Separation of Taste

I recently bought a 5lb tub of whey protein. After choosing the size of tub, I clicked the drop down menu to select a flavor. The choices read like a lineup at an ice cream parlor; Double Rich Chocolate, Rocky Road, French Vanilla, Cake Batter, Strawberries and Cream. I salivated at the though of these rich, sweet flavors. But at the top of the website, the banner still read BodyBuilding.com, and there were pictures of hulking muscles next to the protein brand information. It seemed odd that something so essential to health and fitness, a lifestyle we associate with plain grilled chicken and kale lunches, was tempting you with these candy store flavors.

When we see these mismatched flavors and ingredients and foods, we get suspicious. It must be full of artificial flavors. But the reality is that that brand of protein is naturally flavored. From natural ingredients, the flavor of rocky road ice cream is infused into a powder supplement, and it is essential in ensuring the food is palatable. Another example is a Meal, Ready-To-Eat (MRE), the standard food ration for the US Military. One of the varieties is Fried Rice. If you made it at home, you can imagine the ingredients; a little oil in the pan, rice, soy sauce, onions, chopped carrots, maybe some grilled chicken. But what does the MRE fried rice have in it?

Despite the exhaustive list of ingredients, there is a fairly simple outcome of a palatable, preserved experience of eating fried rice.

This shows the extent of what is possible with natural ingredients. But the posibiliies with atificial flavors are growing too. Endless West is a company making completely synthetic wines and spirits, with no grapes or fermentation going in to the process (Endless West 2019).

This year, two major meat alternative companies, Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, started offering their foods to consumers in grocery stores (LA Times 2019). Showing us that the future of eating is going to include foods that taste like and look like something that they aren’t.

Research into the perception and manipulation of taste and flavor are also ongoing. Engineers at the National University of Singapore have created a “digital lollipop” that stimulates the tongue into tasting different flavors.

At the University of Kentucky, along with several other universities, there is research into the area of “neurogastronomy,” where our tongue is bypassed and sound is used to alter the internal perception of taste. Texture can also be manipulated with sound (Harvard 2016).

All of this combined makes me wonder how the future of eating and tasting can change. The existence of these manipulated flavors and sensations shows that there is not necessarily a clear link between what we eat, what we taste, what we smell, and what flavors and textures we experience.

I envision a very simple meal. But with all of the research and technology combined, we are able to create a much more enriching and stimulating eating experience. The food tastes like something else, and smells like something else, and has the texture of something else, and the fork stimulates new flavors with each bite, and the music changes as you eat, changing the perception of the whole meal.

More than just a pill that tastes like a steak. From very simple ingredients, and using technology, we could extend the kind of eating experiences only had at expensive, molecular gastronomy restaurants, to everybody on earth.

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