January 12, 2005 Edibles » Chew on This

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If It Tastes Like An Orange . . . 

It's probably octyl acetate

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It's an ingredient in just about everything: artificial flavor. You've got to wonder how they go about mimicking all those flavors -- orange, strawberry, peppermint, vanilla, chocolate, almond, beef, chicken, etc.

Those fake flavors are compounds created by extracting the crucial chemicals from the naturally occurring substance. After that, the substance is liquefied or vaporized and analyzed with a chromatograph to determine the structure of the molecules needed to produce the taste. A flavor is quite complex, with dozens or hundreds of chemicals combining to create the taste and smell. But some flavors -- especially fruit flavors -- have just one or only a few dominant chemicals carrying most of the taste. For instance, octyl acetate is a fundamental component of orange flavor, and isoamyl acetate creates the basis for banana flavor. Incidentally, methyl salicylate, which produces wintergreen flavor, is toxic in large doses, as are many of the chemicals used to produce artificial flavors. However, all of the ingredients used in artificial flavors are on the "Generally Recognized as Safe" list and are approved for use by the US Food and Drug Administration; unless you're planning to heist -- and ingest -- enormous quantities of allyl sulfide or benzaldehyde, you shouldn't worry too much about adverse side effects. Still, it's unsettling to know that one source of imitation vanilla flavoring is the waste product of paper mills; another is petroleum.

Given that it seems like tedious work to approximate flavors, why even bother to produce pseudo-tastes? Cost is the culprit. Sourcing natural coconut from Malaysia or vanilla beans from Madagascar, shipping to food manufacturing companies, and processing the natural ingredients into the food products we buy is expensive, both economically and environmentally. Whipping up flavors in chemistry labs is probably the only truly feasible way to meet the huge demand for them.

There are many items on the shelves that include "natural flavorings," but they are also made in a lab. In fact, "artificial flavorings are simpler in composition and potentially safer [than "natural"] because only safety-tested components are utilized," according to Gary Reineccius, a professor in the food science and nutrition department of the University of Minnesota. The distinction between natural and artificial flavoes is based more on how the flavor is made than on what it contains -- the two are chemically identical. The biggest difference is cost. The natural chemical used in natural flavorings is much more expensive than the synthetic one. So we wind up paying the higher price for what we believe to be natural (i.e., healthy) flavorings when they are no better in quality, nor are they safer, than their cost-effective artificial counterparts.

Here's an idea -- if you're craving something orange-flavored, eat an orange.

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