6 Common Food Additives You Should Know About

At a fundamental level, the most polarizing preservatives—those with microbe-stopping power—preserve food by disabling the microbial machinery that bacteria, yeast, and molds use to grow. Some, like sorbic acid and benzoic acid, share a strategy in common with acetic acid in vinegar: They’re Trojan horses. They appear harmless, bypassing the cellular defenses of pathogens like Listeria, then delivering a burst of enzyme-disabling acid inside the cell. Other preservatives, such as nitrites and nitrates used for curing meats, take a more indirect approach. They mimic some of the chemical attributes of oxygen to create an inhospitable environment for the growth of certain oxygen-hating microbes, such as Clostridium botulinum, which causes botulism and thrives in low-oxygen environments.

Chemical preservatives aren’t the only way to keep food safe and fresh, but no single preservation method works without compromise. Heat pasteurization kills microbes, but some foods get real gross real fast when heated—imagine what would happen if you boiled a quart of egg salad or creamy basil pesto—and excessive heating can degrade some nutrients. Freezing can preserve virtually any food, but the energy required to freeze, store, and distribute frozen foods drives prices up higher than their shelf-stable counterparts.

Salt works great for preserving soy sauce and pickles, but most people have a finite sodium consumption budget. Alcoholic beverages are virtually impervious to pathogens but can only be consumed in limited quantities. Dehydrated foods don’t have enough water to support microbial life, but not everything tastes great when dried.

Food companies don’t put preservatives into food out of malice; they do it in order to meet the demands that consumers communicate to them. Decades of consumer behavior trends have taught food companies that we want cheap prices, long shelf lives, and portable convenience. In many instances, the only way to deliver all of that in one package is to use preservatives. Anyone who wants to consume fewer preservatives can do so, but they must have the means to pay premium prices and sacrifice some consistency, convenience, and portability in the food they buy.

Flavors

Flavors are basically edible fireworks. Whereas preservatives carry the heavy burden of acting as a shield between our food and the microbial or oxidative forces that try to corrupt it, flavors exist purely for our entertainment. There are hundreds of molecules that excite our olfactory bulbs and taste buds, and the way those molecules are gathered determines how the flavoring ingredient is categorized.

Extracts are tastes and aromas pulled directly from a specific food like vanilla beans, lemon peels, or hazelnuts. These sources—like many spices, herbs, flowers, citrus, and nuts—naturally stockpile strong-smelling oils, which are vital for a potent extract.

Ingredients that lack essential oil reservoirs typically don’t have the aromatic firepower to make extracts on their own, which is where natural flavors come in. Natural flavors technically must consist of tasty or smelly molecules extracted from plants, animals, fungi, or other biological sources, but, unlike extracts, they can include cocktails of flavor notes from multiple sources. To create a natural strawberry flavor, for example, a flavoring ingredient supplier might take the soft, delicate aroma from a kettle full of strawberries and amplify it with fruity aromas gathered from other fruits, like apples or blueberries, to create a flavor that packs the right punch to echo loudly throughout a bag of strawberry candy. There are also strawberry-type natural flavors that don’t include any actual strawberries as the source material, instead relying solely on other berries, vegetables, or ingredients like caramelized sugar to conjure the right balance of grassiness, creaminess, and ripe fruitiness to evoke strawberries.