A lively and essential argument about where the key to reversing America’s health crisis lies.

In The Dorito Effect, Mark Schatzker shows us how our approach to the nation’s number 1 open public health crisis has gotten it wrong. The epidemics of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes aren’t tied to the overabundance of excess fat or carbs. Rather, we have been led astray from the developing divide between taste – the preferences we crave – as well as the root nutrition. Because the late 1940s, we have been gradually leeching flavor from the meals we grow. Simultaneously, we have used great leaps ahead in technology, allowing us to produce in the laboratory the very flavors that are becoming lost within the farm. Thanks to this largely invisible epidemic, seemingly healthful meals is becoming a lot more like processed foods: extremely craveable but nutritionally clear. We have unknowingly interfered with a historical chemical language – flavor – that advanced to steer our nutrition, not destroy it.