by John McQuaid
88 separate curds and whey: Melanie Salque, Peter I. Bogucki, Joanna Pyzel, Iwona Sobkowiak-Tabaka, Ryszard Grygiel, Marzena Szmyt, and Richard P. Evershed, “Earliest Evidence for Cheese Making in the Sixth Millennium,” Nature 493 (2013): 522–25, doi:10.1038/nature11698.
88 the globes begin to clump together: P. L. H. McSweeney, ed., Cheese Problems Solved (Cambridge, UK: Woodhead Publishing Ltd., 2007), 50.
89 blue-green marbling: Paul S. Kinstedt, Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2012). I drew on this book’s thorough account of the evolution of cheese.
89 closest wild relative: John G. Gibbons, Leonidas Salichos, Jason C. Slot, David C. Rinker, Kriston L. McGary, Jonas G. King, Maren A. Klich, David L. Tabb, W. Hayes McDonald, and Antonis Rokas, “The evolutionary imprint of domestication on genome variation and function of the filamentous fungus Aspergillus oryzae,” Current Biology 22 (2012): 1403–9, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.05.033.
91 “something really delicious”: Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, trans. M. F. K. Fisher (New York: Vintage electronic edition, 2009), Kindle location 1838.
93 potatoes, meat, and sulfur: Gerrit Smit, Bart A. Smit, and Wim J. M. Engels, “Flavour formation by lactic acid bacteria and biochemical flavour profiling of cheese products,” FEMS Microbiology Reviews 29, no. 3 (2005): 591–610, doi:10.1016/j.femsre.2005.04.002.
95 flavor continually evolves: Kirsten Shepherd-Barr and Gordon M. Shepherd, “Madeleines and neuromodernism: Reassessing mechanisms of autobiographical memory in Proust,” Auto/Biography Studies 13 (1998): 39–59.
95 salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami: Xiaoke Chen, Mariano Gabitto, Yueqing Peng, Nicholas J. P. Ryba, Charles S. Zuker, “A gustotopic map of taste qualities in the mammalian brain,” Science 333 (2011): 1262–65.
95 ever-shifting quality of now: A. D. (Bud) Craig, “How do you feel—now? The anterior insula and human awareness,” Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 10, no. 1 (2009): 59–70, doi:10.1038/nrn2555.
96 process pleasure and aversion: Morten L. Kringelbach, “The human orbitofrontal cortex: Linking reward to hedonic experience,” Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 6 (2005): 691–702, doi:10.1038/nrn1748.
98 more powerful sensation: Clara McCabe and Edmund T. Rolls, “Umami: A delicious flavor formed by convergence of taste and olfactory pathways in the human brain,” European Journal of Neuroscience 25, no. 6 (2007): 1855–64, doi:10.1111/j.1460-9568.2007.05445.x.
98 response echoes that for sugar: Christian H. Lemon, Susan M. Brasser, and David V. Smith, “Alcohol activates a sucrose-responsive gustatory neural pathway,” Journal of Neurophysiology 92, no. 1 (2004): 536–44, doi:10.1152/jn.00097.2004.
98 makes tossing back a shot so bracing: Alex Bachmanov, Monell Chemical Senses Center, interview.
99 similar to bell peppers: Amy Coombs, “Scientia Vitis: Decanting the Chemistry of Wine Flavor,” Chemical Heritage Magazine (Winter 2008–09), http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/media/magazine/articles/26-4-scientia-vitis.aspx.
99 In a study: Richard J. Stevenson and Robert A. Boakes, “Sweet and Sour Smells: Learned Synesthesia Between the Senses of Taste and Smell,” in The Handbook of Multisensory Processes, eds. Gemma A. Calvert, Charles Spence, and Barry E. Stein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 69–83.
99 colors associated with words or symbols: Julia Simner, “Beyond perception: Synaesthesia as a psycholinguistic phenomenon,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 1 (2007): 23–29, doi:10.1016/j.tics.2006.10.010.
101 flavor of the food they described: Jamie Ward and Julia Simner, “Lexical-gustatory synaesthesia: Linguistic and conceptual factors,” Cognition 89, no. 3 (2003): 237–61, doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(03)00122-7.
102 myths dating back thousands of years: Julien D’Huy, “Polyphemus (Aa. Th. 1137): A phylogenetic reconstruction of a prehistoric tale,” Nouvelle Mythologie Comparée 1 (2013): 1–21.
102 help themselves: Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Classics, electronic edition, 2002), Kindle location 5674.
Chapter 5: The Seduction
105 the sweeter it will taste: Ayako Koizumi, Asami Tsuchiya, Ken-ichiro Nakajima, Keisuke Ito, Tohru Terada, Akiko Shimizu-Ibuka, Loïc Briand, Tomiko Asakura, Takumi Misaka, and Keiko Abe, “Human sweet taste receptor mediates acid-induced sweetness of miraculin,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 40 (2011): 16819–24, doi:10.1073/pnas.1016644108.
106 Radiation damages them, too: Patty Neighmond, “Chemo Can Make Food Taste Like Metal: Here’s Help,” Morning Edition, NPR, April 7, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/04/07/295800503/chemo-can-make-food-taste-like-metal-heres-help; Marlene K. Wilken and Bernadette A. Satiroff, “Pilot study of ‘Miracle Fruit’ to improve food palatability for patients receiving chemotherapy,” Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing 16, no. 5 (2012): E173–E177, doi:10.1188/12.CJON.E173-E177.
107 any other people in the world: Credit Suisse Research Institute, “Sugar Consumption at a Crossroads” (2013), 4.
108 three-quarters of adults were obese: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Number (in Millions) of Civilian, Noninstitutionalized Persons with Diagnosed Diabetes, United States, 1980–2011,” http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/statistics/prev/national/figpersons.htm.
110 exactly what it was: Asvaghosha, “The Buddhacarita (Life of Buddha),” in Buddhist Mahaˉyaˉna Texts, trans. E. B. Cowell, F. Max Muller, and J. Takakusu (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 166; Sanjida O’Connell, Sugar: The Grass That Changed the World (London: Virgin Books, 2004), 9.
111 first dessert cuisine: Tim Richardson, Sweets: A History of Candy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2002), Kindle location 1101–4.
111 “he becomes invulnerable”: Richardson, Sweets, Kindle location 1125.
112 the means for refining it: John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 249–54.
112 sweet water, milk, wine, and honey: Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), Kindle location 3085–87.
113 found in the accounting rolls: The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, Compact Edition, 1980), 3343–44.
114 used for food: Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 99, 82.
114 the first cough drops: OED, 2120.
114 who began planting their own: J. H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 63.
115 horses, cattle, or waterwheels: Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 33–34.
116 handy for emergency amputations: Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies (New York: Walker, 2011), Kindle location 1546–48.
116 obstructed the digestive tract: Ivan Day, “The Art of Confectionery,” in Pleasures of the Table: Ritual and Display in the European Dining Room 1600–1900: An Exhibition at Fairfax House, eds. Peter Brown and Ivan Day (New York: New York Civic Trust, 2007).
117 reading Tryon’s writings: Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007), 243–44.
117 ninety pounds in 1900: Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 67, 143.
118 “King of Sweets”: Daniel Carey, “Sugar, colonialism and the critique of slavery: Thomas Tryon in Barbados,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 9 (2004): 303–21.
118 corn syrup became a standard food additive: Richard O. Marshall and Earl R. Kooi, “Enzymatic conversion of D-glucose to D-fructose,” Science 125, no. 9 (1957): 648–49; James N. BeMiller, “One hundred yea
rs of commercial food carbohydrates in the United States,” Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 57 (2009): 8125–29, doi:10.1021/jf8039236.
119 the evolution of complex life: John H. Koschwanez, Kevin R. Foster, and Andrew W. Murray, “Sucrose utilization in budding yeast as a model for the origin of undifferentiated multicellularity,” PLoS Biology 9, no. 8 (2011): e1001122, doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001122.
120 “don’t you take to drink on that account”: William James, “To Miss Frances R. Morse. Nanheim, July 10, 1901,” in Letters of William James, ed. Henry James (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920).
120 Olds wrote: James Olds, “Pleasure Centers in the Brain,” Scientific American 195, no. 4 (October 1956): 105–17, doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1056-1105.
121 stimulate itself by pressing a lever: James Olds and Peter Milner, “Positive reinforcement produced by electrical stimulation of septal area and other regions of rat brain,” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 47, no. 6 (1954): 419–27.
122 flick of a switch: Morton L. Kringelbach and Kent C. Berridge, “The functional neuroanatomy of pleasure and happiness” Discovery Medicine 9, no. 49 (2010): 579–87.
122 as if licking their lips: Dallas Treit and Kent C. Berridge, “A comparison of benzodiazepine, serotonin, and dopamine agents in the taste-reactivity paradigm,” Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior 37, no. 21 (1990): 451–56.
123 “pleasure, euphoria, or ‘yumminess’”: Roy A. Wise, “The dopamine synapse and the notion of ‘pleasure centers’ in the brain,” Trends in Neurosciences 3 (1980): 91–95.
124 alleviate their symptoms: Alan A. Baumeister, “Tulane electrical brain stimulation program: A historical case study in medical ethics,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 9, no. 3 (2000): 262–78.
124 the brain of a young man: Charles E. Moan and Robert G. Heath, “Septal stimulation for the initiation of heterosexual behavior in a homosexual male,” Journal of Behavioral Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry 3 (1972): 23–30.
124 sex with both men and women: Kent C. Berridge, “Pleasures of the brain,” Brain and Cognition 52, no. 1 (2003): 106–28, doi:10.1016/S0278-2626(03)00014-9.
125 what caused it: Kent C. Berridge, Isabel L. Venier, and Terry E. Robinson, “Taste reactivity analysis of 6-hydroxydopamine-induced aphagia: Implications for arousal and anhedonia hypotheses of dopamine function,” Behavioral Neuroscience 103, no. 1 (1989): 36–45. To test whether dopamine caused pleasure, Berridge returned to the rodent smile, beginning a strange debate about the inner life of a rat. Roy Wise believed the rats could not possibly feel pleasure without dopamine and that their smiles were a reflex, their brain and muscles carrying out programming in response to a stimulus, with no conscious feeling of gratification. He had a point. Like bitterness, a sweet taste evokes an automatic reaction: newborn babies smile when sugar is placed on their lips; so do animals with most of their brains removed. But Berridge hypothesized the rat smiles were exactly what they appeared to be: a genuine expression of satisfaction—just caused by something other than dopamine.
He hatched a clever experiment. Anyone who has fallen ill while eating finds the food that made them sick becomes persistently disgusting. This is a learned behavior. If Berridge could do the same for rats, changing their smiles to frowns, it would demonstrate the expressions were not lobotomized reflexes—which resist conditioning—but the real thing. He gave rats a dopamine blocker and a drug that caused nausea, followed by sips of sweetened water. Afterward, they all gaped with distaste at sugar water—now they hated it.
125 directly cause pleasure: Susana Peciña and Kent C. Berridge, “Opioid site in nucleus accumbens shell mediates eating and hedonic ‘liking’ for food: Map based on microinjection Fos plumes,” Brain Research 863, nos. 1–2 (2000): 71–86.
127 over the course of a lifetime: Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan, and P. Read Montague, “A neural substrate of prediction and reward,” Science 275, no. 5306: 1593–99, doi:10.1126/science.275.5306.1593; Wolfram Schultz, “The reward signal of midbrain dopamine neurons,” News in Physiological Science 14 (1999): 67–71.
128 maybe even happiness itself: Morten L. Kringelbach and Kent C. Berridge, “The Neurobiology of Pleasure and Happiness,” in Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics, eds. Judy Illes and Barbara J. Sahakian (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15–32.
129 sipping sugar water: Ivan E. de Araujo, Albino J. Oliveira-Maia, Tatyana D. Sotnikova, Raul R. Gainetdinov, Marc G. Caron, Miguel A. L. Nicolelis, and Sidney A. Simon, “Food reward in the absence of taste receptor signaling,” Neuron 57, no. 6 (2008): 930–41, doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2008.01.032.
131 into an insecticide: Walter Gratzer, “Light on Sweetness: the Discovery of Aspartame,” in Eurekas and Euphorias: The Oxford Book of Scientific Anecdotes (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 32.
132 contribute to diabetes: Jotham Suez, Tal Korem, David Zeevi, Gili Zilberman-Schapira, Christoph A. Thaiss, Ori Maza, David Israeli, Niv Zmora, Shlomit Gilad, Adina Weinberger, Yael Kuperman, Alon Harmelin, Ilana Kolodkin-Gal, Hagit Shapiro, Zamir Halpern, Eran Segal, and Eran Elinav, “Artificial sweeteners induce glucose intolerance by altering the gut microbiota,” Nature 514 (October 2014): 181–86, doi:10.1038/nature13793.
132 has a bitter edge: Caroline Hellfritsch, Anne Brockhoff, Frauke Stähler, Wolfgang Meyerhof, and Thomas Hofmann, “Human psychometric and taste receptor responses to steviol glycosides,” Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 60, no. 27 (2012): 6782–93.
Chapter 6: Gusto and Disgust
136 butchered for the choicest parts: Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1909), 86, http://www1.umassd.edu/specialprograms/caboverde/darwin.html.
136 practiced cannibalism: Ann Chapman, European Encounters with the Yahgan People of Cape Horn, Before and After Darwin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 180.
142 “something which smells bad”: Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, “Constants across cultures in the face and emotion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17, no. 2 (1971): 124–29.
143 larger groups than other primates do: Seth D. Dobson and Chet C. Sherwood, “Correlated evolution of brain regions involved in producing and processing facial expressions in anthropoid primates,” Biology Letters 7, no. 1 (2010): 86–88, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2010.0427.
143 precise forms of communication: For a discussion of the evolution of language, gesture, and facial expression, see Maurizio Gentilucci and Michael C. Corballis, “The Hominid that Talked,” in What Makes Us Human, ed. Charles Pasternak (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2007), 49–70.
144 respond with heightened alertness: Daniel M. T. Fessler, Serena J. Eng, and C. David Navarrete, “Elevated disgust sensitivity in the first trimester of pregnancy: Evidence supporting the compensatory prophylaxis hypothesis,” Evolution and Human Behavior 26, no. 4 (2005): 344–51, doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2004.12.001.
145 endless, changing threats: Valerie Curtis, Robert Aunger, and Tamer Rabie, “Evidence that disgust evolved to protect from risk of disease,” supplement, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 271 (2004): S131–33, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2003.0144; Valerie Curtis, “Why disgust matters,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366, no. 1583 (2011): 3478–90, doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0165; Valerie Curtis, “Dirt, disgust and disease: A natural history of hygiene,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 61, no. 8 (2007): 660–64, doi:10.1136/jech.2007.062380; Valerie Curtis, Mícheál de Barra, and Robert Aunger, “Disgust as an adaptive system for disease avoidance behaviour,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366, no. 1563 (2011): 389–401, doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0117.
146 true feelings to the outside world: Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, Michael Koenigs, and Antonio R. Damasio, “Preferring one taste over anothe
r without recognizing either,” Nature Neuroscience 8, no. 7 (2005): 860–61, doi:10.1038/nn1489.
147 labeled the food “delicious”: Ralph Adolphs, “Dissociable neural systems for recognizing emotions,” Brain and Cognition 52, no. 1 (2003): 61–69, doi:10.1016/S0278-2626(03)00009-5.
147 empathetic responses unite: Bruno Wicker, Christian Keysers, Jane Plailly, Jean-Pierre Royet, Vittorio Gallese, and Giacomo Rizzolatti, “Both of us disgusted in my insula: The common neural basis of seeing and feeling disgust,” Neuron 40, no. 3 (2003): 655–64, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14642287.
147 the brighter the insula burns: See, for example, Mbemba Jabbe, Marte Swart, and Christian Keysers, “Empathy for positive and negative emotions in the gustatory cortex,” NeuroImage 34, no. 4 (2008): 1744–53, doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.10.032.
148 relationships and social personae: For some discussion, see A. D. (Bud) Craig, “How do you feel—now?” 59–70; Isabella Mutschler, Céline Reinbold, Johanna Wanker, Erich Seifritz, and Tonio Ball, “Structural basis of empathy and the domain general region in the anterior insular cortex,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7: 177, doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00177; James Woodward and John Allman, “Moral intuition: Its neural substrates and normative significance,” Journal of Physiology–Paris 101, nos. 4–6 (2007): 179–202.
148 primitive form of morality: H. A. Chapman, D. A. Kim, J. M. Susskind, and A. K. Anderson, “In bad taste: evidence for the oral origins of moral disgust,” Science 323, no. 5918 (2009): 1222–26, doi:10.1126/science.1165565.
149 nearly half of adults did: Paul Rozin, April Fallon, and MaryLynn Augustoni-Ziskind, “The child’s conception of food: The development of contamination sensitivity to ‘disgusting’ substances,” Developmental Psychology 21, no. 6: 1075–79, doi:10.1037//0012-1649.21.6.1075.
154 hairy beast: Nick Hazelwood, Savage: The Life and Times of Jemmy Button (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 338.
