You are eating chemicals!!!

            In the modern society today, our requirement on food has far increase as compared to our grandparent’s day. Many of us would prefer fast, delicious and cheap food. That is why scientist has created such thing called food flavourings. Back in those days, our grandparent made food by pickling food for a period of time before they actually cook them. Due to the convenience, food industries nowadays use chemical flavourings instead of the traditional ways. The main reason is food flavourings can make food taste more delicious or enhance the original flavour. Table below shows some example of food and the reasons for adding flavour into them.

Food	Reasons for adding flavour
Margarine	Taste is unacceptable without the addition of favourings.
Ice cream	Taste is unacceptable without the addition of favourings.
Meat substitutes such as soya protein and mycoprotein	These are low fat and extremely nutritious food, however, they have bland and uninteresting taste without the addition of flavor.
Wine gums / table jelly	No flavor at all without the addition of flavouring.
Yogurt	May have a natural flavour present but possibly at a low intensity. Flavourings may be added to enhance the natural flavour

           Monosodium glutamate, MSG is one of the examples of food flavouring which is used worldwide. It is a salt of glutamic acid, one of the building blocks that make up animal and vegetable proteins. It occurs in virtually all protein containing foods including meats, fish, vegetables and dairy products. Various cheeses, tomatoes, peas and mushrooms are among the foods richest in glutamate. Glutamate from our diet is a source of energy for the digestive system, and the human body itself produces around 48 grams of glutamate every day. Glutamate is found in abundance in mothers' milk, at levels about ten times that found in cows' milk. The glutamate naturally present in food and the glutamate derived from MSG are treated by the body in exactly the same way.

In 1907 a Japanese scientist observed that there was a taste, common to many savoury foods, which did not fall into the category of the four well known tastes of sweet, sour, bitter and salty. Professor Ikeda called this new taste "umami". Through experiments with stock prepared from kombu seaweed (an ingredient in traditional Japanese cuisine) he identified glutamate as the source of umami and decided to use it to produce a food seasoning. MSG was first marketed in Japan in 1909.

Doubt was thrown on the safety of monosodium glutamate when reports of nausea, numbness and dizziness were linked to its use. This became known as 'Chinese restaurant syndrome'. Despite this hundreds of studies conducted by scientific and regulatory authorities, including the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives, the US Food and Drug Administration and the American Medical Association have repeatedly affirmed its safety.

Besides, some food flavourings are made artificially. Many of the processed foods that you buy today come with an ingredient label that lists "artificial flavors" as one of the key ingredients. Artificial flavors are simply chemical mixtures that mimic a natural flavor in some way. Any natural flavor is normally quite complex, with dozens or hundreds of chemicals interacting to create the taste/smell. But it turns out that many flavors -- particularly fruit flavors -- have just one or a few dominant chemical components that carry the bulk of the taste/smell signal. Many of these chemicals are called esters. An ester is an organic compound that is formed when a carboxylic acid reacts with an alcohol. Esters give nice fragrances such as apple, orange and pineapple aroma. That is why esters are widely used in bakery and other food industry. For example, the ester called Octyl Acetate (CH3COOC8H17) is a fundamental component in orange flavor. The ester called isoamyl acetate (CH3COOC5H11) is a fundamental component of banana flavor. If you add these esters to a product, the product will taste, to some degree, like orange or banana. To make more realistic flavors you add other chemicals in the correct proportions to get closer and closer to the real thing. You can do that by trial and error or by chemical analysis of the real thing.

There are hundreds of chemicals known to be flavoring agents. It's interesting that they are normally mixed to create "known" tastes. People make artificial grape, cherry, orange, banana, apple, etc. flavors, but it is very rare to mix up something that no one has ever tasted before. But it can and does happen occasionally -- take Juicy Fruit gum as an example!