Episode 184: The Crisis of Blandness in Agriculture with Mark Schatzker

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to improving soil health and ecosystem health, improving plant health and livestock health, and ultimately, of course, with the intention of improving public health outcomes, which is where we have— we have such a large gap in between public health and soil health today because the incentives are not aligned with achieving that. Today I have someone on the podcast with me who I have— whose work I have admired for a very long time. I've never had the chance to speak with him before, and that is Mark Schatzker, who wrote his most recent book, I think, if I'm correct, is The Dorito Effect, which I know many of you have talked about. There's been lots of discussion around and deserves to be even more widely known in In our communities and along with some of his earlier work as well. So Mark, thank you very much for joining me. Thanks for being willing to be here and to share your wisdom and your work. Tell us a bit about your journey and your story and the scope of your work over the last couple of decades.

Sure. Well, it all started with a steak. You could call it— it literally was a life-changing steak. I think it was 1997. I graduated from university. Arts degree, studied philosophy. And I went to visit my brother who was living in Chile at the time. And Chileans and Argentines don't get along that well. So it tells you something that if a Chilean is going to buy a great steak, they will buy an Argentine steak, or perhaps at the time that was true. So he bought a tenderloin and we went up to the beach and we cooked it over coals. And it was just, you know, it was perfect. And I put that first morsel of steak into my mouth and Everything just slowed down. It was one of those, oh my God, experiences. It was just an outstandingly delicious flavor experience. And I asked what I thought was a simple question, kind of an obvious question: why is the steak so good? And I just started— I was very— I mean, I just graduated university. I wasn't even like a writer yet or a journalist, but I just started researching it. Um, got all the standard answers: has to be corn-fed, marbling, you know, contact the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, went down all those rabbit holes. Nothing was working. I found every time I cook a steak— I live in Canada, but North American beef is all kind of the same— it was basically just salty but not much else, just a hint of beef, and then it would flatline. But there was that Chilean steak, and we've all had the odd outlier where you're like, wow, that was a really good steak, and you always have this expectation of deep, resonant, beefy flavor, which just wasn't there. And this ultimately led to a book, my first book called Steak: One Man's Search for the World's Tastiest Piece of Beef. And it was a great book to write. I traveled the world looking for the best steak, but I also started to ask deeper questions. Um, why do we like what we like? Why do we like the flavor of meat? Uh, but even what really caught my attention was the animals. Um, Everybody who's outside the world of farming or ranching or grazing tends to think that ruminants are dumb, that they just sort of eat what's in front of them and stupidly, you know, move across the landscape, you know, munching away. And of course, nothing could be further from the truth. And I would hear farmers and ranchers say the most interesting things like, you know, these, these mama cows are over in this field, they're, they're grazing on clover or alfalfa because they need the protein. They have a fetus to support. And these steers are laying on fat, and they're, they're really going after the ryegrass because it's got the carbs. And you think, well, that's odd. How do they know what a carbohydrate is or a protein? They don't read Men's Health or Self magazine. They, they don't get caught up in these nutrient wars that we have. Um, and that led to my second book called The Dorito Effect, which was about flavor, because Flavor is the one thing we never talk about. We've had this ongoing— you know, I guess it's not really a discussion. It's more like an argument or a disagreement about nutrition going back decades. And it's like, it's like we're a hamster on a wheel because we can't seem to figure out what's wrong. And the one thing we never do is talk about the experience of eating because we just all sort of think that it's dangerous, it's bad. If it tastes good, spit it out. And we're all nutritionists. We put on the white lab coat and we talk about protein, carbs, fat, and so forth. And everything has to do from the neck down. What happens when these nutrients get into your body? The brain just seems to play no role. This experience of eating, it's, you know, ignore it, it's dangerous, it's from the Stone Age. But really, flavor is, to my way of thinking, the most important aspect of food, because that's the great motivator. We want our food to be delicious. Why is food delicious? Why would evolution craft a species to eat itself to death? None of it seemed to make any sense. So the Dorito Effect was an effort to understand how our food has changed through the simple lens of flavor, and it documented two complementary trends. The first is that the foods that we grow on farms—vegetables, fruit, livestock—are getting more bland. It is the negative consequence of high-output agriculture. We, we have focused our efforts on producing more, and that's important because we have many more mouths to feed and we have you know, a decreasing amount of land, but we have paid for it in terms of quality. The second complement trend is that what we now call ultra-processed foods, what people like my grandparents have always called junk food, is getting more flavorful because we have learned to identify, identify flavor compounds in foods, and we produce them in flavor factories, and we impose them on food. So I called the book The Dorito Effect for the very simple reason that the first ever Doritos were just salted tortilla chips. And what no one knows is that they bombed. They, they didn't sell. And it wasn't until Frito-Lay flavored them with taco flavoring that a chip that no one was particularly interested in eating became a chip people famously can't stop eating. So that really illustrates the power of flavor to, to motivate us to to make us eat. And in fact, there's actually a third book that came out a few years ago called The End of Craving. It came out during the pandemic, which was a terrible time to release, to do anything really. And that looked at the effect that all these additives that we add to our food that affect the sensory qualities, that the things that our brain pick up on, picks up on, what is that doing to our brain? So that's really been my, my life's work. I've gotten more and more interested in the science, to my great surprise. You know, when The Dorito Effect came out, I was introduced to a neuroscientist at Yale University named Dana Small, and she was very interested in the book. And she said, it's interesting, we come to a very similar point of view but very different paths. So she invited me to join her research group, which is called the Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center. And the idea would be that I would write about the research, but this— what I never expected is I would actually start to take part in the research. So I've published with Dana and I published with a scientist at the University of Bristol named Geoff Brundstrom, trying to get at some of these really important issues about how the experience of food and how the data that our brains collect about food affects our bodies, affects how we feel, affects what we do. Because I think that's the most important question. And I think, you know, everybody says this, but I think we've really been missing it. It's Western science is really good at simplifying. What we're really bad at is understanding complexity.

Wow, Mark, that is— that's an incredible background. You know, one of the— one of the things that caught my attention years ago, I don't know, must be close to two decades ago, I read this fascinating little book titled Biochemical Individuality, and it was describing how some of the, the mechanisms that each of our bodies have our own unique chemistry profile, and therefore we have our taste receptors all respond differently. And therefore people, people perceive things to a degree, people perceive things differently. That's why people have certain flavor preferences for some fruits and vegetables and so forth. But yet within, within that greater than that individuality, we still have this overall attraction to flavor and aroma. And one of the recurring conversations in this space is as we improve soil health and as we improve the microbiome, we produce fruits and vegetables that have better flavor and they have better aroma, even if they are still producing much higher yields. They have higher sugar content. They have all these various higher concentrations of these various flavor compounds. But there is still a very large gap between tying those field results into people's health and into people's eating experience, into institutionalizing that and having that be something that buyers actually care for and that wholesale buyers actually care for. So there's— I don't really have a specific question that, but there is a, there's this kind of institutional gap between the system that presently exists and what all of us as individuals would desire. None of us desires to have a tomato that resembles a cardboard more than a tomato that we can grow in our garden. And so the— I'm trying to formulate my question here, but I think the question that I want to ask is, in essence, how— well, actually, before I dig into that, Let's talk a little bit more about your work at the institution and the work that you're doing now. What are the connections that you are finding between flavor and nutrition and the attractiveness of food?

You know, it's— I actually want to go back to what you're just talking about because it's such a passion subject of mine, because you're absolutely right. We live in such a deranged food environment. Everyone seems to know that tomatoes are terrible. The research exists to produce better tomatoes. Why don't we eat better tomatoes? You can— there's times a year you can get better tomatoes. If you go to Europe, you can get better tomatoes. I think the problem comes down to the commodification of food. So when you just buy something by the pound, the incentive is just to produce as much of it as you can at the lowest possible price because it becomes a race to the bottom. So if you're producing food the way you produce pea gravel, or sand or something that you just, you know, buy lots of. Dark analogy. Yeah, it's, it's you get what you pay for. What I've really struggled for so many years to understand is why it is this way in North America. It's very different in Europe. It's very different in Japan. The two countries I think are the best examples that I don't necessarily say we should be like them, but think about quality differently are Italy and Japan. Italy has the most rules about food, you know, DOP. These are laws that say things like, if you're going to call a cheese Parmigiano-Reggiano, it has to be made in this area, and it has to be made from these cows that only eat grass or hay. And they have hundreds and hundreds of these rules. San Marzano tomatoes are an example. And we kind of think it's cute, and there's sort of an old world you know, pageantry to it, but we sort of chuckle, and we also think it's kind of silly because it's on some level not practical. But it's interesting to note that Italy really challenges some of our most fundamental thinking about food. Italy has— I'm of the opinion that Italy has the best food in the Western world. Um, we tend to think that the deliciousness causes obesity. So if that were true, then Italians ought to be the fattest, and they are the thinnest. In northern Italy, which does not eat a Mediterranean diet— I mean, it's partially Mediterranean, but they eat lots of pork, lots of fat, lots of cheese, lots of cream— the rate of obesity is less than 10%, and it's been holding steady for decades. So this should be something of a wake-up call. I don't know why we ignore it. This is what I wrote about in the end of Craving. Japan is similar. They also have rules. And I was in Japan, uh, researching steak. I was in a town called Nagoya. Which is famous for Nagoya chicken, which is a crossbreed between an heirloom chicken, which is very slow growing, and a faster growing chicken. But it's essentially a chicken bred to be delicious. There was a bust. The police busted a farm pretending to produce Nagoya chickens, and they weren't telling the truth, and they got busted. That's kind of inconceivable for something like that to happen here. But they— the difference is that they revere the products of the land and the sea. And they think there's something sacred and important about flavor and deliciousness, whereas we think it's something dangerous and something that we can manipulate to our own advantage. And I think the decades of experience tell us that they got it right and we got it wrong. I hope things are changing here. I think there's some, some reasons to be optimistic. If you look at something like craft beer, if you took a time machine back to the late '80s and told the heads of you know, the big beer companies when everybody was drinking Bud Light, Coors Light, or Michelob Light. And by the way, back then the drinkers couldn't distinguish them. It was just all about branding. The beers were indistinguishable. If you told them that in decades people are going to be drinking, you know, IPAs that are bitter and porters and stouts and, and lagers, they just would have said there's no way that's possible. And And there's a lot to love about the craft beer movement. People spend more money on beer. They tend to care about who makes it, how it's made, what's the style, what's their tradition, what are the ingredients. And I think that's a sign, you know, that's something we should be excited about. I think the same is true of wine. Decades ago, we didn't care that much about wine. You know, wine's tricky. There can be so much snobbery and silliness, but, but we care about the variety of grape and we care about where it was grown. I wish it were true for other foods. I hope that it will become true, but it shows you that we can care. What I find so strange is that I've met people with lots— and they make lots and lots of money, and they buy the cheapest food. They'll tell you with pride that they got, you know, like a huge sheet of tenderloins at Costco that are blade tenderized. And it's, it's interesting because they buy— they have a very nice car, they buy nice clothes, they go nice places on their vacation, but they buy the cheapest food with pride. And I think, you know, of all the things that you buy, this stuff's actually going in your body. Now, I'm not trying to say anything bad about Costco, but it's just this focus on buying cheap food, which I don't understand because there could be health consequences. And, and don't— I mean, shouldn't we be optimizing the experience of eating?

And to think about what you just said, in what other areas of our life do we pride ourselves on buying cheap? Everywhere else, we focus on buying quality, our building materials, our cars, our clothes, etc.

And if you do have to buy something cheap because you just can't afford it, you know there's a trade-off. Yeah. So it's— that's what I find intriguing. You know, in France, they have a Label Rouge chicken, and this is a slower growing chicken that must have access to the outdoors. It has the largest market share for whole chickens, and this isn't bought exclusively by people on yachts in Monaco. Ordinary French people, when they want to roast a chicken, they buy a Label Rouge chicken. They make less money than us. Their, their per capita GDP is lower, and yet they, they recognize, to them, that investment is important. And why isn't that way for us has been a real head-scratcher for me.

There's another dimension of this that has also been a real head-scratcher for me, and that is we have a small flock of chickens. We sell some eggs. I'm a part of a butcher shop here in the local area, and how we, how we value different types of food. So people will avoid paying $5 for a dozen of eggs, of really high-quality pasture-raised eggs, but won't hesitate to spend $5 on classical Doritos or York peppermint patties or something else. Like, there's, there is this blind spot around the perception of value that anytime— it seems anytime when you, when you start having a conversation about animal products or really healthy whole foods, we start scrutinizing and obsessing over the price, but we don't scrutinize and obsess over the price of a bag of chips.

I totally agree. And I also— there's this idea floating around that processed foods are cheap. It's not true. They are not cheap. When I go shopping I find the most expensive items are the ones that come in a package. If I'm buying crackers or something like that, I don't buy a lot of that stuff, but when I do, that's the expensive stuff. When you buy whole foods and cook from scratch, it's way, way cheaper, especially if you buy value cuts, if you, you know, um, so I agree with you and I don't know where that scrutiny comes from. Now listen, also, you know, you need to know how to cook. You have to have the time to do it. I'm not pretending it's completely easy. I find once you train yourself to do it, the satisfaction is enormous. But I totally agree with you. Why is it that people complain about the price of eggs and not the price of a bag of chips? It's funny, like going to McDonald's. I don't go to McDonald's, but if you look at what— take a family. I got 3 kids. For a family of 5 to eat at McDonald's, my gosh, the meal you could cook for that price would be incredible. You could buy a beautiful bottle of wine, probably 2. And have money left over. So it really is intriguing. And how do we get people to care more about the quality of the food they eat and the experience not just of eating it, but also of cooking it? Because it's also so communal. When people are in the kitchen, there's activity, there's interaction. Then you sit down and you enjoy the meal, and it reinforces human bonds in so many ways. What I often think about is having a meal with, with like your spouse. If I have a meal with my wife, it's such an interesting experience because us being together makes the food taste better. If I eat that food by myself, I'll probably like look at my phone, maybe I'll turn on the TV or something. But together, the enjoyment of that food— it almost seems like a crime to eat a great meal alone. There's just— it's like watching a comedy alone. It just feels wrong. But then the interesting thing too is the quality of the food reinforces the relationship. So it's such a wonderful thing that eating is not just nourishment for the body, but, but for the soul.

The quality of the food influences the quality of the relationship. That's a great line, Mark. I like that. Yeah. You know, I want to go back a bit to something we were talking about just a bit ago, and that is the price of food and that higher quality whole foods have higher value and can be more satiating. I had an interesting, um, an interesting personal growth experience with my family. I was, um, and it was during my childhood years. I was the oldest of 9 children, and my parents went through a transition of trying to eat— because of some family health challenges, they went through a transition of trying to eat very inexpensively to trying to eat mostly whole foods from, I would say, roughly age range 8 to 12 for me or something like that. It was, it was a transition where we started buying and using a lot more coconut oil and, and cereals disappeared. And we had an incredible family farm where we grew a lot of our own foods because they were still economizing. And what happened during that process is we noticed that we as an entire family, we used to can and process hundreds of jars of beef and fruit products. We canned hundreds of quarts of peaches and tomatoes and so forth because that was the technology that we were using within the Amish community. And our consumption— we're a large family, so we really noticed once we started prioritizing better quality foods, our total consumption of food decreased substantially as a family. And one really obvious case that you— we, we didn't really expect— well, we didn't expect any of this, but in canning peaches, we used to can peaches with sugar. We changed to canning peaches with maple syrup and a shot of orange juice, and our consumption of canned peaches dropped by about 30% as a family.

And that's just— I'm just curious, how did the, how did the flavor change? Was it— were they better? Were they worse? Were they just the same?

They were substantially better. The maple syrup and the orange, uh, added a slight citrus tang. That was— there was substantial improvements in, in shelf life, storability, flavor, texture. They were a lot better. But even with them being that much better there was a reduction in consumption. And that was— I use that as one example, but that happened across the board. And that, when you think about that, it's— it was hard for me for that to compute because they're the same peaches, they have the same nutritional profile. In others where we started trading other oils for coconut oil and so forth, there are other nutritional trade-offs as well. But what was so fascinating is we started, as a family, we started prioritizing higher quality ingredients, spending more for ingredients and our overall food budget went down. We spent less.

So it's not an isolated case. I'll tell you something that was really interesting when I was researching The End of Craving. What I discovered, really interesting stat, is that French and Italians— France and Italy as a group, they consume fewer calories than Americans. Not a surprise, they tend to be much thinner. And yet it takes them much longer to consume those calories. It seems bizarre. You're eating less food, but it's taking you longer. We also know, especially in the case of Italy, the food is, is wonderful. I mean, people travel— it's one of the most popular destinations in the world to travel, and the main reason people go to Italy is to eat food and drink. Wouldn't you feed— wouldn't you think if the food were so much better, wouldn't they eat more? I mean, it's more delicious. Aren't you just going to kind of shove more of it in your mouth? And yet they don't. So this is one of the things that we get wrong, is that we think that deliciousness is what causes us to eat more. And this is the whole problem. And I think your example is instructive and it's something we keep getting wrong. You know, people keep saying these processed foods, these ultra-processed foods are hyperpalatable. Does anybody really believe that? I mean, there's this thing they have where you can't stop eating them, but no one, you know, the best meal you ever had, does anybody ever say, oh yeah, it was this bag of Doritos. I had in Wisconsin. It was unbelievable. Like, no one ever says that. So I think they have a peculiar grip on us, but they're not that good. There's a reason my grandparents called them junk food, because we know there's something kind of fake about them. It's the same reason they call heroin junk, because they know that the pleasure that it brings you is false and dangerous. It's the same, you know, you might say, like, I always use this line, like, my cousin sold me his BMW, it turned out to be a piece of junk, which is to say, I thought it had this representation of being something that it wasn't. So we kind of all know that these things are terrible or that they're— they don't deliver. And real food delivers pleasure. It delivers highs and joys that the ultra-processed stuff will just never get close to.

Well, this I'm just realizing, based on thinking about your commentary about food consumption in Italy and satiation, reflecting on the thoughts I was sharing a bit ago, the reality is what we're, what we're kind of saying is that the, the lack of satiation, the lack of quality food, is part of what is contributing to overconsumption, which is part of what is contributing to obesity and our negative public health outcomes.

Yes, and I think livestock could be very instructive. When we look at livestock diets, they are designed to get animals to market weight as fast as possible, and it's kind of a junk food diet, which is to say it's just, it's energy dense. They fortify them the way we do our breads and our grains, and it gets them fat real quick. Well, that's what it does to us. They put flavorings in too, by the way.

You know, I read this funny story and I haven't researched it. I don't know if it's actually true, but although it was, it was an old publication, so they wouldn't have— I don't know they would have any reason to be untruthful about it. But years ago there was a time period when coconut oil was really inexpensive and they experimented with feeding it to hogs and it turned the hogs lean. It didn't store. They became very healthy, very robust and very lean. And so they had to switch away from coconut oil. To more grains, to more soybean oil and corn and so forth. And yeah, it's just a fascinating commentary, fascinating quote that you shared, that we're feeding ourselves like we feed our livestock for the express purpose and intent of fattening them. You know, when you were speaking about the chicken in Japan, you used a phrase that they were bred to be delicious. And that caught my attention because how many things, how many crops in the States are bred to be delicious? There are certain crops that are selected for flavor and so forth, but there's many more that are not. And livestock certainly generally are not, at least as far as I'm aware. Where do you see the opportunity? There are certainly people who are doing great things with flavor profiles, grazing beef and so forth, and specifically optimizing and focusing on producing exceptional flavor profiles, but they're outliers. There's very few of them out there. Where is the opportunity for growers to specifically grow for flavor and to market accordingly? When you look at the macro landscape and the macro context, where is the opportunity and where do you see we can possibly go collectively?

It's a great question, um, because you talked about the market and marketing, and I think this is the challenge. That many of the farmers and ranchers doing the best work are very small. And some of them have built great, you know, direct-to-consumer businesses. And I applaud them. I think that's wonderful. But the question is, how can we make change on a larger scale? And I wonder if maybe one of the things we can do is look at the example of Europe or Japan. When we talk about— the Japanese call them brands. You know, Kobe beef is the most famous brand. But that basically says if you're going to make Kobe beef, it's got to be from this area around Kobe and they've got to eat this kind of a, you know, grain, but not, not as intense a grain diet as our cattle eat. And they have all these brands, which is basically rules that basically make it easier to market because you can have many producers in a single region following those rules. Then you have a kind of a marketing ability where it doesn't necessarily have to be the farmer knocking on the door of the supermarket. You can because they never have enough, you can start to produce in quantity and you have a brand, whether it's, whether, you know, like Kobe beef or San Marzano tomatoes, but just basically some stamp of quality that says there are rules as to how this was made and you can expect a certain level of quality as a result. And I think that makes it easier. I think if you're one farmer, for example, doing pastured pork, it can be really challenging to build a business because it's easy to sell the pork chops, it's harder to sell some of the lesser-loved cuts, although I think they're the best. These things become a lot easier when you start to build scale. So I won't pretend that I'm a business genius and this is going to solve all of our problems, but I think maybe that would be a way so that in different regions you could have these marketing organizations that are a promise of quality and a promise also of values that inform that farming so that you know that there's humane standards, you know that that the land is respected. But you also have scale so that economies of scale are real. It gets more— if the farmer doesn't also have to worry about inventory and sales and they can just focus on what they do best, I think that's one of the benefits. That's one of the things the commodity system has going for it as people become very, very sometimes too hyper-specialized. But I think maybe there could be Maybe that could be a solution so that these values can be sort of collectivized and we can produce things in greater number, which makes it easier to access the food system we have today. I love that idea.

But looking at the landscape through the perspective of growers who might be producing a large volume of a certain crop, let's say strawberries or tomatoes or cherries or who might be producing chickens. One of the challenges that we have is, and this is my perspective, and also I also have lack of experience in this particular domain, but my perspective is that we have one of the foundational challenges that we have is that within North America, there appears to be relatively limited demand or willingness to pay for quality? Like, if there were greater willingness to pay for quality, wouldn't more of those brands exist? We have, we have organic certification, which is not— just to be clear— is not a certification of quality, it's just a certification of the absence of certain toxins. Um, and yet we have relatively limited consumer demand for that. What, what do you think the, the consumer demand part of the profile looks like?

Well, I guess I don't want to say I'm an expert on organic, but I think part of the problem with organic is maybe at points the standard got diluted, that it became something different from what it was intended to be. If you look at something like organic chicken, it's just a super fast-growing chicken raised to an organic standard, which is organic feed. It's not— it doesn't— there may be some minor differences in things like texture and flavor, but it's not a substantially different chicken. Costs a lot more, but I don't think you get a great eating experience as a result. I think organic food can taste better, but I think there's many cases where it does not. So it's a chicken and egg question. There are people with lots of money in their pocket that would be willing to pay more for food if there was the guarantee of quality. Grass-fed beef is a passion of mine. I love grass-fed beef. I don't eat beef that isn't grass-fed, not because I'm a snob, and— but I just, I love it so much. And quality is improving, but the biggest problem for so long with grass-fed beef was just unevenness. Some of it was absolutely spectacular and some of it was really bad. I mean, the worst steak I've ever eaten in my life was grass-fed. It was awful. Grain-fed beef is predictably mediocre.

So I thought you were going to say predictably middle of the pack, and then you say predictably mediocre. There's a lot of people who will have perked up ears when they hear that.

So, so the challenge really is to, to maintain that standard. And I think once you can do that and people have an expectation that it's going to deliver, I think that value proposition becomes easier. I also want to say how easy it is for me to say these things. I'm not a farmer, I'm not a rancher, I don't have skin in the game the way those people do. So, and I, I recognize the incredible challenges there are, so I don't want to sound as I'm, I'm a critic. And, and those are very, very challenging occupations with incredible risks and surprises. But these are just some of the things I think in my head, how can we make this better?

Well, I think there are a large group of people who understand the constraints and the challenges of the existing system, the existing food supply web that exists, and are seriously asking the question, how can we improve outcomes for the entire system? How can we improve outcomes for farmers? How can we improve outcomes for consumers, and how can we benefit the whole? And this, this is an important part of that conversation of recognizing that we have been misguided over the last century or more on optimizing for quantity with no consideration for quality. Yes, I want to, I want to dig a bit more into your most recent book, The End of Craving. Because I think the conversation ties back to our discussion around satiation and the quantity of food that it takes to satiate us, as well as this whole flavor conversation. I really enjoyed the book, but I don't, I don't want to put it into my words. Can you give us an overview of the process, the journey that you went through with that book and what the key findings were?

The real question was the Dorito effect left me with more questions, you know, some amazing insights and discoveries, but left me with a lot of questions. Like I said, the food conversation has been dominated by an obsession with nutrients, you know, carbs, protein, fat. Those things haven't changed at all. Sugar isn't any more sugary than sugar was 100 years ago. There's more of it. Maybe we consume more of it, but sugar hasn't changed. What has changed is the flavor of food. Like I said, whole foods are getting blander. But what most people don't realize is, is in that arsenal of additives that get added when we, when we process food, so much of them change the experience of food. So the Dorito Effect, I talk an awful lot about flavorings, but that's just one in a whole gamut. There's artificial sweeteners, there's fat replacers, there's things like modified starches, which are starches that are engineered to have no flavor profile because You know, if you're microwaving a pizza, you don't want there to be, um, like a puddle appearing as it thaws. So they, they use starches, modified starches, to control these things. That makes your microwave pizza more appealing, I suppose. But a question we don't ask is, well, starches usually have a flavor. You know, a noodle, a wheat noodle tastes like a wheat noodle, a rice noodle tastes like a rice noodle, mashed potatoes taste like potatoes. When you create a starch that has no flavor profile, what does that do to the brain? Like I said, we tend to think that flavor is dangerous and we should ignore it. But if you look at your DNA, the, the thickest chapter, it's not on how to make your eyeballs or your brain, it's on how to make your flavor-sensing equipment, the nose and mouth. So it must be really important. When you look at the brain, when you do brain scans, nothing engages more brain matter than the sensation of food. So something really interesting is going on. So why does food have flavor? This is the question we never ask. The reason food has flavor is because the brain exists to predict. The part of your brain that eats, it's sealed inside your skull. It doesn't talk to the part of your brain that can read. So it doesn't know about the, you know, the ingredient label or the nutritional stuff about calories. All it can do is sense. So we develop the capacity to sense food before it enters the body because we need to know what's coming. We release different hormones depending on what we eat. If there's more fat or if there's more, more carbs, we, we secrete insulin when we experience sweetness because we know sugar is going to hit the bloodstream and we need to, we need to prepare for it. So what happens when you start to change the sensory aspects of food. One of the most— I talked about pleasure. The stigma about obesity is that people can't control themselves. They just love food too much and they indulge too much. When you look at the brain science, this isn't what we see. We see that people with obesity don't enjoy food more. If anything, they enjoy it less. What we see is that they, they crave food more. So if you take a trim brain and an obese brain, and you show them both a picture of a pizza or a milkshake or an ice cream cone or cheeseburger, the trim brain thinks, oh, that looks nice, has a bite and says, ah, that tastes nice, that was nice. The obese brain goes, I want that so badly, I really, really want that. And then they have a bite of it or a sip of it and it does not satisfy them, it does not pleasure them the way they'd expected, so they take another bite. So it's really a terrible situation. You'd like to think, well, at least at least they enjoy all that food, they're having a great time. But no, that's actually not the case. So the brain isn't sort of this Stone Age moron that's bent on feeding itself as many calories as possible. This whole idea that we're preparing for famine, it just doesn't hold out. There were not enough famines for there to have been kind of an evolutionary mutation to take place. But also, if you're in a low-calorie environment, the worst thing you can do is overconsume calories because it's like if the price of gas is really high, do you want to trail around a big trailer filled with gas cans? That just costs you more gasoline. It's, it's a very expensive behavior. So you have to ask the question, why would a brain that predicts, that knows the value of calories, become bent on consuming more calories? And this is where those additives come in. Because so many of the additives that we put in food send the brain the wrong message about calories on the way. So artificial sweeteners— in a state of nature, sweetness is a good predictor of calories that are on the way. Sweet fruit has more calories. In the world we live in, sweetness can mean anything. It can mean lots of calories, like in a can of Coke. It can mean no calories in a can of Diet Coke. But then we have soft drinks now where they're blending artificial sweeteners and stevia, which is quote natural, um, with sugar. And this really confuses the brain. But it's not just artificial sweeteners, there's fat replacers. Now interestingly, nobody knows anything about fat replacers. This is an enormous industry, but unlike the sweetener industry, the fat replacer people, they keep their head down. So you really have to be crafty to read an ingredient label to know if there's a fat replacer there. Even I know this stuff really well, I can't tell you for sure because some of these ingredients might be a fat replacer, might not be. It's depending on how they're used, how they're deployed in the food processing. But what they do is sort of like artificial sweeteners. They create this rich mouth-filling sensation of fat but deliver very few calories to the gut. Like I said, there's things like modified starches where you're getting a boatload of calories you didn't expect. This creates what psychologists call uncertainty. Has a more technical term called reward prediction error, which sounds sort of fancy, but what it basically means is, I was anticipating this, I got something else. And that is really the condition we have created in the modern food environment. So, the question you need to ask, how does a brain respond when it doesn't get what it thought it was going to get? How does a brain respond to uncertainty? And And before I tell you that, it's something we all know intuitively. If I told you, you're going to borrow my car and you're going to drive 500 miles to this destination, but I said the fuel gauge doesn't work. It's always pinned at full, even when it's empty. What would the first thing you would do be?

Fill the tank.

You'd fill the tank. And then you get halfway there and you'd think, you know, the full tank should work, but I don't know. And if I'm wrong, I run out of gas. You'd fill the tank again. If I told you you got a flight that leaves in 2 hours and your watch is either an hour fast or an hour slow, you don't know, what would you do? You'd go to the airport. Because uncertainty, it motivates us. This is what evolution baked into our brains. Evolution did not design us to overconsume calories to the point of obesity. And metabolic disease. What it did do is program us to respond to uncertainty, because if a needed reward out there in the world— a piece of fruit, a mate— if that becomes uncertain, you work harder to achieve it, because if you don't get it, that's a loss, and losses are bad. Losses mean you don't get the food you need, you might die, you might not reproduce. So that's what evolution baked into our genes, is how to respond to uncertainty. That's why we gamble. That's why a billionaire will bet you $10 on a baseball game. It's not that they need the $10, it's because uncertainty has a motivating effect that gets all of us. That's why we watch sport. It's not interesting to watch LeBron James play 21 with me. It— that's just— but with a really good basketball player, that does become interesting because we want to know what's going to happen. It engages us, it pulls us in. That's why people become addicted to gambling. So the modern food environment has become a calorie casino. You don't know what you're going to get. And one of the things we find with people who become addicted to gambling is they're always going for the big, big win because very often they're trying to get out of the hole. So they do what seems insane. They've lost $4,000 and they bet their kid's college fund. Why? Because being in the domain of losses is painful. It feels awful. They'll do anything to get out of it. And now we look at the modern food environment and you see foods like a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder or a Double Down. That's taken, right? That's gambling language right there. A Triple Stacker. These are promises of calories. We've created brains that want the big dependable hit. And how have we done that? With uncertainty. We've created a food environment in which the information our brain gets when it senses food is not reliable. That has a hypermotivating effect. We've created millions of brains that want more food than they need. And we see this because the people who eat ultra-processed foods, junk food, they have it the worst. The people who eat whole foods, where their food isn't lying to them, you don't see this extreme obesity. You, like you said with the teachers, you— food is more satiating because it's not constantly letting you down and fooling you and telling you falsities.

I'm just sitting here and I'm smiling, and I'm smiling because this ties in, there is an aspect of this conversation that all of us know in our spirits to be true. We all know in our hearts that this is true because we see it around us. We experience it, we feel it. So there's an aspect of validation that is making me smile, but there's also, I don't know quite how to articulate it. There's the realization or the reaffirmation that there is tremendous opportunity to, to change course and to fix it. So one of the— I suppose one of the questions, given the, the studies and the research that you are participating in, if you are on the treadmill of having the gas meter completely pegged at full all the time and you have this food addiction, what does the off-ramp look like?

It's a great question. One thing I can tell you is the GLP-1 drugs that are, are showing to be very successful in getting people to lose weight, they affect the urge part of eating. They don't seem to affect the pleasure of eating nearly as much as they affect the desire to eat. So I would say that's more evidence that this is the problem. I feel I have mixed emotions about these drugs because I'd like to believe we don't need to live in a world where everybody needs to to inject themselves with a drug or take a pill just to eat food. But I am also thankful that people who really struggle with this and really truly struggle now have an option for something that can really improve their, their health and their lives. But I don't want to say medication is the off-ramp. I know in my own case, I never really struggled. I'm very lucky. I certainly used to eat a lot of junk food when I was a teenager, partly because I was a teenage boy, and teenage boys, they do need calories. They grow fast, play sports, high energy. But I was also lucky that I was raised in a household where we, we ate real food. You know, my mother cooked dinner with groceries she bought at a grocery store, supermarket. That sounds strange, but a lot of people don't eat that way. And I know that my own tastes changed. You know, if you told me when I was 22 years old, do you want a pizza with arugula on it? I would have been angry. I would have said no, put like sausage and bacon and pepperoni on it. Now I don't want that pizza. I want the pizza with arugula on it because my body changed. I think to some degree my needs are in harmony with my— with— or my tastes, my desires are in harmony with my needs. I think to change this, it takes an awfully long time. It takes a long time to get your body into a bad state. It takes years, sometimes decades. And I think that off-ramp is a long time. I haven't done that struggle myself, so I can't say this works. It was interesting, I visited a clinic in Germany when I wrote The End of Craving, and one of the techniques— this is for people with, with real eating disorders— and one of the techniques this researcher had developed for people with binge eating disorders, that when they'd get the desire to binge eat candy, they'd eat a dark chocolate. And at first they hated it, they thought it's bitter, it's awful, but they stuck with it and they started to like it. And then one day they ate milk chocolate and they said it was just too sweet, kind of syrupy and gross. And so the dark chocolate had the effect of slaying that craving. So I think what that tells us is if maybe there is the possibility with time to get your, your body, you know, back in line with, with food that, that tells an honest story about, about the nutrition that's inside it.

One of my developing perspectives— I'm going mentally going back to the conversation we were having about the landscape and where are the levers for change and how can farmers and producers facilitate change and also what is the role of consumers. There's lots of pieces that tie into this, but one of the things that I've come to realize is that in certainly in some categories, It is actually the retailers and the food distribution hubs or distribution distributors that really control— they're the ones that have the power, they're the ones that have the influence in the relationship. And the reason why less than high-quality tasting tomatoes prevail in the United States is because of transportation. Because of shippability and storability. And that is really largely controlled by distributors, shippers, processors, and their demands. Like, we know there is no consumer demand for a tomato that tastes like the majority of tomatoes produced, or strawberries, or melons. I mean, there's a number of crops that we could pick, but that demand is— what gets offered to customers is determined by the supply chains rather than by customer demand, or rather even than by what farmers desire to grow. So, uh, when, when we consider that macro landscape and that the very sophisticated food supply web that exists today, I asked a version of this question earlier, but, and you, you responded with the possibility of producing or, or aggregating quality brands. There's a slightly different question, which is Where is— what is the trajectory that you see that we are on now here in North America? What's the trajectory like now? Is there any emerging movement or preference for quality, and how can we shape and influence that?

I see two trends. I think some of the bad stuff is getting worse, but I think there's reason to be hopeful about some positive signs. Like, I, you know, I use the example of craft beer. Farmhouse Cheese is a good example. There are some stores that care more and respond more to these, you know, to consumers who care more about this. Excuse me. I think the more that people travel to other countries, the more they realize that it doesn't need to be this way. So I think over time, hopefully, you know, I think we'll see two different trends, which is that some of the the bad stuff continues to get worse, but that there will be a more differentiated, more sophisticated marketplace that emerges where my hope is that there will be space for products that are produced by, by people with values who care about, about everything, about everything about how food is created, so that they can make a living creating food that should be eaten, that, that creates joy and happiness and pleasure in people who eat it.

I feel like we've just— you have produced such a wealth of work, and, and I really enjoyed, uh, reading your books, but we've only scratched the surface in this conversation. Where can people learn more about the scope of—

they can read the books, um, The Dorito Effect: The End of Craving. Um, I have a Substack, they can— Mark Shasker, they can look it up, where I, I should update it more often than I do, but I talk about some— I talk about some of the research that I do. I wrote one not long ago about onions because I realized that onions used to make me cry when I sliced them and they don't make me cry anymore. And that there's a flavor crisis in onions because it's those compounds that make onions intense where the flavor comes from. So these are the kind of things that obsess me. People might think that's silly, but I think onions are one of, like, one of the most important foundations for cuisine. And they can follow me on social media. I don't— I'm not that active on social media. I just find it such a strange environment. Um, but, uh, yeah, I would say the books and the Substack.

Well, thank you, and I want to say thank you for all the work that you're doing. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. We've only scratched the surface, and I look forward to having more conversations with you.

Thank you, uh, and for the work that you're doing and, uh, bring these important topics to everybody's attention. It was a real pleasure chatting.

The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At AEA, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible, and since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At AEA, we don't guess, we test, we analyze. And we provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge, and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you.