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The Nacho Dorito
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- scragg 13y agoI love this flavor... reading this article makes me wish I had a bag right now.
- machinagod 13y agoI've read recently the book that the article references - Why Humans like Junk food - and it's a fascinating read - despite being poorly written. Putting theories behind food appreciation, like Vanishing Caloric Density, the Umami flavor (MSG, garlic and Friends) and flavor familiarity (vanyloids are present in breast milk) - on the context of foods your familiar with, changes your perspective when you're tasting any kind of food, allowing you to deconstruct what are you experiencing: "Ho, I like this because it's greasy, and it salty, and it has loads of umami from the garlic". It allowed me to deconstruct a common action, changing it from an immediate appreciation to a more rational, pondered thought process.
- samatman 13y agoReminding me of my favorite hunger hack: got into kitchen, chop onion or press garlic, toss into oil, fry. In ten seconds, I go from "dinner sounds like a hassle" to rooting through the cupboards, salivating madly.
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- MrZongle2 13y agoThis article read like a commercial.
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- hxrts 13y agoreads like a syndicated article
- Mikeb85 13y agoEven though I eat a generally healthy diet, even I can't resist the pull of the Dorito... There's just something about salty, savoury, crispy, fatty and sometimes spicy treats that is so appealing.
- thatcherclay 13y agoIt is really impressive when you think about it; the level of genius that goes into tricking our brains to like this synthetic mush is astonishing. But only the same way that the porn industry is astonishing in some ways - both appeal to a desire and then over-stimulate, and both are on tenuous morale standing.
- twoodfin 13y agoWhat's morally tenuous about making food people enjoy? Gourmet chefs use the same science as Frito Lay. The only difference is that almost anyone can afford to have Doritos whenever they like.
- rthomas6 13y agoReally. Price is the only difference between gourmet chefs and Doritos. Oh, come on. Frito Lay doesn't make food people enjoy, they make food people crave. You don't feel satiated after eating a lot of Doritos, and as this article points out, Doritos are engineered that way on purpose. You don't get sick of them, or full from them, or long-lasting enjoyment out of them. You just get an overloaded reward center in your brain, a lot of empty calories, and a blood sugar spike. Gourmet food typically strives for the opposite: intense and complex flavors, long-lasting enjoyment, and a pleasant full feeling. To keep with OP's analogy, saying Doritos and real food are the same is like saying porn is the same as being in a great relationship, except anyone can afford porn.
- twoodfin 13y agoReally. Price is the only difference between gourmet chefs and Doritos. That wasn't my claim. My claim was that they're using much of the same chemical and culinary science. For example: salt = good, more salt = usually better! Similarly, people can and do gorge themselves on gourmet food. God knows I've done so myself a few times. You don't get sick of them, or full from them... I invite you to test this claim with a 17oz bag! Plenty of people find themselves completely satisfied with a reasonable quantity of Doritos. It's also an enjoyable experience for them. This food engineering is designed to make that experience more enjoyable. They're not physically addictive in any meaningful sense. If your threshold for "moral tenuousness" is the potential to cause harm because you've produced something tasty enough that people have more than is healthy for them, then you'd have to string up a whole bunch of brewers and winemakers, too. Which would be too bad.
- HaloZero 13y agoI'm curious if they understood all these concepts when they created the chips or if they were developed afterwards and realized this is why we love them.
- stonemetal 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doritos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doritos The original product was made at the Casa de Fritos at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Using surplus tortillas, the company-owned restaurant cut them up and fried them (as in traditional Mexican chips called totopos) and added basic seasoning, resembling the Mexican chilaquiles, but in this case being dry. Arch West was the Vice President of Marketing of Frito-Lay at the time, and noticed the popularity. He made a deal with Alex Foods in 1964, the provider of many items for Casa de Fritos at Disneyland, and produced the chips for a short time regionally, before it was overwhelmed by the volume, and Frito-Lay moved the production in-house to its Tulsa plant. Sounds like the chips came first. It wouldn't surprise me if the additional flavors of doritos were experiments studying the phenomenon, and plunged back into reformulations of the original.
- jmduke 13y agoI forget where I read it, but a while back Frito-Lay food scientists were actually able to eliminate the 'gold dust' from Doritos. Focus groups for the new chips -- that had the exact same taste and 'biology', just without the dust -- revealed that consumers hated them, because at some level we equate flavor with the dust (and thus lack of dust with lack of flavor.)
- hfsktr 13y agoI remember reading that (probably on imgur). I looked it up but first result wasn't promising: http://wafflesatnoon.com/2013/05/07/doritos-powder-hoax/ http://wafflesatnoon.com/2013/05/07/doritos-powder-hoax/ I can't really dig too much deeper because I am at work but it really seems unlikely that they would pay for a powder that isn't needed.
- robg 13y agoIn my neuroimaging days we found a tight correlation between visual and taste regions, even when we were only asking about one quality and from only word stimuli.
- scotth 13y agoThe article directly contradicts your claim.
- twiceaday 13y agoHow would this not lead to a significant mouth-feel change?
- zwieback 13y agoNacho Doritos - I don't even know why they make other chips anymore.
- DiabloD3 13y agoThis page isn't rendering correctly, text is overlapping with images. Good job NYT. I'm on Firefox, btw.