Could you make a food product entirely out of "natural flavors"?

Factual Questions
1

Reading this thread gave me the idea, but I think the topic is broad enough for it’s own thread.

Could you make a food product entirely out of “natural flavors”? We all know there’s a litany of things in the “natural flavors” category, but A - not being a food scientist and B - not knowing what all counts as “natural flavors”, I wonder if an entire product could be made out of the ingredients that get lumped together in that category.

For example - could you make a snack cake by substituting something for the flour, the filling and the icing that could all fall into the natural flavors bucket? Maybe a drink with nothing but natural flavors? A whole meal?

Assume for purposes of this question that cost is no object - a $100 snack cake would count as long as the only thing legally required to be listed on the label is “natural flavors”. Let’s also assume it has to be edible (which I assume it must be since the FDA lets us put it in our food) and not barf-inducing (i.e. a reasonable person could eat it without gagging) but it doesn’t have to replicate the flavor and texture exactly (say, the “chocolate icing” could taste like beef and bananas and be crunchy, so long as it was edible and the picture on the box would be a reasonable facsimile of the real thing).

2

Does birch beer count? It’s traditionally made with water, sugar, yeast, spices and birch oil.

3

Wasn’t all food made of all natural ingredients with natural flavors not too long ago. Salt, Milk, whole grain flour, honey, fruits, vegetables and fresh unprocessed meat are pretty much staples that can be made into many items. Go to a farmers market and check out the homemade jams like blackberry, strawberry and peach preserves. Or ice cream, pretty basic there too.

4

Flavorings tend to be used in microscopic amounts, often less than a percent of the content even in combination. I don’t know that there’s any “flavoring agent” that has any significant bulk at all until you get to things like sugar, which is a flavor ingredient but not a “flavoring.”

If water is allowed, your question is answered by any soda and “water” aisle.

5

None of these answers really get to my question. I’m not asking for foods that are natural, I’m asking for ingredients that get lumped into the nebulous “natural flavorings” category instead of being listed separately.

Water, sugar, yeast, etc will show up as an ingredient on the ingredient list on a nutrition label. Ice creams would have the ingredients listed as “milk, sugar, eggs”, not “natural flavorings”. I’m talking about the things like crushed up bugs that happen to taste like raspberries, or the famed beaver anal gland extract that nobody uses in food anymore, that aren’t listed separately but show up on the label as “natural flavoring”.

EDIT: I realize none of these are used in bulk. But if you had a pound of crushed up bugs that taste like coffee (or whatever), could you make a facsimile of a ‘normal’ food item out of it?

6

The answer is in what’s already been posted, but to summarize, “No.” Most flavorings are either very intense in flavor or don’t taste anything like expected unless blended 1000:1 or more with diluting substances.

I can’t think of any “flavoring” agents or substances that would make a tasty snack, alone or in any combination.

7

Per OP, it doesn’t have to be tasty, just edible.

8

Stuff like Pringles and Cheetos are just puffed up something or other and then sprayed with natural flavors. That’s what it looks like on those “How stuff is made” shows.

9

The ingredient list for cheetos lists a TON of things besides “natural and artificial flavors”, so it’s not really what I’m curious about.

10

Likebacobits?

11

All flavorings are inherently “edible,” so almost any large quantity of any mix of “natural flavorings” would be “edible” by that standard.

Some might be toxic or indigestible in full bites, just as, say, salt is. But you could eat a cube of salt with few serious effects. Most flavorings that are appealing in dabs, though, would be about as tasty and appealing as a Saltsicle in bulk.

12

While those are edible, they also contain an ingredient list that has many items on it that are not “artificial and natural flavorings”.

I’m will to expand to “artificial and natural flavorings” since that’s what’s most often seen on the label.

And I’m not really looking for real life examples, because I seriously doubt there are any (although if there are, it’ll be easy to tell, because the ingredients list will be one item long). I’m asking if you could make something that is edible, and looks like a normal product, but if it were actually sold would have only “artificial and natural flavorings” on the ingredients list and NOTHING ELSE. Of course it would never make it onto a store shelf because I’m sure it would be gross and wildly unhealthy, I’m just asking if it’s possible.

13

I believe that natural flavors, by definition, have to be additives and not the main substance itself. I imagine a factual answer can be dragged out of here: http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr=501.22

14

This list provides some substances the FDA considers natural flavors. Castor oil is on the list, so this would seem to indicate that a nutritional label for castor oil could read simply as “natural flavors”.

15

So orange juice isn’t a natural flavour, but orange oil is.

It might mean that Marmite qualifies as food made of natural flavours according the FDA (but whether any normal person thinks it’s edible is up for debate :wink: )

16

Interestingly, according to “Fast Food Nation”, the distinction between artificial and natural flavors is actually minor.

In both cases, the flavors are constructed from suites of basic chemicals. If the chemicals are synthesized, the flavor is ‘artificial’. If the chemicals are extracted from plants & things found in nature, the flavor is ‘natural’.

17

Interesting list. The part about “They are used in the minimum quantity required to produce their intended physical or technical effect” seems to indicate using enough to make the end product look like something would prevent it from being labeled “natural flavoring”

Psh, no normal person thinks marmite is anything more than a practical joke by the Aussies.

18

Even if we grant you that there is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between “natural” an “artificial” flavorings and foodstuffs, which is very dubious, your question is incoherent. To start with, there is nothing “unnatural” or artificial about the flour in a cake (unless you think that harvesting and milling the wheat, and refining the flour, make it unnatural, but then, most “natural flavorings” will have undergone far more processing than that). You may say it is not a “flavor” (although it certainly imparts a flavor to the cake), but, if that is so, it is because it is there to provide the main substance or body of the cake, rather than just affect its flavor. By that criterion, anything you used to constitute the main body of the cake (whether natural or artificial - however you may define those slippery terms) would not count as a “natural flavor” because it would not count as a flavor. Thus, either a cake is already made from “natural flavors”, such as the natural product, wheat flour, or it could not possibly be, because, by definition, anything that makes up a substantial part of the substance of a food does not count as a flavoring. (The same argument can be made regarding other elements of the cake, such as the sugar, another natural product, that makes up most of the substance of the icing.)

You are confused again. The delectable Marmite is a British product. The Australians invented a substitute for it, Vegemite, when they were unable to import sufficient quantities of the real thing to satisfy their very understandable love of its flavor. In any case, if we are distinguishing between flavorings and actual foodstuffs, as you seem to want to, Marmite (and Vegemite), although they are highly nutritious, are probably better understood as flavorings, to be added to other foods (such as bread and butter) in small quantities, in order to make them more delicious.

19

Perhaps it is different in other parts of the world, but what I have tried to explain, several times in this thread (does anyone read the whole thread? we had a poll about this!) is I mean “natural flavorings” as the catchall category that appears on ingredients lists in the nutrition label mandated by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, which can contain a lot of questionable additives. Chingon and Construct posted links described what I’m talking about.

Whether it is natural or otherwise I could care less. I care if it falls into the “natural or artificial flavorings” category on food labels. As such your post makes no sense in the context of this thread.

20

Let’s start with the definition of what a natural flavoring really is…

The term natural flavor or natural flavoring means the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional. Natural flavors, include the natural essence or extractives obtained from plants listed in subpart A of part 582 of this chapter, and the substances listed in 172.510 of this chapter.

So can we make a snack cake from this stuff? We could certainly make a sculpture that looked like a snack cake.

For example, the flavor component of bananas is isoamyl acetate, which you could make by using alcohol to extract it from mashed bananas and then distilling off the alcohol and drying what was left and grinding it into a powder. Since isoamyl acetate is not water soluble, you could then wet the powder with water and make it into a paste and then use a mold to form the paste into the shape of a snack cake and let it dry. You could use more of that same paste in a pastry bag to decorate the top so it looks like it has frosting, and then all you need to do is “paint” the sculpture with a flavor compound of the appropriate color and Bob’s your uncle!

The idea is that any powder that doesn’t dissolve in water can be the “clay” for your sculpture and basically any compound can be the “paint” (as either a suspension or extract) and the rest is up to your imagination.

Is that what you had in mind?