited Ginkgo Bioworks.

They call it their foundry.

This is the space where they build the yeasts that are gonna make the flavor.

I talked to Patrick Boyle.

He's one of the founders there and his job title is organism designer.

What we're interested in doing is can we design a fermentation process so that we can culture those ingredients instead and eliminate some of the kind of harsh chemical steps as well as kind of relieve some of the supply issues that come from using really rare plants to extract things from.

And you'd be surprised how

much that is involved with flavor.

You know, you can kind of just look at the kind of history of the spice trade and looking at how resource-intensive that can be and how constraining that can be.

Part of what we're interested in here is: can cultured ingredients be a way to prevent us from really expanding non-sustainable farming practices?

So, you know, many

more exotic plants that flavors and fragrances are extracted from are hard to grow and hard to grow without using, you know, a lot of water.

Christina also told us that because they can get the yeasts to produce a number of flavor enzymes, they can create a richer, more nuanced taste.

It's got some of those impurities that Michelle mentioned.

It'll be closer to the real thing.

Yeah, more like the wide variety of flavors you tasted in that real vanilla versus the one-note vanilla.

And, you know, in a weird way, it might actually democratize some of the world's most expensive, rare flavors.

Like saffron, for example.

I mean, having a yeast make saffron is a lot cheaper than collecting the stamens of thousands of tiny crocus flowers.

I can only imagine.

But let's say cultured vanilla becomes wildly popular.

What does that mean for vanilla farmers in Madagascar and Mexico?

You know, the vanilla bean producers have been around for a very long time, and artificial vanilla has been on the market for a very long time.

So I think it's clear that both industries can coexist.

I think if we could grow more vanilla bean, we certainly would.

So there's some sustainability benefits, maybe price benefits too, but the real attraction for companies using these cultured flavors is that they're considered natural, not artificial, for the purposes of labeling.

Really?

Even though they're made from genetically modified yeast.

Uh-huh.

The thing is, there's no yeast left by the end of the process.

They just do their job, make the flavor, and die, like in brewing.

Or, I mean, like in all the genetically modified yeasts that make the rennet that makes our cheese.

You know, I know Christina made the process sound simple: figure out which DNA the yeast need and insert the right bits.

But of course, science is not nearly that straightforward.

She said the process takes a long time.

Yeah, Ginkgo have been working on their first one, this rose oil, for more than a year at this point.

Patrick told me the main issue is just yeast variations that don't work, that don't produce the flavor.

Patrick and Christina test hundreds at a time, each with tiny differences in their DNA.

The main kind of exciting thing that we can do in the foundry is really be able to test many different variants.

So we wouldn't have just one and kind of hope for the best.

We would be able to test, like, okay, if we have a little bit more of this gene, a little bit less of this gene, a little bit more of this enzyme in the final pathway, you know, what's the final smell going to be like?

What's that flavor in the end?

Okay, so this episode is all about artificial flavors.

And we've discovered that the line between artificial and natural natural flavors is actually kind of blurry, at least the way the FDA defines it.

I mean, you can get a natural strawberry flavor that is made using super intense harsh chemicals in big industrial factories from ingredients that have never been anywhere near a strawberry in their lives.

And these brand new designer yeast flavors are natural too.

So I went looking for something that is a truly artificial flavor.

In the industry, they're called fantasy flavors.

To me, you know, it's the reason I get out of bed.

I love fantasy flavors.

Okay, let's say apple.

Everyone has an opinion on what a crisp apple should taste like.

So it's carved in our brains since we crunched into an apple from our third grade lunch.

But a fantasy flavor is sort of undiscovered and it has no boundaries.

You can do anything you want, call it anything you want.

So if you think about bell bottoms in the 70s, if you translate that into a fantasy flavor, think of juicy fruit.

That's kind of a fantasy flavor.

You essentially have an orange flavor with this very large upfront isoamylacetate, ethyl butyrate note.

Isoamylacetate, for those of you who do not have a chemical dictionary to hand, it's that fake banana flavor we encountered earlier.

And cast your mind back to the 350 flavors in a strawberry.

Ethyl butyrate is one of them.

Michelle's point is that juicy fruit is a fantasy flavor.

It takes something that people are familiar with, orange, and then it adds these other notes that you wouldn't expect to find in an orange to transform it into something new.

Another example is Red Bull.

So it's something that's kind of familiar, like

black cherry, and then you add this very large medicinal gharana flavor, and then you've got Red Bull.

So one way of looking at it is something that's kind of known.

You put a spin on it, you add a zinger, you kind of move it into an uncultivated space.

And in our world, we call that the white space.

Doing something that no one's ever done before.

That expression, white space, I love it.

There's an infinite number of fantasy flavors still waiting to be created.

It's expanding flavor space in our minds.

There are all these fantasy flavors, sure, but they're also extinct flavors too.

All those plants we've lost, the original ancestors of the grains and fruits and vegetables that we eat today.

Right, yeah, and Christina Aginko, she thinks that might actually be possible using this new science.

The science behind like trying to understand extinct flavors, you know, there's the kind of Jurassic Park fantasy that, oh, you can find

maybe embedded in amber, you'll find some of the plant tissue and then you can extract the DNA.

That's possible, perhaps,

maybe not from actually the Jurassic, but maybe, you know, a few thousand years ago.

But there's also ways that we can use kind of evolutionary biologists, so collaborate with evolutionary biologists to think about looking at plants that exist now, close relatives of things that may have gone extinct.

You can reconstruct a lot of the biology and the genetics of these lost plants and try to work from there.

So that's something that like, yeah, I'm thinking about, but

I don't know if it's possible.

I don't know what's going to happen in the future, but that's something that I'm excited about.

It's amazing when you start thinking as well, like when our ancient, ancient ancestors were first figuring out farming, what they would have tasted when they sort of first began domesticating those foods.

Because so many things are unrecognizable now.

And yeah, we have the wild relatives,

but sort of getting back to, you know, you could imagine

sort of a bread course that gave you the taste of wheat over time.

Oh, wow.

Man, I'm having fun with that.

As wheat kind of transformed teosin, how was it pronounced?

Teosynth, the original corn.

Yeah.

And, you know, what that was like when they first started breeding and kind of creating the big corn kernels that are more similar to what we're eating now, what that tasted like.

Yeah, this is a great, I love this.

I'm taking notes.

This is awesome.

Awesome.

For free, we'll come to the first ancient wheat tasting.

As we've learned over the course of this episode, artificial flavors started off as a vehicle for this new explosion of sugar.

They almost helped smuggle more sugar into our diets.

And then the flavors became crucial in our new industrialized food system.

Processed foods shipped long distances needed those flavors added back in.

And those flavors could have been either natural or artificial.

In fact, in a lot of ways, artificial versus natural just doesn't really matter.

They're the same chemical made in the same factories, just from different source materials.

The bigger story is that over the past 100, 150 years, the flavors that are naturally in our fruits, veggies, meat, whatever have become blander.

Meanwhile, our diets, at least in rich Western countries, those have overall become more flavorful.

But a lot of that flavor is coming from added flavors.

So the story of inventing artificial flavors and how we've used them, it's kind of like this parallel track to the story of where our food system went wrong.

I mean, at the same time that we were robbing our apples of any flavor, I'm thinking of red delicious here, we were making, you know, Doritos, Locos, explosion, flavor, crazy bomb.

But today there are new uses for these flavors, like helping insect or pea protein.

Both of these seem to to be pretty sustainable sources of protein, and some people don't really like the taste of them necessarily.

So, these flavors could help those proteins become more tasty and easier to integrate into our diets.

Yeah, so it's less that artificial flavor is bad and natural flavor is good, or even that all added flavor is necessarily bad or good.

It's all about how we use it.

And what's fascinating is that when you look at the flavor business, it can really tell us a lot about our relationship with food.

That's why Nadia is studying this,

When you are creating a synthetic strawberry flavor, a synthetic peach flavor, in a certain way of thinking about it, you're replicating the sensory qualities of the natural world, right?

You're looking out there and you're saying, this is what these things are like, and we're going to figure out a way to kind of reproduce this chemically.

On the other hand, what you're doing is you're replicating people's desires, right?

People's appetites, which are not necessarily always completely coherent with what is actually possible naturally.

So I think that the really skilled flavor chemists and flavorists have this sense of all of the kind of effective qualities that we expect from actual foods and flavors, right?

That we're not just looking for a strawberry that resembles a strawberry or a cherry that resembles a cherry, that they're looking for something that replicates our desires, our memories, the kind of field of associations that we have when we think of refreshment or summer or sweetness or nature itself.

That you're producing a synthetic version of our expectations of what it means to consume nature.

That's it for the world of artificial flavor.

Come back in two weeks and you'll hear me visit the first American escargot farm.

That's snails, actually that's gastropods.

The actual kind, not the podcast kind.

To help us explore the weird and wonderful world of artificial flavors, we had a lot of help.

We couldn't have done it without Christina Agapakis and Patrick Boyle of Ginkgo Bioworks.

Side note, by the way, Christina recently launched an online magazine called Method, which is all about how scientists actually do science, as opposed to the way it gets written up and smoothed out once the results of whatever experiment are in.

I think you all would find it pretty interesting.

It's, you know, it's this perspective that's often missing from mainstream media.

Links on the website.

Thanks also to Nadia Berenstein and to Michelle Hagen of Gevaudin, and we have links to their work and more about what they do online too.

Check them out.

There are lots of goodies in our episode notes this week, including one of my favorites, a history of Manashevitz Wine and the Concord Grape.

And as always, you should get in touch and tell us what you thought.

But please also get in touch with your cocktail stories.

You can always reach us at contact at gastropod.com.

You can follow us on Twitter at Gastropodcast, find us on Facebook, and give us lots of stars on iTunes.

Yes, please.

And that's it from us.

Till next time.

This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

Collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes and fitness trackers.

But what does it actually mean to be well?

Why do we want that so badly?

And is all this money really making us healthier and happier?

That's this month on Explain It to Me, presented by Pureleaf.