Inside the Food Labs

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Certainly not everybody needs or wants to know about the humectants in snacks. Scientific reductionism is fine in astronomy or physics, but it's another thing entirely when your dinner is involved. There are few things more intimate than the preparation of food--an ancient, imprecise craft built on pinches and dashes and tasting things at the stove. What are old-style cooks to do when this quiet craft is elbowed aside by an industry in which flavor concentrations are measured in parts per billion and companies like IFF can sell, without irony, a product called Fleximint, "a tool kit for mint work"?

Traditionalists may abhor all this, but the food scientists are only doing what we ask them to do: respond to the needs of 280 million people all trying to eat at once and do so in the most enjoyable, affordable and nutritious way possible. It's the industry's job to fill the national plate; it's our job to decide which parts of that vast meal we want to eat. --With reporting by Dan Cray/Los Angeles and Maggie Sieger/Chicago