Except that in pursuit of flavor, it does. “In nature,” Schatzker writes, “flavor never appears without nutrition.” Flavor means nutrition. Omega-3 fatty acids have flavor. Phenylethanol, a chemical compound humans love and often describe as a “rose note” in tomatoes, is made by an essential amino acid, which its presence signifies. Flavor’s purpose is to help us become like ingestive homing pigeons. Our bodies learn to draw connections between flavors and the physiological responses they signal. Through this post-ingestive feedback, latent intelligence in our digestive systems is animated. We can seek out and find what we need, nutritionally, and stop eating once we get it.

A perfect case is illustrated in an old study, begun in 1926, conducted by a Chicago pediatrician named Clara Davis. She foster-parented 15 babies “who’d never been exposed to ‘the ordinary foods of adult life’ ” and for six years let them eat whatever they wanted, in any order, from a list of 34 foods including “water, potatoes, corn meal, barley, beef, lamb, bone jelly, carrots, turnips, haddock, peaches, apples, fish, orange juice, bananas, brains, milk and cabbage.” They chose balanced diets — sometimes strange ones: One child ate liver and drank a pint of orange juice for breakfast. Their preferences changed often. Another child, who had started off with rickets, was early on given a glass of cod liver oil as medicine. Over the course of his illness, never encouraged, he drank it “ ‘irregularly and in varying amounts’ of his own free will until he was better,” Schatzker writes. This unconscious wisdom has been subsequently studied in goats and calves, showing ­repeatedly that if the body can make nutritional connections via physical feedback from flavor, it will be a good nutritionist.

But for the body to develop credible associations — including feeling satiated — between dark greens and iron, or eggs from free-ranging chickens and carotenoids, or tomatoes and phenylethanol, it needs to be communicated with honestly. Otherwise it can’t learn. “All over ­nature, animals . . . limit their meal size not ­because they’re stuffed and couldn’t possibly eat another bite, but because they’ve hit a secondary compound wall,” i.e. met nutritional needs beyond calories. Synthetic-flavor technology makes bland ingredients attractive without supplying the myriad benefits of the real thing. The twin forces of flavor dilution and fake ­flavor have short-circuited the biological basis for mutable appetite.

One particularly wonderful thing about Schatzker’s thesis is that if flavor is the voice in which the nutritional benefits of the natural world call out to us, then the impulse to eat taco-flavored Doritos, Caesar wraps and maple-flavored ribs is not the opposite of but rather akin to impulses toward $6-a-pound heritage-breed chicken, or dandelion greens. They are both, as Schatzker puts it, “unconscious strategies against dilution.” Access, not moral fiber, is the difference between one person’s search for flavor and another’s.

Aside from changing the status of flavor — from frill to nutritional essential — the most radical thing about “The Dorito Effect” is that Schatzker doesn’t suggest returning to agriculture of simpler days. His solution is technological. He suggests turning to what started the mess in the first place: breeding. The trade-offs of flavor for pest resistance, for example, weren’t inevitable. Schatzker writes of five successful contemporary breeding experiments — of chicken, tomatoes, potatoes, cacao beans and lettuce — that keep a focus on factors like yield and shelf life, while adding flavor to the list of priorities. It’s doable; it just needs to be done.