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Craving french fries a mystery
Published:
Thursday, October 24, 2002
Nara Schoenberg
Chicago Tribune
Add this to the great mysteries of modern life, up there with the ultimate destination of missing socks and the existence of the Adam Sandler Fan Club: What makes the french fry taste so good?
There are answers of course, with ordinary fry-eaters offering, “It’s the fat, stupid,” and experts pointing to everything from chemistry to nostalgia to evolutionary psychology.
But if you’re looking for The Answer, good luck. The truth is that other foods satisfy our craving for salt and fat, trigger childhood memories, and undergo the chemical reactions that lead to satisfying cooked or “browned” flavors.
And yet none occupies the same place in the American food pantheon as the fry.
“I’m not sure why they’ve gotten to the point where people appreciate them so much,” says Keith Cadwallader, a professor of food science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Certainly, the fry is a good candidate for side-dish stardom. For one thing, it has salt.
“Evolutionarily, salt was important to our survival,” says Alan Hirsch, neurological director of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago. That may be why salt is at or near the top of our list of food cravings.
And then there’s fat.
“We know that fat is a very important in flavor” because it affects the aroma of food, which in turn strongly affects our experience of taste, Cadwallader says. Fat controls the release of aroma, allowing only a little bit at a time to escape.
And, of course, we have the potato factor. Here we can give thanks to what scientists call the Maillard Reaction, a chemical reaction involving amino acids and sugars, which produces what we know as that great cooked-potato taste.
But the fry’s appeal isn’t as neat as a list of ingredients or as clear-cut as a chemical equation.
“No one actually knows why people like certain foods, so you can only make generalizations,” says Michael O’Mahony, a professor of food science at the University of California at Davis.
Among the complicating factors is the psychology of food: We’re introduced to french fries as small children, so eating them can trigger positive emotions such as nostalgia, Hirsch says. And we eat fries as treats, so they remind us of times when we felt deserving of a reward.
Taste itself tends to be subjective, with people bringing emotional baggage _ say, a bad food poisoning incident _ to the table, along with a lifetime of habits and expectations.
Scientists who study taste can’t chase such factors from the lab. They ask ordinary people to rate foods on a nine-point scale, Cadwallader says, a process that highlights the subjective nature of taste: “It’s a personal opinion, like politics.”
And consider this: People tend to like the foods they have grown accustomed to, and avoid the ones that are unfamiliar.
In other words, eating french fries leads to eating french fries.
“I suppose if (McDonald’s) made fried broccoli, the next generation would like it too,” Hirsch says.
