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EDITOR'S COMMENT:

This article is long, but full of eye-opening information concerning
processed food, of all kinds. Thanks to Wes Wyatt and Robert Foote.

--- David Sunfellow

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WHY MCDONALD'S FRIES TASTE SO GOOD
By Eric Schlosser
Atlantic Monthly
January 2001

http://www.theatlantic.com/cgi-bin/o/issues/2001/01/schlosser.htm

[Eric Schlosser is a correspondent for The Atlantic. The following article
is adapted from his book, "Fast Food Nation", to be published this month by
Houghton Mifflin.]

The french fry was "almost sacrosanct for me," Ray Kroc, one of the founders
of McDonald's, wrote in his autobiography, "its preparation a ritual to be
followed religiously." During the chain's early years french fries were made
from scratch every day. Russet Burbank potatoes were peeled, cut into
shoestrings, and fried in McDonald's kitchens. As the chain expanded
nationwide, in the mid-1960s, it sought to cut labor costs, reduce the
number of suppliers, and ensure that its fries tasted the same at every
restaurant. McDonald's began switching to frozen french fries in 1966 -- and
few customers noticed the difference. Nevertheless, the change had a
profound effect on the nation's agriculture and diet. A familiar food had
been transformed into a highly processed industrial commodity. McDonald's
fries now come from huge manufacturing plants that can peel, slice, cook,
and freeze two million pounds of potatoes a day. The rapid expansion of
McDonald's and the popularity of its low-cost, mass-produced fries changed
the way Americans eat. In 1960 Americans consumed an average of about
eighty-one pounds of fresh potatoes and four pounds of frozen french fries.
In 2000 they consumed an average of about fifty pounds of fresh potatoes and
thirty pounds of frozen fries. Today McDonald's is the largest buyer of
potatoes in the United States.

The taste of McDonald's french fries played a crucial role in the chain's
success -- fries are much more profitable than hamburgers -- and was long
praised by customers, competitors, and even food critics. James Beard loved
McDonald's fries. Their distinctive taste does not stem from the kind of
potatoes that McDonald's buys, the technology that processes them, or the
restaurant equipment that fries them: other chains use Russet Burbanks, buy
their french fries from the same large processing companies, and have
similar fryers in their restaurant kitchens. The taste of a french fry is
largely determined by the cooking oil. For decades McDonald's cooked its
french fries in a mixture of about seven percent cottonseed oil and 93
percent beef tallow. The mixture gave the fries their unique flavor -- and
more saturated beef fat per ounce than a McDonald's hamburger.

In 1990, amid a barrage of criticism over the amount of cholesterol in its
fries, McDonald's switched to pure vegetable oil. This presented the company
with a challenge: how to make fries that subtly taste like beef without
cooking them in beef tallow. A look at the ingredients in McDonald's french
fries suggests how the problem was solved. Toward the end of the list is a
seemingly innocuous yet oddly mysterious phrase: "natural flavor." That
ingredient helps to explain not only why the fries taste so good but also
why most fast food -- indeed, most of the food Americans eat today -- tastes
the way it does.

Open your refrigerator, your freezer, your kitchen cupboards, and look at
the labels on your food. You'll find "natural flavor" or "artificial flavor"
in just about every list of ingredients. The similarities between these two
broad categories are far more significant than the differences. Both are
man-made additives that give most processed food most of its taste. People
usually buy a food item the first time because of its packaging or
appearance. Taste usually determines whether they buy it again. About 90
percent of the money that Americans now spend on food goes to buy processed
food. The canning, freezing, and dehydrating techniques used in processing
destroy most of food's flavor -- and so a vast industry has arisen in the
United States to make processed food palatable. Without this flavor industry
today's fast food would not exist. The names of the leading American
fast-food chains and their best-selling menu items have become embedded in
our popular culture and famous worldwide. But few people can name the
companies that manufacture fast food's taste.

The flavor industry is highly secretive. Its leading companies will not
divulge the precise formulas of flavor compounds or the identities of
clients. The secrecy is deemed essential for protecting the reputations of
beloved brands. The fast-food chains, understandably, would like the public
to believe that the flavors of the food they sell somehow originate in their
restaurant kitchens, not in distant factories run by other firms. A
McDonald's french fry is one of countless foods whose flavor is just a
component in a complex manufacturing process. The look and the taste of what
we eat now are frequently deceiving -- by design.

THE FLAVOR CORRIDOR

The New Jersey Turnpike runs through the heart of the flavor industry, an
industrial corridor dotted with refineries and chemical plants.
International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), the world's largest flavor
company, has a manufacturing facility off Exit 8A in Dayton, New Jersey;
Givaudan, the world's second-largest flavor company, has a plant in East
Hanover. Haarmann & Reimer, the largest German flavor company, has a plant
in Teterboro, as does Takasago, the largest Japanese flavor company. Flavor
Dynamics has a plant in South Plainfield; Frutarom is in North Bergen; Elan
Chemical is in Newark. Dozens of companies manufacture flavors in the
corridor between Teaneck and South Brunswick. Altogether the area produces
about two thirds of the flavor additives sold in the United States.

The IFF plant in Dayton is a huge pale-blue building with a modern office
complex attached to the front. It sits in an industrial park, not far from a
BASF plastics factory, a Jolly French Toast factory, and a plant that
manufactures Liz Claiborne cosmetics. Dozens of tractor-trailers were parked
at the IFF loading dock the afternoon I visited, and a thin cloud of steam
floated from a roof vent. Before entering the plant, I signed a
nondisclosure form, promising not to reveal the brand names of foods that
contain IFF flavors. The place reminded me of Willy Wonka's chocolate
factory. Wonderful smells drifted through the hallways, men and women in
neat white lab coats cheerfully went about their work, and hundreds of
little glass bottles sat on laboratory tables and shelves. The bottles
contained powerful but fragile flavor chemicals, shielded from light by
brown glass and round white caps shut tight. The long chemical names on the
little white labels were as mystifying to me as medieval Latin. These
odd-sounding things would be mixed and poured and turned into new
substances, like magic potions.

I was not invited into the manufacturing areas of the IFF plant, where, it
was thought, I might discover trade secrets. Instead I toured various
laboratories and pilot kitchens, where the flavors of well-established
brands are tested or adjusted, and where whole new flavors are created.
IFF's snack-and-savory lab is responsible for the flavors of potato chips,
corn chips, breads, crackers, breakfast cereals, and pet food. The
confectionery lab devises flavors for ice cream, cookies, candies,
toothpastes, mouthwashes, and antacids. Everywhere I looked, I saw famous,
widely advertised products sitting on laboratory desks and tables. The
beverage lab was full of brightly colored liquids in clear bottles. It comes
up with flavors for popular soft drinks, sports drinks, bottled teas, and
wine coolers, for all-natural juice drinks, organic soy drinks, beers, and
malt liquors. In one pilot kitchen I saw a dapper food technologist, a
middle-aged man with an elegant tie beneath his crisp lab coat, carefully
preparing a batch of cookies with white frosting and pink-and-white
sprinkles. In another pilot kitchen I saw a pizza oven, a grill, a
milk-shake machine, and a french fryer identical to those I'd seen at
innumerable fast-food restaurants.

In addition to being the world's largest flavor company, IFF manufactures
the smells of six of the ten best-selling fine perfumes in the United
States, including Estée Lauder's Beautiful, Clinique's Happy, Lancôme's
Trésor, and Calvin Klein's Eternity. It also makes the smells of household
products such as deodorant, dishwashing detergent, bath soap, shampoo,
furniture polish, and floor wax. All these aromas are made through
essentially the same process: the manipulation of volatile chemicals. The
basic science behind the scent of your shaving cream is the same as that
governing the flavor of your TV dinner.

"NATURAL" AND "ARTIFICIAL"

Scientists now believe that human beings acquired the sense of taste as a
way to avoid being poisoned. Edible plants generally taste sweet, harmful
ones bitter. The taste buds on our tongues can detect the presence of half a
dozen or so basic tastes, including sweet, sour, bitter, salty, astringent,
and umami, a taste discovered by Japanese researchers -- a rich and full
sense of deliciousness triggered by amino acids in foods such as meat,
shellfish, mushrooms, potatoes, and seaweed. Taste buds offer a limited
means of detection, however, compared with the human olfactory system, which
can perceive thousands of different chemical aromas. Indeed, "flavor" is
primarily the smell of gases being released by the chemicals you've just put
in your mouth. The aroma of a food can be responsible for as much as 90
percent of its taste.

The act of drinking, sucking, or chewing a substance releases its volatile
gases. They flow out of your mouth and up your nostrils, or up the
passageway in the back of your mouth, to a thin layer of nerve cells called
the olfactory epithelium, located at the base of your nose, right between
your eyes. Your brain combines the complex smell signals from your olfactory
epithelium with the simple taste signals from your tongue, assigns a flavor
to what's in your mouth, and decides if it's something you want to eat.

A person's food preferences, like his or her personality, are formed during
the first few years of life, through a process of socialization. Babies
innately prefer sweet tastes and reject bitter ones; toddlers can learn to
enjoy hot and spicy food, bland health food, or fast food, depending on what
the people around them eat. The human sense of smell is still not fully
understood. It is greatly affected by psychological factors and
expectations. The mind focuses intently on some of the aromas that surround
us and filters out the overwhelming majority. People can grow accustomed to
bad smells or good smells; they stop noticing what once seemed overpowering.
Aroma and memory are somehow inextricably linked. A smell can suddenly evoke
a long-forgotten moment. The flavors of childhood foods seem to leave an
indelible mark, and adults often return to them, without always knowing why.
These "comfort foods" become a source of pleasure and reassurance -- a fact
that fast-food chains use to their advantage. Childhood memories of Happy
Meals, which come with french fries, can translate into frequent adult
visits to McDonald's. On average, Americans now eat about four servings of
french fries every week.

The human craving for flavor has been a largely unacknowledged and
unexamined force in history. For millennia royal empires have been built,
unexplored lands traversed, and great religions and philosophies forever
changed by the spice trade. In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail to find
seasoning. Today the influence of flavor in the world marketplace is no less
decisive. The rise and fall of corporate empires -- of soft-drink companies,
snack-food companies, and fast-food chains -- is often determined by how
their products taste.

The flavor industry emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, as processed
foods began to be manufactured on a large scale. Recognizing the need for
flavor additives, early food processors turned to perfume companies that had
long experience working with essential oils and volatile aromas. The great
perfume houses of England, France, and the Netherlands produced many of the
first flavor compounds. In the early part of the twentieth century Germany
took the technological lead in flavor production, owing to its powerful
chemical industry. Legend has it that a German scientist discovered methyl
anthranilate, one of the first artificial flavors, by accident while mixing
chemicals in his laboratory. Suddenly the lab was filled with the sweet
smell of grapes. Methyl anthranilate later became the chief flavor compound
in grape Kool-Aid. After World War II much of the perfume industry shifted
from Europe to the United States, settling in New York City near the garment
district and the fashion houses. The flavor industry came with it, later
moving to New Jersey for greater plant capacity. Man-made flavor additives
were used mostly in baked goods, candies, and sodas until the 1950s, when
sales of processed food began to soar. The invention of gas chromatographs
and mass spectrometers -- machines capable of detecting volatile gases at
low levels -- vastly increased the number of flavors that could be
synthesized. By the mid-1960s flavor companies were churning out compounds
to supply the taste of Pop Tarts, Bac-Os, Tab, Tang, Filet-O-Fish
sandwiches, and literally thousands of other new foods.

The American flavor industry now has annual revenues of about $1.4 billion.
Approximately 10,000 new processed-food products are introduced every year
in the United States. Almost all of them require flavor additives. And about
nine out of ten of these products fail. The latest flavor innovations and
corporate realignments are heralded in publications such as Chemical Market
Reporter, Food Chemical News, Food Engineering, and Food Product Design. The
progress of IFF has mirrored that of the flavor industry as a whole. IFF was
formed in 1958, through the merger of two small companies. Its annual
revenues have grown almost fifteenfold since the early 1970s, and it
currently has manufacturing facilities in twenty countries.

Today's sophisticated spectrometers, gas chromatographs, and headspace-vapor
analyzers provide a detailed map of a food's flavor components, detecting
chemical aromas present in amounts as low as one part per billion. The human
nose, however, is even more sensitive. A nose can detect aromas present in
quantities of a few parts per trillion -- an amount equivalent to about
0.000000000003 percent. Complex aromas, such as those of coffee and roasted
meat, are composed of volatile gases from nearly a thousand different
chemicals. The smell of a strawberry arises from the interaction of about
350 chemicals that are present in minute amounts. The quality that people
seek most of all in a food -- flavor -- is usually present in a quantity too
infinitesimal to be measured in traditional culinary terms such as ounces or
teaspoons. The chemical that provides the dominant flavor of bell pepper can
be tasted in amounts as low as 0.02 parts per billion; one drop is
sufficient to add flavor to five average-size swimming pools. The flavor
additive usually comes next to last in a processed food's list of
ingredients and often costs less than its packaging. Soft drinks contain a
larger proportion of flavor additives than most products. The flavor in a
twelve-ounce can of Coke costs about half a cent.

The color additives in processed foods are usually present in even smaller
amounts than the flavor compounds. Many of New Jersey's flavor companies
also manufacture these color additives, which are used to make processed
foods look fresh and appealing. Food coloring serves many of the same
decorative purposes as lipstick, eye shadow, mascara -- and is often made
from the same pigments. Titanium dioxide, for example, has proved to be an
especially versatile mineral. It gives many processed candies, frostings,
and icings their bright white color; it is a common ingredient in women's
cosmetics; and it is the pigment used in many white oil paints and house
paints. At Burger King, Wendy's, and McDonald's coloring agents have been
added to many of the soft drinks, salad dressings, cookies, condiments,
chicken dishes, and sandwich buns.

Studies have found that the color of a food can greatly affect how its taste
is perceived. Brightly colored foods frequently seem to taste better than
bland-looking foods, even when the flavor compounds are identical. Foods
that somehow look off-color often seem to have off tastes. For thousands of
years human beings have relied on visual cues to help determine what is
edible. The color of fruit suggests whether it is ripe, the color of meat
whether it is rancid. Flavor researchers sometimes use colored lights to
modify the influence of visual cues during taste tests. During one
experiment in the early 1970s people were served an oddly tinted meal of
steak and french fries that appeared normal beneath colored lights. Everyone
thought the meal tasted fine until the lighting was changed. Once it became
apparent that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, some
people became ill.

The federal Food and Drug Administration does not require companies to
disclose the ingredients of their color or flavor additives so long as all
the chemicals in them are considered by the agency to be GRAS ("generally
recognized as safe"). This enables companies to maintain the secrecy of
their formulas. It also hides the fact that flavor compounds often contain
more ingredients than the foods to which they give taste. The phrase
"artificial strawberry flavor" gives little hint of the chemical wizardry
and manufacturing skill that can make a highly processed food taste like
strawberries.

A typical artificial strawberry flavor, like the kind found in a Burger King
strawberry milk shake, contains the following ingredients: amyl acetate,
amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate,
benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate,
cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl acetate, ethyl amyl
ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate,
ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate,
ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroxyphenyl-2-butanone (10 percent solution
in alcohol), a-ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butyrate, lemon
essential oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl
benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl
ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil,
nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum
ether, g-undecalactone, vanillin, and solvent.

Although flavors usually arise from a mixture of many different volatile
chemicals, often a single compound supplies the dominant aroma. Smelled
alone, that chemical provides an unmistakable sense of the food.
Ethyl-2-methyl butyrate, for example, smells just like an apple. Many of
today's highly processed foods offer a blank palette: whatever chemicals are
added to them will give them specific tastes. Adding methyl-2-pyridyl ketone
makes something taste like popcorn. Adding ethyl-3-hydroxy butanoate makes
it taste like marshmallow. The possibilities are now almost limitless.
Without affecting appearance or nutritional value, processed foods could be
made with aroma chemicals such as hexanal (the smell of freshly cut grass)
or 3-methyl butanoic acid (the smell of body odor).

The 1960s were the heyday of artificial flavors in the United States. The
synthetic versions of flavor compounds were not subtle, but they did not
have to be, given the nature of most processed food. For the past twenty
years food processors have tried hard to use only "natural flavors" in their
products. According to the FDA, these must be derived entirely from natural
sources -- from herbs, spices, fruits, vegetables, beef, chicken, yeast,
bark, roots, and so forth. Consumers prefer to see natural flavors on a
label, out of a belief that they are more healthful. Distinctions between
artificial and natural flavors can be arbitrary and somewhat absurd, based
more on how the flavor has been made than on what it actually contains.

"A natural flavor," says Terry Acree, a professor of food science at Cornell
University, "is a flavor that's been derived with an out-of-date
technology." Natural flavors and artificial flavors sometimes contain
exactly the same chemicals, produced through different methods. Amyl
acetate, for example, provides the dominant note of banana flavor. When it
is distilled from bananas with a solvent, amyl acetate is a natural flavor.
When it is produced by mixing vinegar with amyl alcohol and adding sulfuric
acid as a catalyst, amyl acetate is an artificial flavor. Either way it
smells and tastes the same. "Natural flavor" is now listed among the
ingredients of everything from Health Valley Blueberry Granola Bars to Taco
Bell Hot Taco Sauce.

A natural flavor is not necessarily more healthful or purer than an
artificial one. When almond flavor -- benzaldehyde -- is derived from
natural sources, such as peach and apricot pits, it contains traces of
hydrogen cyanide, a deadly poison. Benzaldehyde derived by mixing oil of
clove and amyl acetate does not contain any cyanide. Nevertheless, it is
legally considered an artificial flavor and sells at a much lower price.
Natural and artificial flavors are now manufactured at the same chemical
plants, places that few people would associate with Mother Nature.

A TRAINED NOSE AND A POETIC SENSIBILITY

The small and elite group of scientists who create most of the flavor in
most of the food now consumed in the United States are called "flavorists."
They draw on a number of disciplines in their work: biology, psychology,
physiology, and organic chemistry. A flavorist is a chemist with a trained
nose and a poetic sensibility. Flavors are created by blending scores of
different chemicals in tiny amounts -- a process governed by scientific
principles but demanding a fair amount of art. In an age when delicate
aromas and microwave ovens do not easily co-exist, the job of the flavorist
is to conjure illusions about processed food and, in the words of one flavor
company's literature, to ensure "consumer likeability." The flavorists with
whom I spoke were discreet, in keeping with the dictates of their trade.
They were also charming, cosmopolitan, and ironic. They not only enjoyed
fine wine but could identify the chemicals that give each grape its unique
aroma. One flavorist compared his work to composing music. A well-made
flavor compound will have a "top note" that is often followed by a
"dry-down" and a "leveling-off," with different chemicals responsible for
each stage. The taste of a food can be radically altered by minute changes
in the flavoring combination. "A little odor goes a long way," one flavorist
told me.

In order to give a processed food a taste that consumers will find
appealing, a flavorist must always consider the food's "mouthfeel" -- the
unique combination of textures and chemical interactions that affect how the
flavor is perceived. Mouthfeel can be adjusted through the use of various
fats, gums, starches, emulsifiers, and stabilizers. The aroma chemicals in a
food can be precisely analyzed, but the elements that make up mouthfeel are
much harder to measure. How does one quantify a pretzel's hardness, a french
fry's crispness? Food technologists are now conducting basic research in
rheology, the branch of physics that examines the flow and deformation of
materials. A number of companies sell sophisticated devices that attempt to
measure mouthfeel. The TA.XT2i Texture Analyzer, produced by the Texture
Technologies Corporation, of Scarsdale, New York, performs calculations
based on data derived from as many as 250 separate probes. It is essentially
a mechanical mouth. It gauges the most-important rheological properties of a
food -- bounce, creep, breaking point, density, crunchiness, chewiness,
gumminess, lumpiness, rubberiness, springiness, slipperiness, smoothness,
softness, wetness, juiciness, spreadability, springback, and tackiness.

Some of the most important advances in flavor manufacturing are now
occurring in the field of biotechnology. Complex flavors are being made
using enzyme reactions, fermentation, and fungal and tissue cultures. All
the flavors created by these methods -- including the ones being synthesized
by fungi -- are considered natural flavors by the FDA. The new enzyme-based
processes are responsible for extremely true-to-life dairy flavors. One
company now offers not just butter flavor but also fresh creamy butter,
cheesy butter, milky butter, savory melted butter, and super-concentrated
butter flavor, in liquid or powder form. The development of new fermentation
techniques, along with new techniques for heating mixtures of sugar and
amino acids, have led to the creation of much more realistic meat flavors.

The McDonald's Corporation most likely drew on these advances when it
eliminated beef tallow from its french fries. The company will not reveal
the exact origin of the natural flavor added to its fries. In response to
inquiries from Vegetarian Journal, however, McDonald's did acknowledge that
its fries derive some of their characteristic flavor from "an animal
source." Beef is the probable source, although other meats cannot be ruled
out. In France, for example, fries are sometimes cooked in duck fat or horse
tallow.

Other popular fast foods derive their flavor from unexpected ingredients.
McDonald's Chicken McNuggets contain beef extracts, as does Wendy's Grilled
Chicken Sandwich. Burger King's BK Broiler Chicken Breast Patty contains
"natural smoke flavor." A firm called Red Arrow Products specializes in
smoke flavor, which is added to barbecue sauces, snack foods, and processed
meats. Red Arrow manufactures natural smoke flavor by charring sawdust and
capturing the aroma chemicals released into the air. The smoke is captured
in water and then bottled, so that other companies can sell food that seems
to have been cooked over a fire.

The Vegetarian Legal Action Network recently petitioned the FDA to issue new
labeling requirements for foods that contain natural flavors. The group
wants food processors to list the basic origins of their flavors on their
labels. At the moment vegetarians often have no way of knowing whether a
flavor additive contains beef, pork, poultry, or shellfish. One of the most
widely used color additives -- whose presence is often hidden by the phrase
"color added" -- violates a number of religious dietary restrictions, may
cause allergic reactions in susceptible people, and comes from an unusual
source. Cochineal extract (also known as carmine or carminic acid) is made
from the desiccated bodies of female Dactylopius coccus Costa, a small
insect harvested mainly in Peru and the Canary Islands. The bug feeds on red
cactus berries, and color from the berries accumulates in the females and
their unhatched larvae. The insects are collected, dried, and ground into a
pigment. It takes about 70,000 of them to produce a pound of carmine, which
is used to make processed foods look pink, red, or purple. Dannon strawberry
yogurt gets its color from carmine, and so do many frozen fruit bars,
candies, and fruit fillings, and Ocean Spray pink-grapefruit juice drink.

In a meeting room at IFF, Brian Grainger let me sample some of the company's
flavors. It was an unusual taste test -- there was no food to taste.
Grainger is a senior flavorist at IFF, a soft-spoken chemist with graying
hair, an English accent, and a fondness for understatement. He could easily
be mistaken for a British diplomat or the owner of a West End brasserie with
two Michelin stars. Like many in the flavor industry, he has an Old World,
old-fashioned sensibility. When I suggested that IFF's policy of secrecy and
discretion was out of step with our mass-marketing, brand-conscious,
self-promoting age, and that the company should put its own logo on the
countless products that bear its flavors, instead of allowing other
companies to enjoy the consumer loyalty and affection inspired by those
flavors, Grainger politely disagreed, assuring me that such a thing would
never be done. In the absence of public credit or acclaim, the small and
secretive fraternity of flavor chemists praise one another's work. By
analyzing the flavor formula of a product, Grainger can often tell which of
his counterparts at a rival firm devised it. Whenever he walks down a
supermarket aisle, he takes a quiet pleasure in seeing the well-known foods
that contain his flavors.

Grainger had brought a dozen small glass bottles from the lab. After he
opened each bottle, I dipped a fragrance-testing filter into it -- a long
white strip of paper designed to absorb aroma chemicals without producing
off notes. Before placing each strip of paper in front of my nose, I closed
my eyes. Then I inhaled deeply, and one food after another was conjured from
the glass bottles. I smelled fresh cherries, black olives, sautéed onions,
and shrimp. Grainger's most remarkable creation took me by surprise. After
closing my eyes, I suddenly smelled a grilled hamburger. The aroma was
uncanny, almost miraculous -- as if someone in the room were flipping
burgers on a hot grill. But when I opened my eyes, I saw just a narrow strip
of white paper and a flavorist with a grin.

------------

RELATED WEBSITES:

INGREDIENT LIST -- MCDONALD'S USA:
http://www.mcdonalds.com/countries/usa/food/ingredient_list/index.html

Downloadable PDF files listing ingredients in McDonald's foods. Posted at
the official Mcdonald's Web site.


UNHAPPY MEALS:
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/ba2000-12-14.htm

In an Atlantic Unbound interview, Eric Schlosser talks about his new book,
"Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal".


PREPARED FOODS:
http://www.preparedfoods.com/index.asp

The online edition of a magazine that "concentrates its coverage in the high
value-added processed/prepared foods and beverage products sector of the
$480 billion food industry in North America." The site offers articles,
industry news, events listings, supplier resources, and more.


PERFUMER AND FLAVORIST:
http://www.perfumerflavorist.com/

The online edition of a magazine designed "to meet the informational needs
of creative perfumers and flavorists throughout the world." The site offers
industry news, conference schedules, books for purchase, and a guide to
companies and related organizations.


THE INSTITUTE OF FOOD SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY:
http://www.ifst.org/

"IFST is the independent incorporated professional qualifying body for food
scientists and technologists." The site offers general information about
food science, industry news, events listings, a guide to products and
services, publications for purchase, and a comprehensive index of links.

------------

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