Flavour and flavourings

It's a popular bit of marketing guff when they say on the side of your yoghurt pot or fruit juice bottle or microwave dinner "no artificial flavours". Because when it comes to flavourings for the food industry, the technical distinction between 'natural' and 'artificial' concerns only the very first step in the production process.

An artificial flavour, as the name suggests, has been cobbled together by scientists. A natural flavour, though, is taken from a naturally occurring object (be it animal, vegetable or mineral).

But from there on in, they're pretty much the same: a microscopic amount of flavour chemicals is then scaled up by industrial means and mass produced in factories. About as natural as the screen you're reading this on.