Old recipes just don't work any more. Even following Julia Child's roast chicken instructions to the letter, the results are...bland. Tomatoes are watery and pale. It turns out that even veggies have fewer vitamins and minerals than 50 years ago. The green revolution that made food cheaper and more plentiful via selective breeding, feed innovations and genetic engineering has kept us from $30 chickens, but the $5 chickens require substantial flavor correction. Even with globalization, traditional herbs and spices just don't deliver--but designed chemicals can (with the help of gas chromatography) deliver note-perfect vanilla (and not be dependent on Madagascar politics), stronger strawberry and punched-up chilies. Food companies are *really* good at it, even eschewing demographic groups for "need states"--the desire for excitement, comfort or hipness--that cut across age, ethnicity and class. Schatzker offers a view into the reasons why Doritos are so good at making us feel better than the more subtle, slow-grown flavors of a old stewed chicken, and the wide-scale effects of this shift in food production.