My dad was fresh out of grad school with a degree in biochemistry when he found himself up to his elbows in white powder. It was 1952, and he had joined a team of scientists at International Minerals & Chemicals (IMC) charged with manufacturing monosodium glutamate from sugar-beet sludge, a process that promised greater profits than starting from scratch with seaweed, as the Japanese had done since 1908.
I remember the pilot plant, a two-story affair on the campus of IMC’s corporate headquarters, in Skokie, Illinois, where the massive administration buildings were referred to as the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Heavy hooks hung from the plant’s ceiling, and dizzying metal stairways spiraled upward. The pungent smell of MSG permeated the air. My dad showed me a toolbox deeply dented by a falling piece of equipment that had almost killed a fellow researcher; then he bought me a bottle of Coke from a nearby machine. It cost a nickel.
IMC got a pretty good payoff for its investment in MSG. Ac’cent hit the market in 1954 in a soon-to-be-familiar stunted jar with a red plastic screw cap, the odd punctuation mark necessitated by a shampoo already in stores called Accent. Soon after my twin brothers were born, in the fall of 1955, an article appeared in Reader’s Digest extolling “the amazing white crystals that accentuate flavors without changing them &. It makes steaks seem juicier and vegetables taste more succulent.” A few months later, my maternal grandfather called to report that he was shaking Ac’cent on boiled eggs and dill pickles and swallowing a spoonful every morning to improve his outlook on life.
But marketing MSG as a consumer condiment was only the beginning. Soon manufacturers like Campbell Soup Company were dumping it into their products, and demand soared in the food industry. A handful of conglomerates, including IMC, raced to develop further glutamate derivatives, along with inosinates, guanylates, hydrolyzed proteins, and other additives with a variety of objectives, some less than admirable. As Reader’s Digest put it about MSG crystals: “They improve the taste of leftovers which have lost flavor in the refrigerator. On steam tables in restaurants, the crystals keep foods from getting that overcooked taste.” Foodwise, we stood at the dawn of the chemical age.
No wonder the formulator—the person who transformed these compounds, derivatives, and additives into food—was an all-powerful figure. This was the scientist who stood at the center of an army of chemists, technicians, and home economists, dreaming up products and then supervising the development of industrial recipes.
My father, Jacob Sietsema, became a formulator in 1959 for Pillsbury. His area of responsibility in those days was frostings and angel food cakes. In the morning he would think up a potential product and make a list of ingredients and instructions. He’d go to the statistical clerk, who would take his list and prepare a grid showing differing proportions of ingredients. This chart would then go to chemists in the pilot plant, who would prep and measure constituents, then to bakers, who would create a series of cakes following the instructions on the chart.
At the end of the day, my dad would saunter into the home economics area, where there was a tall shelf with 20 or so pigeonholes, each of which held a slightly different version of the cake he’d thought up that morning. He’d examine, poke, and taste each one, all the while speaking into a Dictaphone. A night secretary would type up the notes and they’d be on his desk the next morning.
My father never touched a utensil or an ingredient, yet he was responsible for all the products under his development. Between the morning’s recipe and the evening’s taste-o-rama, he’d go around to all the labs, test kitchens, and taste panels that were evaluating his products. If problems occurred, he would solve them the next day with a new set of formulations.
During the 1960s, he developed creamy frostings, fluffy frostings, pudding cakes, angel food cakes, “confetti” cakes with little bits of candy in them, an “Aunt Jane” piecrust enhanced with eggs and vinegar (released from a chemical powder when the crust was heated), au gratin potatoes, and a line of powdered beverages with sophisticated flavors for adults.
But his most memorable Pillsbury product, a project he took over soon after it was initiated, was Funny Face drinks. Unlike Kool-Aid, whose vulnerability was the need to stir stupefying quantities of white sugar into cold water, Funny Face, a heady chemical cocktail of saccharin, sodium and calcium cyclamates, and artificial flavors, dissolved instantly. I remember my seven-year-old brothers sitting at the kitchen table trying to think up names for the flamboyant fruit characters that decorated the packages. The original 1964 flavors were Goofy Grape, Freckle Face Strawberry, Loud Mouth Lime, Rootin’ Tootin’ Raspberry, Chinese Cherry, and Injun’ Orange—though the last two were hurriedly changed to Choo-Choo Cherry and Jolly Olly Orange. The cyclamate scare of the late 1960s caused Pillsbury to replace the artificial sweeteners with sugar, and the product line was eventually sold to another company. I remember its last days, when some of it was given away free at service stations with the purchase of gasoline.
With all the attention my father was paying to nuances of flavor, you might think that our home dinner table must have been a gourmet’s paradise. Far from it. While James Beard and Julia Child were busy reinventing American food in the French mold out East, and M.F.K. Fisher was savoring every last garden-grown bite in the West, dinner for most of us in the Midwest was a predictable cycle of meat loaf, well-done roast beef, pot roast, spaghetti with meat sauce, baked chicken, hot dogs, hamburgers, frozen halibut steaks, and the ubiquitous fish sticks. And even though our neighborhood in suburban Minneapolis could be called multicultural, it was fervently assimilationist. Most kids didn’t even know what their ethnic category was—let alone its favorite dishes.
Our lives in the early ’60s were ruled by science, and we cherished the belief that technology—not politics or religion—held the key to a better life. Each innovation in food technology was eagerly embraced. Mashed-potato flakes made potatoes dug from the ground a rarity. And I remember the moment frozen vegetables supplanted canned in our home, when we were permanently liberated from ever again having to eat canned peas, green beans, or, most hated of all, creamed corn. Instead, there was a bowl of bright-green broccoli on the table, or gleaming white cauliflower, vegetables we had never seen before. Almost overnight every house on our street had a Deepfreeze in the basement, and it was loaded with TV dinners.
In 1967 my father left Pillsbury for Frito-Lay, an empire in flux. Besides corn and potato chips, Frito-Lay, which would soon merge with Pepsi-Cola to become PepsiCo, boasted only a handful of products: Rold Gold pretzels, Cheetos, Ruffles, and fried pork skins. Plain Doritos had just been introduced in an attempt to create a milder product that would appeal to Yankees, who, it was believed, had a natural aversion to the heavy and strongly flavored Fritos.
At Frito-Lay’s brand-new Irving, Texas, laboratories, the formulator system had been dismantled in favor of power decentralization. My father, now a product development manager, measured his own ingredients and mixed his own batches of dough, in addition to designing extruder nozzles and running his own experiments. He no longer interacted directly with suppliers. And the final taste of a product was no longer his responsibility. Instead, the marketing department ran multiple versions of a product through consumer and taste-panel tests.
Nevertheless, my dad flourished under the new system, making contributions to a variety of new products as the company sought to fill every niche in the expanding junk-food market: sour cream and onion potato chips, Baked Cheetos, Chili Cheese Fritos, Munchos, Tostitos, Taco Flavored Doritos, and, yes, Nacho Cheese Doritos. Years of research he conducted on “healthy” snacks using whole grains and fewer additives resulted, after his retirement, in the rollout of Sunchips. He also worked on crunchy-on-the-outside-but-chewy-in-the-middle Grand Ma’s cookies (a food-technology wonder), wheat-based Fritos (never marketed), and a line of drink mixes for adults with the carbonation built right into the powder—a project that was later quashed.
Increasingly, though, my father was tapped to work on snacks for the international market. His first foreign assignment, in a rundown Mexico City neighborhood, was to retool a factory that made chips out of pork skins. Using wheat pellets, he developed a product that closely resembled chicharrones. The next year he went to the Canary Islands to launch Munchitos, chips made from potato flakes that were the forerunner of Pringles. In Japan he introduced Baked Cheetos, using cheese from Australia, and Funyuns, formulated with a sugar coating to mimic traditional Japanese crackers.
I was off at college by this time and would return home to find the kitchen shelves lined with shiny silver bubble packs of test snacks. My father would always ask how I liked each one, and he seemed to take my comments to heart. But something had changed. My father was becoming disillusioned with the food industry. He explained his reservations to me: “Food companies take quality products that are well made with simple ingredients, which the public loves, and, little by little, they start to change the ingredients. Whey and enzyme-modified cheese replace aged Cheddar; cocoa is substituted for chocolate liquor—the list goes on and on—all to reduce manufacturing costs or improve shelf life. Chemicals are added to mask off flavors, and more chemicals are added to mask the additives. Eventually you have a list of ingredients as long as your arm, and you wake up one day and find that products you once loved taste horrible.”
It was not until the end of my father’s 40-odd years in the food industry that he witnessed the reintroduction of real cheese into many snacks, Cheetos among them. By then he and my mother, like many other Americans, were increasingly eating a diet of fresh vegetables and other unadulterated food products, avoiding chemical additives. Even so, he wasn’t disappointed last year with the appearance of several articles exonerating MSG as the cause of the so-called Chinese restaurant syndrome and championing its continued use.
Like everything else in life, attitudes about food come full circle.