by John McQuaid
A blend called Breeze, flavored with lemon and anise, turns that most mundane of fish, tilapia, into a live wire. His cookies have a similar delicacy. In the Sugar Face biscuit collection, a pale wooden box held an aluminum tin. Daria was a round cookie of orange, curry, and dark chocolate. Desert Rose was made with sesame, salted butter, rosebuds, and cardamom; it tasted like an oasis. Secarz’s long experience with spices has taught him some valuable secrets. “If you put a grain of pepper in your mouth and crack it and eat it and drink coffee,” he said, “it’s as if you put two Splendas in your coffee, or a tablespoon of sugar.”
• • •
Among the different kinds of culinary establishments, technology and tradition contend most fiercely behind the bar. An evolving cocktail craft has turned many bars into working flavor chemistry labs. Dave Arnold, the proprietor of the lower Manhattan bar Booker and Dax, eschews what has become a post–molecular gastronomy cliché: flash-freezing drinks and fruits with liquid nitrogen. While he does have a nitrogen tank outside, a kind of sentinel for the bar, he sees nitrogen as a tool, not an end in itself. “We want it so the drink comes out just looking like a drink, because here, the point is we’re trying to change the way we make things behind the bar, not how you experience the cocktail,” he said. “So there’s not tiny little frozen balls, and there’s not a mound of heaping foam and all this other stuff. Because I don’t think that stuff has legs. I don’t think the average person wants to change the way they drink. They just want something that’s a little unexpected in a format that’s very comfortable.”
Arnold is a chef, beverage formulator, and polymath. (Part of the Momofuku empire, Booker and Dax is named for his two young sons.) He has no formal culinary training: he has a BA in philosophy from Yale and an MFA from Columbia; but he advanced in the world of food because of his sharp intelligence and eclectic interests. He was the first director of technology at the International Culinary Center in New York, a position created to exploit his fascination with centrifuges, vacuum evaporators, and thermal circulators. He is the creator-founder of the Museum of Food and Drink, a work in progress whose aim is to create a Smithsonian Institution for cuisine. In 2013, he mounted a modest first exhibit consisting of a working vintage puffing gun, a huge contraption used to make puffed cereal during the early part of the twentieth century. He also hosts Cooking Issues, an Internet radio show.
One evening, the Booker and Dax menu included a margarita made with mescal, yellow chartreuse, Cointreau, and lime; the typical sweet-salt-sour kick seemed both richer and lighter. A mix of gin and grapefruit juice was made with a centrifuge, which extracts only the clear, light juice from the fruit. A drink called the Sure Bet included a rum blend; crème de mure, a liqueur made from black currant berries; toasted almond orgeat, a sugary syrup; lemon; and egg white. But the dominant ingredient was lavender. “If you like lavender, you’ll love this,” the menu said.
Arnold said he and his bartenders had had a long debate over whether the Sure Bet went too far. It arrived in a daiquiri glass, a milky, pinkish-lavender color with a light froth on the top and an aroma like scented bath soap. It presented itself like a drink-soap hybrid, an unapologetic challenge to expectations. “In our discussion, I was like, this drink is balanced, it’s well-crafted, and it tastes good. You don’t have to like everything,” Arnold said. Customers who might find it “like licking out your mother’s bath” should check the list of ingredients before ordering.
The lavender aroma was a bit overwhelming at first, but the flavor was mild compared to the initial whiff. Sipping revealed further complexities, like a curtain being drawn back, the almond balancing the tartness of the lemon. What started out as a possible trigger for disgust became vivid and memorable. Arnold mused on why people found unexpected and strange things delicious. “The highest pinnacles of any culture’s gastronomy are based in their weird, fermented and/or bitter, complicated, or conflicted flavors,” he said. “Why is that? I don’t know, but it’s almost universally true. Carbonation is supposed to be a sign that fermentation is going wrong, and yet we’re attracted to it. We’re told nobody likes rotting things. And yet, if you asked me what I would want to eat right now, it is a cheese that smells worse than anyone’s dirty laundry.”
• • •
Many foods are still engineered for blandness, though—especially fruits and vegetables. The typical supermarket tomato has been bred to stand out in supermarket produce sections. It’s a bold red, pleasing to the eye, both plump and firm to the touch. It can be packed up and shipped over long distances and retain its robust profile. But it’s just not very tasty. Most of the complex flavors have been bred out of it to service the needs of markets and farmers.
“The biggest problem at the heart of everything is, the growers are paid for how many pounds they pack and put in a box. There is no connection between the grower and consumer in terms of flavor. So the system is set up so there’s no incentive for anyone to produce a tomato that tastes good,” said Harry Klee, a professor of horticulture at the University of Florida. Klee is trying to unwind the past century of the tomato’s history, using scientific methods to re-create the lost, earthier flavors of a simpler time.
Klee scoured farmers markets and the Internet looking for heirloom tomato varieties, which carry flavors of the past. But heirlooms alone aren’t enough to create a tasty and popular tomato. It must be easy to grow, move, and sell. Taking into consideration the diversity of types and tastes, Klee aimed to develop a portfolio of a few types that taste good and are inexpensive to cultivate. He and his colleagues collected more than two hundred different heirloom cultivars. Their DNA was extracted and their genomes sequenced. Panels of volunteers convened to sample each one and tie their taste qualities to specific genes. They also compared the heirlooms’ flavors to those of mass-produced tomatoes to determine what had been lost and how it might be re-created. “We have a long way to go to make a mass-produced, good-tasting heirloom tomato that costs $1.50 a pound,” Klee said. But if he succeeds, perhaps the example will show that the science of flavor is useful for something other than driving a mad, blind rush into the future.
Wines have never faced a problem like that of the mass-market tomato. For centuries a mix of traditions, laws, and regulations has guaranteed their consistency. The appellation system is based on the concept of terroir, in which geography is destiny. In France, a Sauvignon Blanc must come from Bordeaux; champagne must come from Champagne. But the inventors of this system never contemplated climate change, another force that will change flavor in imponderable ways.
Over the past fifty years, the average temperature in French wine country has risen by 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit. This has already altered terroir. Most wines simply taste different than they used to. Heat hastens ripening, and the grapes make more sugar, giving wines a higher alcohol content and bolder flavors. In the short term, that’s been good. But one estimate predicts that by 2050 it will be too hot to grow Sauvignon Blanc grapes in Bordeaux. Entire wine industries will shift northward, abandoning the lands that shaped them. New growing areas with very different terroir will open up. In one new wine-growing area in Ontario, Canada, vineyards bury their vines in the winter, and if frost strikes during growing season, they light fires and set up giant fans to blow smoke over the plants. The owners can hardly wait for more global warming.
All cuisine is on the cusp of similar changes from global forces no technological wizardry can hold back. In 2011, a symposium on the future of food at the Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen featured a sampler of live ants, mayonnaise made with bee larvae, and a fermented fish sauce made instead with grasshoppers and wax moth larvae. Some in the audience didn’t bite. But many found the insect-based foods rather tasty. The lab, founded by the Danish superchef René Redzepi, blends culinary art with ecological values. Bug cuisine is a promising frontier. Insects are a largely untapped food resource; they contain a lot of protein, vitamins, and other nu
trients. They can be captured or farmed, and their environmental impact is light compared to growing cattle, pigs, or chickens. In a warming world prone to droughts and other ecological catastrophes, eating insects might one day become necessary.
The trick is making them palatable. How to create delicious food out of an ingredient widely considered disgusting? Many societies consume insects, but there’s no such tradition in European and American cuisine. Ben Reade, the Nordic Lab’s director of research and development, and researcher Josh Evans traveled to Australia, where they sampled ants that store a kind of honey in their abdomen, and to Uganda, where they had a lunch of fried crickets, tomato, onions, and chili peppers. They gathered the finest bug recipes and returned to Copenhagen to experiment and consult with a team of chefs, scientists, and anthropologists recruited to solve the problem.
Flavor now sits at the intersection of all the sciences. It’s driven more by forces outside kitchens than in them. But chefs and artisans do have one thing working for them: the mystery at the heart of flavor has never truly been cracked. Science has still not explained how flavor can encompass the whole range of human experience—pleasure, joy, disgust, pain, memory—continually hammering these into something new with each new dish, each sip. The protean quality of the flavor sense will help us adapt to the dietary upheavals accompanying climate change—and to the bioengineered food of the future. But while neuroscientists can map firing neurons and hormonal signals, these efforts amount to crude sketches. The flickering images that fMRI scans associate with flavors, feelings, and moods are just a transient scaffolding for systems of mind and action that scientists have only begun to glimpse.
Acknowledgments
A book project begins as a slight idea, then gathers momentum, support, and assistance along the way as it rumbles to its finish. Thanks to my wife, Trish Clay, and my children, Matthew and Hannah, for providing the inspiration for this book, and for their steady support throughout months of reporting, research, and writing. I’m grateful to my mother, Theresa McQuaid, who passed away midway through the writing process, for a lifetime of love and encouragement, which I continue to rely on. The critical eye of my agent, Kris Dahl, helped to develop a germ of an idea into a full-fledged book project. Constance Jones and Norman Oder provided valuable input in figuring out how to tell the story. Thanks to Colin Harrison for believing in and enthusiastically supporting the book—and for pushing me to get it finished. Liese Mayer somehow turned various messy, clunky drafts into a readable narrative. I tip my hat to others at Scribner who brought the book to light, including Will Staehle and Benjamin Holmes. Many scientists, chefs, and others took time to patiently explain their complex work and views to me, including Dave Arnold, Kent Berridge, Zoe Brickley, Ed Currie, Dennis Drayna, Rachel Dutton, Dan Felder, William Leonard, Kyle Palmer, Jill Pruetz, Danielle Reed, Nick Ryba, Lior Lev Secarz, and Gordon Shepherd. Ted Janger and Vicki Eastus provided a bed and lively company during several research trips to New York. Thanks to Michael Cahill for getting me into Booker and Dax. Eric Rubin provided cigars and liquor at key junctures. During many late nights of writing, the movie Team America: World Police kept reappearing on cable and was a welcome break, so thanks, finally, to Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
About the Author
John McQuaid’s journalism has appeared in Smithsonian magazine, the Washington Post, Wired, Forbes.com and EatingWell magazine. His science and environment reporting for The Times-Picayune anticipated Hurricane Katrina, explored the global fisheries crisis and the problems of invasive species. His work has won a Pulitzer Prize, as well as awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute for Biological Sciences, and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. McQuaid is a graduate of Yale. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife and two children.
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Notes
Chapter 1: The Tongue Map
1 eternal present was truly conscious: S. S. Stevens, “Edwin Garrigues Boring: 1886–1968: Biographical Memoir,” National Academy of Sciences (1973).
1 a young woman’s head: Harvard University Department of Psychology website, http://www.isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k3007&panel=icb.pagecontent44003%3Ar%241%3Fname%3Dhistoricprofs.html&pageid=icb.page19708&pageContentId=icb.pagecontent44003&view=view.do&viewParam_name=boring.html#a_icb_pagecontent44003.
2 the differences were very small: Edwin G. Boring, Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1942), 452.
3 small differences in perception appear huge: Linda M. Bartoshuk, “The biological basis of food perception and acceptance,” Food Quality and Preference, no. 4 (1993): 21–32.
4 she found very limited variation: Virginia B. Collings, “Human taste response as a function of locus of stimulation on the tongue and soft palate,” Perception and Psychophysics 16, no. 1 (1973): 169–74.
4 all over the tongue: Jayaram Chandrashekar, Mark A. Hoon, Nicholas J. P. Ryba, and Charles S. Zuker, “The receptors and cells for mammalian taste,” Nature 444, no. 7117 (2006): 288–94, doi:10.1038/nature05401.
4 maintains the glass designs work: Robert Simonson, “House of Glass: How Georg Riedel has changed the way we have a drink,” Imbibe (January/February 2009), https://imbibemagazine.com/Characters-Georg-Riedel.
5 “reach to the heart”: Plato, Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, MIT Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html.
6 more skeptical attitude that persisted: Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 26; Korsmeyer, “Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60, no. 3 (2009): 217–25; Korsmeyer, “Disputing taste,” TPM (2nd quarter 2009): 70–76. Korsmeyer’s work provides an excellent exploration of this topic.
7 iron key on a leather thong: Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: HarperCollins, Kindle Edition, 2009), Kindle location 11884.
8 explained the irritation they caused: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. Alcmaeon, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/alcmaeon/; Democritus: Stanley Finger, Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 165.
8 phlegm (earth and water): Birgit Heyn, Ayurveda: The Indian Art of Natural Medicine and Life Extension (Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 1990), 91–93.
8 insipid, aqueous, and nauseous: Finger, Origins of Neuroscience, 166.
10 later won a Nobel Prize: Nobel Prize website, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2004/.
11 a hundred thousand times less sensitive: Nicholas Ryba, interview.
12 half of a rodent gene for a sweet receptor: Mark A. Hoon, Elliot Adler, Jurgen Lindemeier, James F. Battey, Nicholas J. P. Ryba, and Charles S. Zuker, “Putative mammalian taste receptors: a class of taste-specific GPCRs with distinct topographic selectivity,” Cell 96 (1999): 541–51.
13 such as imagination and emotion: Mbemba Jabbi, Marte Swart, and Christian Keysers, “Empathy for positive and negative emotions in the gustatory cortex,” NeuroImage 34, no. 4 (2007): 1744–53, doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.10.032; Mbemba Jabbi, Jojanneke Bastiaansen, Christian Keysers, “A common anterior insula representation of disgust observation, experience, and imagination shows divergent functional connectivity pathways,” PloS One 3, no. 8 (2008): e2939, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002939.
15 carrot-flavored cereal: Julie A. Mennella, Coren P. Jagnow, and Gary K. Beauchamp, “Prenatal and postnatal flavor learning by human infants,” Pediatrics 107, no. 6 (2001): e88, doi:10.1542/peds.107.6.e88.
15 probing, adventurous periods: Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl, The Sci
entist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 186.
Chapter 2: The Birth of Flavor in Five Meals
19 fossil of a predator eating its prey: Mark A. S. McMenamin, “Origin and Early Evolution of Predators: The Ecotone Model and Early Evidence for Macropredation,” in Predator-Prey Interactions in the Fossil Record, eds. Patricia H. Kelley, Michal Kowalewski, and Thor A. Hansen (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2003), 379–98.
20 to kill, and to feed: University of California Museum of Paleontology website, http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/cambrian/camblife.html.
21 450 million years ago: Robert M. Dores, “Hagfish, genome duplications, and RFamide neuropeptide evolution,” Endocrinology 152, no. 11 (2011): 4010–13, doi:10.1210/en.2011-1694.
23 the brain’s basic structure: John Morgan Allman, Evolving Brains (New York: Scientific American Library, 2000), 76. Allman’s book provides an excellent exploration of the evolution of the brain over the entire history of life; Helmut Wicht and R. Glenn Northcutt, “Telencephalic connections in the Pacific Hagfish (Eptatretus stouti), with special reference to the thalamopallial system,” The Journal of Comparative Neurology 260 (1998): 245–60; R. Glenn Northcutt, “Understanding vertebrate brain evolution,” Integrative and Comparative Biology 42, no. 4 (2002): 743–56, doi:10.1093/icb/42.4.743.
24 250 million years earlier: Seth D. Burgessa, Samuel Bowringa, and Shu-zhong Shen, “High-precision timeline for Earth’s most severe extinction,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 9 (2014): 3316–21, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1317692111.
26 three-dimensional images of meteorites: High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility at the University of Texas at Austin website, http://www.ctlab.geo.utexas.edu/.
