By ANN HINCH
Assistant Editor

ST. LOUIS, Mo. — Bite into a juicy homegrown tomato or a peach fresh from the tree; each has a particular flavor. But not everything we eat is naturally-flavored, nor can it be with our systems of processing, creating, shipping and storing food.

Livestock feed is also often artificially flavored to make it more palatable to animals’ taste buds. Flavor, explained Dr. Chad Risley, helps animals and humans eat and, therefore, acquire nutrients – and it also exists in plants to attract animals into eating the food and excreting the seeds to grow into new plants.

“Why do we taste? There’s actually a biological reason for that,” explained Risley, general manager of Lucta USA, Inc., which supplies the animal feed industry with flavoring and other feed additives. His presentation was part of the four-day Feed Industry Institute in St. Louis June 14-17.

There are five basic tastes; the four most of us learned about in school are sweet, salty, sour and bitter. Quite apart from the first three, “bitter” is nearly always unpleasant and repulsive to any eater. “That is our way of finding out what not to eat,” Risley said.
Unlike these, umami is not descriptive of its flavor, which he said is basically that of protein-rich foods – “savory” might be the best description, according to Sokol and Co., an Illinois-based food ingredient products firm. The word umami is Japanese for “delicious,” Risley said, and he noted it is a hot topic right now in the food industry, in advertising and marketing. He also said it may be used to enhance other flavors and tastes such as salty.

How many taste buds an animal has affects how its feed can be flavored. Humans average 9,000 taste buds; a chicken only has 24 and a cat, 473. Unlike us, these two animals would not be lured by sweets. A pig and cow, on the other hand, would – with 15,000 and 25,000 taste buds each, respectively. (Grazing animals have a high number, Risley said, to help them avoid unpleasant-tasting toxic plants.)

Young animals typically prefer sweet tastes, he said, which is why those flavors might be added to feed. He explained the feed contains nutrients they need – and the Mary Poppins philosophy is that a spoonful of sugar does make it go down easier. Necessary proteins have their own pleasing flavor – umami – as does the necessary mineral of salt.

Flavoring livestock feed is a tricky selling point because it’s humans who buy the feed and they don’t want a repulsive scent – but animals taste “sweet” differently than humans do.

“If it smells good to the producer or farmer, it’s good for the animal, and away we go,” Risley said. “That’s more marketing.”
On the other hand, the animal has to want to eat the feed, since they can remember bad food experiences just as we can. Flavor is not a big ingredient in feed, by volume – Risley said usually only about 1/4 to 2 pounds of flavoring additive is put into a ton of feed.

Another additive put in livestock feed to make it digest better are direct-fed microbials (DFMs). These used to be known as probiotics – not to be confused with prebiotics, which is used to improve existing gastrointestinal bacteria, fungi and protozoa.

Probiotics are “a live microbial feed supplement, which beneficially affects the host animal by improving its intestinal balance.” Examples for humans are yogurt, pickles, pepperoni and sauerkraut.

“Basically, you’re putting good bacteria in the intestinal tract and trying to get rid of the bad,” Risley said.

The word “probiotic” in the feed industry was replaced with DFM, he said, because the former term is considered a claim of quality by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. DFMs must be naturally-occurring; they cannot be genetically-engineered.

Several types of bacillus work to break down complex nutrients into simpler components for the body to digest. Lactic acid bacteria, Risley said, take up the space in the gut that pathogens – microorganisms causing illness – might otherwise inhabit, and keep the immune system from having to work so hard.

Fungal DFMs aid in digestion of tough fiber, he explained. They also stabilize the acid level through the G.I. tract, scavenge oxygen from food for use by the body and bind harmful cells together to be pushed out through excretion.

Risley said it’s important feed manufacturers understand at least the basics of DFMs so they can choose reputable suppliers that have research to back up their claims, and so they can learn how to properly handle the microorganisms in the additives. “If you mishandle them, they die and thus, become less effective,” he explained.