Lemonade: The Rise And Fall Of The Spice Industry

"We live in a world where lemonade is made from artificial flavoring and furniture polish is made from real lemons," said Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman. Throughout history, the spice industry has evolved from primitive humans flavoring meat with leaves, to multi-billion dollar companies injecting chemical compounds into common foods; from tasting a few minute grains on entrées to feeling a discharge of natural and artificial flavors from exquisite candies, and from scavenging the world for priceless spices to inspecting every ingredient for harmful side-affects. The first speculated accounts of adding flavorings or spices to food go back over fifty thousand years, when primitive humans used aromatic leaves to flavor food (Add Spice). They
P. McCormick died of a heart attack in 1970, the company kept manufacturing spices and flavors. By 1979, McCormick had purchased Acquired All Portions, Inc., TV Time Foods, Inc., Astro Foods, Inc. and Han-Dee Pak, Inc. for over ten million dollars. After McCormick Foods, Astro Foods, and Golden West foods started a headquarters in California, a Swiss pharmaceutical firm, announced in October, 1979 that it intended to buy the entire company. By September 1980, it dropped its effort and McCormick's sales surpassed $500 million. The company was growing at an exponential rate, buying every company in its path. McCormick is now in China, the U.K., the Netherlands, and Australia, as well as the United States and Canada (McCormick History). As of 2003, the total net sales were $2.26 billion, with 8,000 employees; McCormick is one of the top competitors in the food industry and the world's number one spice maker
By looking at the label on the back of any products such as drinks or snacks, one can see the vast majority of flavors added to these. There are thousands of different flavor additives, but they are all split into two different categories known as natural flavors and artificial flavors. These flavors are created in a laboratory with different chemicals by a special flavor chemist known as a flavorist (Yerger). In fact, most natural flavors can be cloned into an artificial flavor, and still have the same chemical makeup – the only difference is the natural flavor must be derived from a "spice, fruit, vegetable, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf, meat, fish, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof (Code of Federal Regulations)." But just because it is a "natural" flavor does not mean it is healthier. For example, almond flavor – or benzaldehyde – contains traces of a deadly poison, hydrogen cyanide, when derived from natural sources, yet when using an artificial process, chemists can avoid the cyanide (Schlosser