Deep in the heart of the exotic forests of Madagascar live an exotic people who grow
an exotic bean, and this exotic bean has an exotic flavor with an exotic name.
They call it…
“Vanilla.”
Wait, wait, wait… vanilla?
Vanilla’s not exotic at all—it’s in everything from ice cream to pastries to shampoo
to vapes!
I mean, it’s literally synonymous with bland and boring… right?
But, surprise twist of narrative perspective!
Vanilla’s not actually as common as you’d think—in fact, it’s actually still the
second-most expensive spice in the world.
The reason that vanilla became such a widespread flavor actually has to do with how easy it
is to mimic.
Vanilla was one of the first artificial flavors ever created, and to this day, an estimated
90% to 97% of all vanilla-flavored things don’t have any real vanilla at all.
Now, this might come as kind of a surprise, because vanilla-flavored things actually taste
like vanilla, and we expect artificial flavors to taste like a godless affront to Mother
Nature.
So, what makes vanilla so easy to fake, and what is it about other artificial flavors
that tastes so… artificial?
Well in order to explain what tastes wrong about artificial flavors, we need to talk
about what a flavor actually is.
You see, there are actually only five tastes your tongue can detect, so when you’re thinking
of distinct flavors—like the difference between a blue slushie and a red slushie—you’re
actually thinking of aromas.
Flavors are really just a combination of chemicals that you smell while consuming a food.
Your other senses kind of come into play as well, but I don’t really have time to get
into all of that, so I’m just going to cram all of those irrelevant fun facts into the
next two seconds.
Got it?
Good.
Now that we’re on the same page, let’s get into why artificial flavors taste so wrong.
Much like a baby, there are two main ways an artificial flavor can be conceived: on
purpose or by accident.
Some of the most iconic wrong-tasting tastes were discovered when someone decided that
a new chemical just kind of reminded them of a real flavor.
For example, methyl anthranilate—better known as artificial grape, or, more accurately,
vaguely purple flavor—didn’t actually come from grapes.
Chemists had been pulling it from a slightly less popular snack—industrial coal tar—and
using it as grape flavoring for decades before anyone discovered that it could actually be
found, in trace amounts, in real grapes.
An even weirder example would be isoamyl acetate, which my American viewers would recognize
as artificial banana, but my English viewers might recognize as artificial pear… or whatever
it is that they call pears over there.
And that’s because, sorry to break it to you, but isoamyl acetate is just a vaguely
fruity flavor—since Jargonelle pears were all the rage in England when the chemical
was first discovered, they decided to market it as pear.
But over in the US, where those pears weren’t as popular, they told people it tasted like
banana instead—and since most 19th century Americans had no idea what bananas tasted
like, everyone was just like, “oh yeah, totally, this is definitely what bananas taste
like.”
And just as a side note, bananas did actually taste more like their Laffy Taffy counterparts
until the 1950s when they were all killed off and replaced by backup bananas, but we
have a whole other video about that if you’re just here for banana facts.
Anyway… for a long time, this was basically how all flavors were created; chemists would
be synthesizing some new poison to kill a Sultan with, notice that their lab smelled
vaguely like apples, and bottle up whatever was oozing from their machines for children
to enjoy around the world.
Obviously, it makes sense why a lot of these early artificial flavors—some of which we
still use today—don’t taste quite right: it’s because they… aren’t right.
But we don’t live in the 1800s anymore; we have penicillin, rocket ships, and we can
even make things taste like apples on purpose.
In fact, we know exactly which 300 or so chemicals make up the composition of an apple, so why
is it that green Jolly Ranchers still taste like someone candied a rod of uranium?
Well, it’s because translating that list of chemicals to a candy flavor is more complicated
than you’d think.
This job is left up to people called “flavorists,” and it’s so tricky that there are only about
500 of them in the world.
Basically, what they do is they take a real food like a strawberry, and mush it up—seems
easy so far, but there’s actually more to it than that.
They then have to sort through the hundreds of different chemicals that end up in the
air, and figure out which ones they need to recreate the food’s flavor.
In some cases, all you need is a single chemical—this is why vanilla is so easy to synthesize; it
gets its flavor almost entirely from just one compound called “vanillin.”
Most flavors, though, aren’t so simple—getting a decently accurate strawberry flavor requires
20 or 30 different chemicals, and that’s only a small sample of what you’d find in
the real deal.
To make matters more complicated, identifying what chemicals contribute to a flavor isn’t
exactly intuitive; chemists couldn’t crack artificial raspberry until they tried adding
a substance that smelled like cat urine, which was also a godsend for the chemists trying
to crack artificial cat urine.
But before anyone decides swear off artificial flavors because they’re scared of guzzling
cat urine, I should clarify that they’re technically no different than so-called natural
flavors, which are also made by mashing chemicals together in a lab—it’s just that instead
of being sourced from petroleum or wood pulp, they’re sourced from something that’s
slightly more edible.
But at the end of the day, these natural and artificial flavors are just the real flavors
with a few chemicals missing.
They’re like… low-resolution flavors.
Artificial strawberry is just strawberry with bad graphics.
Could we make it more accurate?
Sure.
Is it possible to make a grape flavor that has anything to do with grapes?
Most definitely.
But let’s be honest: there’s just something special about the sweet, sweet taste of that
industrial coal tar.
But you know what also tastes good?
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