With all engineered foods such as Doritos, there are a lot of chemicals in the ingredients lists that are artificial. How do food scientists know which chemicals are edible and how they taste?
In: Chemistry
In most cases, they know things are edible because they isolated them from things we already knew were edible.
For example, “monosodium glutamate” sounds hella sketchy when you hear its chemical formula. But this is the molecule that makes soy sauce, parmesan cheese, and nutritional yeast have a “savory” flavor. We already knew it was edible because humans have been eating these things for ages; we just isolated that this one specific chemical was edible.
Other forms of testing include things like animal “LD50” tests: the test for what dosage is lethal in 50% of recipients. Things like this are what factor into safety limits of chemical additives. Generally, they’ll look for the amount that starts to have toxic symptoms, and then set the limit hundreds or thousands of times smaller than that. That way even if a silly person eats a huge amount of stuff that contains it, it will be unlikely to cause them meaningful harm.
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