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A review by marisa_n
The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor by Mark Schatzker
hopeful
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
The Dorito Effect is a critique of our modern food system. It argues that the myopic quest to maximize food production has unintentionally come at the expense of nutrition and flavor. Livestock and plants are bred to produce more food, grow faster, and use fewer inputs. As a result, our food contains more water, more carbohydrates, and fewer nutrients. To compensate for increasingly bland, nutritionally unsatisfying foods, a new industry of synthetic flavors has appeared that keeps people eating. While synthetic flavoring improves the taste of food, it doesn't improve nutrition. Our bodies, tricked by the synthetic flavors and scents, never receive the expected corresponding nutrients, and therefore never feel satisfied. As a result, we overfeed and undernourish ourselves.
The basic premise was interesting. I liked that he questioned what "improvement" in agriculture truly means and who it benefits. His interviews with scientists were great. I also appreciated that he made a few caveats, such as his ambivalence with organic food and the difficulty of growing enough high-quality food to feed everyone.
All that said, I cannot recommend this book. Throughout the book, the author struggled to understand and/or explain the nuance of complex problems. For example, there is more than one reason the nutrients in our food are changing, such as climate change. Moreover, this phenomenon cannot completely explain the obesity crisis. There are many reasons why people are overweight (hormonal disorders, metabolism damage from yo-yo dieting, etc.).
This leads me to another huge problem with the book--it is incredibly fatphobic. The clear derision he has for overweight people was awful to read. Not only does he depict all overweight people as closet binge eaters, he actively body shames them. For example, he describes two children he saw in a convenience store (who had nothing to do with the story and were just minding their own business) in the following way:
<i> "At the tender age of perhaps eleven, they already had what a farmer would call "finish" on them, a layer of buttery fat that smoothed their features and made their skin look like it would jiggle like Jell-O in a bowl. They had achieved the state of livestock perfection--young and plump. Their basketball high-tops looked blown out and haggard from withstanding all the heft pounding down on them, and to behold their knees was to imagine a future of joint replacement." </i>
Overall, this is an interesting story, but I don't think the author was the best person to tell it.
The basic premise was interesting. I liked that he questioned what "improvement" in agriculture truly means and who it benefits. His interviews with scientists were great. I also appreciated that he made a few caveats, such as his ambivalence with organic food and the difficulty of growing enough high-quality food to feed everyone.
All that said, I cannot recommend this book. Throughout the book, the author struggled to understand and/or explain the nuance of complex problems. For example, there is more than one reason the nutrients in our food are changing, such as climate change. Moreover, this phenomenon cannot completely explain the obesity crisis. There are many reasons why people are overweight (hormonal disorders, metabolism damage from yo-yo dieting, etc.).
This leads me to another huge problem with the book--it is incredibly fatphobic. The clear derision he has for overweight people was awful to read. Not only does he depict all overweight people as closet binge eaters, he actively body shames them. For example, he describes two children he saw in a convenience store (who had nothing to do with the story and were just minding their own business) in the following way:
<i> "At the tender age of perhaps eleven, they already had what a farmer would call "finish" on them, a layer of buttery fat that smoothed their features and made their skin look like it would jiggle like Jell-O in a bowl. They had achieved the state of livestock perfection--young and plump. Their basketball high-tops looked blown out and haggard from withstanding all the heft pounding down on them, and to behold their knees was to imagine a future of joint replacement." </i>
Overall, this is an interesting story, but I don't think the author was the best person to tell it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Body shaming, Eating disorder, and Fatphobia