You are what you eat, as the saying goes. But do you know what you eat?

If someone handed you a bag containing a mixture of five to 10 chemicals with unfamiliar names, you probably wouldn’t think to eat from it — unless that bag was a bag of Doritos. As it were, I have looked at the ingredients list of such a bag. Besides the innocuous whole corn, corn oil, and salt, the list includes such esoteric items as disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate.