Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal Read Online Free Page B

metaphor. They patented a system whereby snack-food bags could be printed with a bar code allowing consumers to retrieve and download a fifteen-second audio clip of a symphonic interlude, with the different instruments representing the various flavor components. Eapen, in his patent, used the example of a salsa-flavored corn chip. “A piano intro begins upon the customer’s perception of the cilantro flavoring. . . . The full band section occurs at approximately the time that the consumer perceives the tomatillo and lime flavors. . . . A second melody section corresponds to the sensation of the heat burn imparted by the Serrano chili.” U.S. Patent No. 7,942,311 includes sheet music for the salsa-flavored chip experience.
    * It could be worse. In 1984, goat-milk flavor panelists were enlisted by a team of Pennsylvania ag researchers to sleuth the source of a nasty “goaty” flavor that intermittently fouls goat milk. The main suspect was a noxious odor from the scent glands of amorous male goats. But there was also this: “The buck in rut sprays urine over its chin and neck area.” Five pungent compounds isolated from the urine and scent glands of rutting males were added, one at a time, to samples of pure, sweet goat milk. The panelists rated each sample for “goaty” “rancid,” and “musky-melon” flavors. Simple answers proved elusive. “A thorough investigation of ‘goaty’ flavor,” the researchers concluded, “is beyond the scope of this paper.”
    * Probably more. The Handbook of Fruit and Vegetable Flavors includes a four-page table of aroma compounds identified in fresh pineapple: 716 chemicals in all.



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    I’ll Have the Putrescine
    YOUR PET IS NOT LIKE YOU

    D ESPITE THE CRYPTIC name and anonymous office-park architecture, the nature of the enterprise that goes on at AFB International is clear the moment you sit down for a meeting. The conference room smells like kibble. One wall of it, entirely glass, looks onto a small-scale kibble extrusion plant where men and women in lab coats and blue sanitary shoe covers tootle here and there pushing metal carts. AFB makes flavor coatings for dry pet foods. To test the coatings, they first need to make small batches of plain kibble and add the coatings. The flavored kibbles are then presented to consumer panels for feedback. The panelists—Spanky, Thomas, Skipper, Porkchop, Rover, Elvis, Sandi, Bela, Yankee, Fergie, Murphy, Limburger, and some three hundred other dogs and cats—reside at AFB’s Palatability Assessment Resource Center (PARC), about an hour’s drive from the company’s suburban St. Louis headquarters.
    AFB Vice President Pat Moeller, myself, and a few other staff members are seated around an oval conference table. Moeller is middle-aged, likable, and plain-spoken. He has a small mouth with naturally deep red lips and a pronounced Cupid’s bow, but it would be inaccurate to say he has a feminine appearance. Moeller once consulted for NASA, and he has that look. The fundamental challenge of the pet-food professional, Moeller is saying, is to balance the wants and needs of pets with those of their owners. The two are often at odds.
    Dry, cereal-based pet foods caught on during World War II, when tin-rationing put a stop to canning, including the canning of dog food made from horse meat (of which there was an abundance around the time Americans embraced the automobile and began selling their mounts to the knackers). Regardless of what pets made of the change, owners were delighted. Dry pet food was less messy and stinky, and more convenient. As a satisfied Spratt’s Patent Cat Food customer of yesteryear put it, the little biscuits were “both handy and cleanly.”
    To meet pets’ nutrition requirements while also giving humans the cheap, handy, cleanly product they demand, mainstream pet-food manufacturers blend animal fats and meals with soy and wheat grains and add vitamins and minerals. This yields a cheap, nutritious pellet that