by Hope Jahren
The sneaky additive approach, though, is not one favored by chefs like Blumenthal. “We have enough naturally occurring flavors that we don’t do enough to exploit,” he told me. “Like MSG. It’s an old wives’ tale that it’s bad for you. It occurs naturally all the time. Tomatoes. Parmesan. Shiitake. Seaweed.” We can use natural properties to create flavor profiles that are apparent—and make other foods enjoyable by sheer association. It’s an approach that stems from stimulating other tastes that may then make a food more pleasurable by proxy. In addition to studying heat, Barry Green has worked with flavors that could have a similar effect, namely, menthol and capsaicin. The former gives the sensation of cooling your tongue. The latter, found in peppers, warms it up. In so doing it stimulates the pain system—but in a way that can be pleasurable. Could the addition of foods that work on different neural channels from sweetness and saltiness but that stimulate the somatosensory system just as strongly help reduce the need for things like sugar and salt? “Obviously, chili pepper has become a huge part of the American diet,” Green said. “I’d love to see how that channel of input could be utilized to increase flavor when you’re decreasing things like salt and sweetness . . . using spice so you don’t have to have a chip that’s as salty, for instance.”
In Blumenthal’s kitchen, such approaches are evident in dishes like the Mock Turtle’s soup from the Mad Hatter’s tea party. A faux-gold watch made from gold leaf covering the equivalent of a beef and oxtail bouillon cube is placed into a teapot of water, only to dissolve into beef and oxtail stock, which is then poured over an “egg” that is actually made of rutabaga and turnip, and also flavored with mustard seeds and pickled cucumbers. The combination of spice, from both the mustard and the pickling, make the oft-ignored tubers—not many people crave rutabaga—shine in a new light, with a complexity of flavor not associated with the uniform blandness of root vegetables. “We really undervalue spice,” Blumenthal said. “But used the right way, it’s eye-opening.”
The wine in the Fat Duck’s second-floor wine cave is hidden behind a faux bookshelf. The bottles are accessible only if you know the proper title to tip off the shelves—part of the ethos of playful curiosity and discovery that permeates the whole restaurant. On the day I visited, the room was empty but for a small round table in the center. It was covered with a white tablecloth and several identical-looking glasses of wine, some white, some red. Blumenthal was running several experiments based in part on the research of Oxford psychologist Charles Spence, the first of which involved the links between dexterity and taste. Isa Bal, the Fat Duck’s sommelier, a dapper-looking man in a dark suit, instructed me to pick up a glass of white wine and take a sip.
“What does it taste like?” he asked.
“Smooth,” I replied. “A bit buttery?”
“Now pick it up with your left hand.” (I’m right-handed.)
I drank again, and it was like a different wine: sharper, crisper, more acidic. One explanation for this lies in the neural wiring of the dominant versus secondary hand. Our dominant hand is more fluent, which means the signals from it are processed more easily. If the results were strong enough, one might expect future dinners at the Fat Duck to include nontraditionally placed glass and silverware—and wait staff who instruct guests on the proper hand with which to try a certain dish or drink. It’s not a stretch to imagine such instructions appearing on food packaging: Tear open with your right hand and dig in with your left for maximal pop—or make sure to hold with your right hand for the fullest buttery feel.
Next Isa played a series of musical tracks and had me taste wine against different songs. And indeed, with each track the taste changed. Alongside one, the white was greener, more effervescent. Along another, smoother. The music played in the Fat Duck’s dining room has been carefully chosen to match the sensory characteristics each dish is meant to convey. The Sound of the Sea—an ethereal plate of mackerel, octopus, and kingfish covered in a rich seaweed foam and arrayed on a sand-strewn beach (the sand is made from tapioca and miso oil)—was presented with headphones that snaked their way out of a conch shell. An iPod was hidden inside, playing a collection of surf, waves, seagulls, and beach sounds.
Did the music add anything, or was it more theater in an already theatrical meal? In a series of studies to test that, Blumenthal and several collaborators had PhD students eat a similar dish, listening to either barnyard or seashore sounds. They rated their enjoyment levels up to 90 percent higher with the sea soundtrack. I got another taste, so to speak, of the same phenomenon when I took part in some of the ongoing studies at Spence’s cross-modal laboratory at Oxford. A candy bar tasted sweeter alongside a piano, a jelly more sour alongside brass. “Music changes the sensory and hedonic experience,” Janice Wang, Spence’s graduate student in charge of the experiment, explained. “The olfactory nerve is partly connected to the auditory—and the more we learn about how the senses are wired, the more we can change the experience by changing the auditory environment.”
A little more than a year ago, the Cadbury chocolate company changed the shape of one of its bars from rectangular to round. “People complained about it being sweeter,” Spence said. This was in one sense a marketing error—but it was also a missed opportunity. Could Cadbury’s not have reduced sugar at the same time, thereby rendering the reduction imperceptible and thus creating a healthier candy bar? “Reducing the ingredient by some amount and changing packaging to make it neutral in the consumer’s perception is a very real goal,” Spence said. Other studies show that heavier cutlery or packaging makes a food taste better, that certain colors and contrasts can make it taste sweeter, saltier, smoother, more bitter, more sour, even that the language we use to describe it can make a difference in how it’s perceived. One can easily imagine that part of the appeal of Mast Brothers chocolate was in the packaging: what they lacked in flavor they more than made up for in artisanal-seeming wrapping. Perhaps this was also one of the reasons the blowback against them was so harsh. People felt deceived, as, in a sense, they were.
No matter how much we learn about neurogastronomy, though, a disconnect between what’s possible and what can actually be accomplished will doubtless remain. Not everyone will be happy that the sugar content of their chocolate bar has been lowered. “Innovation is really slow in food companies. It’s really difficult to get things done,” Spence told me.
About ten years ago Francis McGlone attempted to bring Blumenthal into Unilever, a leader in the world of FMCG, or fast-moving consumer goods, as a consultant. He felt the company would benefit immensely from the chef’s creativity. The collaboration went nowhere. “No one could agree who controlled the intellectual property,” McGlone said. “They wanted to nail him down to contain his creativity in ways he couldn’t accept. It was a missed opportunity.” He paused. “It’s very difficult to change the way these large companies go about what they do.” Theoretically they may be intrigued by Blumenthal’s innovations, by his use of the latest science to craft ways to eat more healthfully. But practically they are beholden to their shareholders. The tolerance for risk and acceptance of failure that marks the Fat Duck’s experimentations—new dishes are the result of many spectacular mishaps in the test kitchen—are unacceptable from their perspective.
And yet the mandate from consumers seems to be changing in a way that may force large corporations to rethink their approach. Companies respond to consumer pressure. What matters is what people want as expressed by what they will buy. Food manufacturers aren’t our parents, nor are they our doctors. They care about profit, not health. But their profit is dependent on shifting preferences and demands. The mass production of the 1960s and 1970s was about the demand for convenience, freeing the housewife from the slavery of cooking. And from that demand came the packaged foods and snacks that fill grocery stores today. But increasingly consumers are demanding more than simple convenience. They want health too. Doug Rauch, the former president of Trader Joe’s, just opened a new store, Daily Table, tha
t he hopes will grow from a single location in Boston to a national chain of supermarkets. It aims to sell nutritious food at the price point of fast food. Bananas for 29 cents per pound. A dozen eggs for 99 cents. PepsiCo has just announced a new vending-machine initiative, to be rolled out to several thousand locations in 2016, which will offer healthier snack options than the traditional soda and chips—Naked Juice, Quaker bars, Sabra hummus cups, and the like. And interest in the frontiers of nutrition science has risen apace. “People don’t do anything until somebody else does it, then they all want to do it,” Spence said with a laugh. “I had three companies on the phone today. It’s been an explosive growth in interest. And my colleagues working in this space would say the same.”
One initiative, with the University of Barcelona and the Alícia Foundation, a research center helmed by Ferran Adrià, the chef of the now-closed El Bulli restaurant, focuses on improving nutrition and recovery for children with cancer. Most common treatments, including chemotherapy, create an eating experience in which food takes on a metallic, ungainly taste. Unlike adults, who can override such unpleasant inputs with the knowledge that they have to eat to get better, children will often refuse food altogether rather than consume something they don’t like. This team of chefs and scientists hope to use the new understanding of the brain’s sensory integration of taste to create foods that would override that aversion, by changing either the perception of the taste or its seeming desirability. “The evidence that we can improve consumption is quite good,” Spence, who consulted on the project, told me. “And a lot of hospitals and end-of-life care are now engaged in sensory design related to food. It’s an important investment.”
Blumenthal told me of a recent project he collaborated on with the National Health Service at the Royal Berkshire Hospital to improve nutrition among the elderly. As we age, our sense of smell dampens—loss of smell sensitivity is one of the earliest signs of dementia—and our desire for healthier foods along with it. There’s a reason your grandmother douses everything in salt and prefers simple, strong fat-sugar-salt combinations. But something else rises with age: the risk of cardiovascular disease. And so ways of enhancing flavor that don’t necessitate huge quantities of condiments and fats could go a long way toward easing the aging transition. “We wanted to get the elderly excited about food again,” Blumenthal said. “And I’m hopeful that it can be done well.”
Chefs like Blumenthal are an important first step in the advancement of neurogastronomy. But to realize the full health and nutritional potential of this science, we will need to go much further than test kitchens and high-end dining rooms. Neurogastronomy must be incorporated into mainstream consumption. “It’s like Formula 1 racing,” McGlone said. “The car is the pinnacle of advanced technology. The efficiency and safety of these engines are at the most advanced. But in three, four years it appears in the average car.” The same could be said of neurogastronomical innovation. “It will ultimately become part of the standard. It will be an advanced use of the technology that will ultimately trickle down into the standard food product.” The fact that why we eat what we eat originates in the mind rather than the palate is a powerful one. Properly harnessed, it could prove to be the key to succeeding where so many other nutritional interventions have failed.
KIM TINGLEY
The Secrets of the Wave Pilots
FROM The New York Times Magazine
At 0400, three miles above the Pacific seafloor, the searchlight of a power boat swept through a warm June night last year, looking for a second boat, a sailing canoe. The captain of the canoe, Alson Kelen, potentially the world’s last-ever apprentice in the ancient art of wave piloting, was trying to reach Aur, an atoll in the Marshall Islands, without the aid of a GPS device or any other way-finding instrument. If successful, he would prove that one of the most sophisticated navigational techniques ever developed still existed and, he hoped, inspire efforts to save it from extinction. Monitoring his progress from the power boat were an unlikely trio of Western scientists—an anthropologist, a physicist, and an oceanographer—who were hoping his journey might help them explain how wave pilots, in defiance of the dizzying complexities of fluid dynamics, detect direction and proximity to land. More broadly, they wondered if watching him sail, in the context of growing concerns about the neurological effects of navigation by smartphone, would yield hints about how our orienteering skills influence our sense of place, our sense of home, even our sense of self.
When the boats set out in the afternoon from Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, Kelen’s plan was to sail through the night and approach Aur at daybreak, to avoid crashing into its reef in the dark. But around sundown the wind picked up and the waves grew higher and rounder, sorely testing both the scientists’ powers of observation and the structural integrity of the canoe. Through the salt-streaked windshield of the power boat, the anthropologist, Joseph Genz, took mental field notes—the spotlighted whitecaps, the position of Polaris, his grip on the cabin handrail—while he waited for Kelen to radio in his location, or rather what he thought his location was.
The Marshalls provide a crucible for navigation: 70 square miles of land, total, comprising five islands and 29 atolls, rings of coral islets that grew up around the rims of underwater volcanoes millions of years ago and now encircle gentle lagoons. These green dots and doughnuts make up two parallel north-south chains, separated from their nearest neighbors by a hundred miles on average. Swells generated by distant storms near Alaska, Antarctica, California, and Indonesia travel thousands of miles to these low-lying spits of sand. When they hit, part of their energy is reflected back out to sea in arcs, like sound waves emanating from a speaker; another part curls around the atoll or island and creates a confused chop in its lee. Wave piloting is the art of reading—by feel and by sight—these and other patterns. Detecting the minute differences in what to an untutored eye looks no more meaningful than a washing-machine cycle allows a ri-meto, a person of the sea in Marshallese, to determine where the nearest solid ground is—and how far off it lies—long before it is visible.
In the 16th century, Ferdinand Magellan, searching for a new route to the nutmeg and cloves of the Spice Islands, sailed through the Pacific Ocean and named it “the peaceful sea” before he was stabbed to death in the Philippines. Only 18 of his 270 men survived the trip. When subsequent explorers, despite similar travails, managed to make landfall on the countless islands sprinkled across this expanse, they were surprised to find inhabitants with nary a galleon, compass, or chart. God had created them there, the explorers hypothesized, or perhaps the islands were the remains of a sunken continent. As late as the 1960s, Western scholars still insisted that indigenous methods of navigating by stars, sun, wind, and waves were not nearly accurate enough, nor indigenous boats seaworthy enough, to have reached these tiny habitats on purpose.
Archaeological and DNA evidence (and replica voyages) have since proved that the Pacific islands were settled intentionally—by descendants of the first humans to venture out of sight of land, beginning some 60,000 years ago, from Southeast Asia to the Solomon Islands. They reached the Marshall Islands about 2,000 years ago. The geography of the archipelago that made wave piloting possible also made it indispensable as the sole means of collecting food, trading goods, waging war, and locating unrelated sexual partners. Chiefs threatened to kill anyone who revealed navigational knowledge without permission. In order to become a ri-meto, you had to be trained by a ri-meto and then pass a voyaging test, devised by your chief, on the first try. As colonizers from Europe introduced easier ways to get around, the training of ri-metos declined and became restricted primarily to an outlying atoll called Rongelap, where a shallow circular reef, set between ocean and lagoon, became the site of a small wave-piloting school.
In 1954 an American hydrogen-bomb test less than a hundred miles away rendered Rongelap uninhabitable. Over the next decades no new ri-metos were recognized; when the last well-known one died, in 2003, he left a 5
5-year-old cargo-ship captain named Korent Joel, who had trained at Rongelap as a boy, the effective custodian of their people’s navigational secrets. Because of the radioactive fallout, Joel had not taken his voyaging test and thus was not a true ri-meto. But fearing that the knowledge might die with him, he asked for and received historic dispensation from his chief to train his younger cousin, Alson Kelen, as a wave pilot.
