Frontiers Of Flavour

In ad 1271, Marco Polo travelled to the farthest reaches of Asia and discovered the origins of what had become the linchpin of European social order: spice. Spice ruled the ancient world. Empires rose and fell, religions began and thrived, wars were fought, and fortunes made, all driven by the engine of flavour. Food back then was neither good nor particularly palatable. Medieval man preserved his meat with salt and then cooked it until thoroughly charred. Spice delivered a gastronomic orgy reserved only for the wealthy and the powerful. A pound of ginger would cost you a sheep. Pepper was worth more than gold. Arab traders sold it peppercorn by peppercorn.

Today, the spice trade continues to flourish, but not just in the common and inexpensive herbs and botanicals you find dried on your grocer’s shelves. The substances now more valuable than gold are the biochemical molecules of flavour themselves. Without the potent chemicals carefully designed by the flavour industry, processed food—i.e., food that has been prepared, frozen, canned, extruded, bottled, jarred, dried, or vacuum-packed—would be essentially inedible. About 90 percent of what Americans spend on food goes to buying processed food.

The world market for manufactured flavours is about $8 billion (US) per year. You see them in those cryptic phrases listed on most packaged-food labels: natural flavour or artificial flavour. The typical American eats one out of four meals in restaurants, including fast-food restaurants, and most fast food is dosed with flavourings. Even so-called “white tablecloth” eateries commonly employ sauces, dressings, stocks, and beverages that include flavouring. Two-thirds of the remainder of the American diet consists of processed food, and most of it contains added flavour.

The flavour industry spans the earth, shaping the human palate and, by extension, global culture itself. What we taste, often, is the strange alchemy of a group of specialists who inhabit a parallel world, a place where food is abstract, where strawberry is a relative concept. Food tastes the way it does because a flavour scientist spent weeks combining molecules to make it so.

So when Givaudan, the world’s largest flavour and fragrance manufacturer, invited me to travel with them to China on a TasteTrek, sniffing around for new flavours and ingredients that might prove useful in their global efforts to colonize the human tongue, I packed my bags. If we are what we eat, what are we when what we consume is a simulacrum, a caricature of food, created in a Cincinnati lab?

Shanghai: Pearl of the Orient, whore of Asia. China: Land of mystery and intrigue, the inscrutable east.

Nonsense.

Judging from the massive redevelopment project that is modern Shanghai, China is actively wiping away five millennia of culture and tradition in one sweep of the bulldozer. Construction cranes fill the horizon like wheat in a Saskatchewan field. At last report, Shanghai alone had over 300 high-rise buildings under construction.

My hotel sits on the bank of the Huangpu River opposite Shanghai proper, in Pudong. Fifteen years ago, Pudong was a bunch of rice paddies. Then Beijing decided that it should become one of the financial centres of Asia, so, like a theme hotel in Las Vegas, they invented a city. And it is just as surreal. Gleaming glass towers, thirty to ninety storeys tall, shimmer in the late-setting sunlight. Most sport futurist designs seemingly created by architects overdosed on 1950s sci-fi flicks and episodes of The Jetsons. The Oriental Pearl TV Tower, at 468 metres the tallest tower in Asia, looks like three Styrofoam balls stuck on a metal music stand.

As widely reported, the New China boom has transformed 1.3 billion people into a supercharged mass of industry and enterprise propelled by the fear that it could all end tomorrow. Walking through Shanghai, it struck me as a culture hooked on cocaine; everyone is dancing as fast as he or she can, living intensely for the moment, unaware of where it will lead.