by Bob Holmes
I don’t eat like this all the time, of course. Sometimes I forget. Other times I’m distracted and wolf down my meal without really noticing, just like I usually did before. But I’m trying to pay attention and eat mindfully more often, and I’m slowly building my flavor chops. The more I do it, the easier it is to identify subtler elements of my flavor experience, and the more I build my flavor vocabulary, the better to describe what I’m tasting.
For professional flavorists, of course, paying attention has become second nature. When I visited Givaudan, the world’s largest flavor company, several of the people I talked to noted that most of their flavorists stop and sniff everything before they put it in their mouths. Occasionally, the habit makes for a slightly awkward moment at a dinner party. “People ask me, ‘Is something wrong with the food?’” one flavorist told me a bit sheepishly. (Maybe, in light of that, you want to think twice about flavor experiments in certain social settings.)
Practice is exactly how people come to grips with the complex flavors of wine, too. You can learn the basic dimensions of wine description—color, body, astringency, acidity, sweetness—from any number of books. For the more subtle elements of the flavor—the hint of anise, or blackberry, or tobacco—feel free to play around. Buy some cheap red wine and divide it into a half-dozen jars. Mash a few raspberries in one, a slice of plum in the next, a few blackberries in another, and so on, to make aroma standards. Then pick a jar at random and see whether you can identify the addition just by smelling the wine. (The guy at my local wine shop was amused when I asked him to recommend the least flavorful, most nondescript wine on his shelves for this exercise.) This is exactly the method that the wine mavens at UC Davis use when training tasting panels to recognize wine aromas.
It also helps immensely to fall back on a flavor wheel or other crib sheet. These days you can find flavor wheels online for everything from wine, beer, and Scotch whisky to cheese, chocolate, and coffee. (I found one for apples, too!) Look around to see what you can find for some of your own favorite foods. Having a list of potential flavors to choose from avoids the tip-of-your-tongue problem, when you know what a flavor is but can’t call up a name.
I now carry in my wallet a folded wine-aroma crib sheet that I can pull out when I’m at a loss for words (although I do temper my geekiness when I’m with friends). Just last week, for example, I found an odd but familiar aroma in a glass of California Zinfandel. I couldn’t immediately name it, but I recognized it as soon as I saw it on my crib sheet: horse sweat (it tasted much better than it sounds, actually). I was surprised to identify it; I’d never tasted that in a wine before, but the crib sheet made me confident in my call.
Of course, my confidence could be misplaced, but I try not to let that hold me back. Remember, even expert perfumers and flavorists can’t accurately identify more than three or four aromas from a mixture. In something as complex as wine, that means the experts’ flavor identifications miss the mark pretty often. (You can easily verify that by comparing two critics’ reviews of the same wine and noting their lack of overlap.) The bottom line is that accuracy doesn’t matter. What’s important is that coming up with a description forces me to pay attention, and paying attention enriches my flavor experience. It slows me down, so that meals become a time for dining, not merely for eating.
There’s a world of flavor out there waiting, and it’s ours to enjoy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I had no idea a book required so much cooperation from so many people. More than one hundred scientists and flavor professionals generously gave their time and knowledge to educate me about flavor. Only a few of them are mentioned by name here, but every one, named or not, helped shape my understanding in ways great and small. Thank you all—it’s been fascinating, every step of the way.
A few deserve special mention. Leslie Stein arranged my visit to the Monell Chemical Senses Center, where Joel Mainland and Dani Reed sequenced portions of my genome and ran me through a panel of perceptual tests, and Gary Beauchamp knocked out my sense of taste. Linda Bartoshuk in Florida examined my tongue and shared her vast knowledge of taste. Richard Doty tested my sense of smell and let me visit his taste disorders clinic at the University of Pennsylvania for a day, and Patricia Yager graciously let me write about her case. Andreas Keller gave up most of one Saturday to show me around his lab and talk about smell. I spent three fascinating days with Bob Sobel and the other flavorists at FONA International, and another day with Brian Mullin and the flavorists at Givaudan. Profound thanks to Tracy Cesario at FONA and Jeff Peppet at Givaudan for setting up the visits. Nicole Gaudette at Alberta Agriculture arranged my participation in a consumer taste panel. Maynard Kolskog at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology let me invade his research kitchen and cooked strange food with me. Chris Loss and Jonathan Zearfoss talked flavor over a lovely meal at the CIA. Thanks to all of you for letting me participate.
For phone conversations above and beyond the normal interview, I’m grateful to Sanne Boesveldt, John Hayes, Michael Nestrud, Charles Spence, Dana Small, Mike Trought, Carol Wagstaff, and Vance Whittaker.
Sebastian Ahnert, Bruce Bryant, Tracy Cesario, Richard Doty, Harry Klee, Darren Logan, Joel Mainland, Richard Mattes, Florian Pinel, Charles Spence, Leslie Stein, Mike Trought, Carol Wagstaff, Vance Whitaker, Patricia Yager, and Jonathan Zearfoss valiantly read whole chapters or portions thereof to help me get the facts straight. Any errors that remain are my own fault.
Thanks to Richard Doty for permission to reprint portions of the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test, and to Caroline Hobkinson for graciously allowing me to reproduce portions of the menu from her Multisensory Feast at the House of Wolf restaurant.
I’m indebted to Justin Mullins for suggesting that there was a book in this, and to my agent, Peter Tallack at The Science Factory, for encouraging me to develop the proposal and then finding just the right home for it. Louisa Pritchard has done a wonderful job selling foreign rights.
I thank my editor, John Glusman at W. W. Norton, for his steady support and sensitive editing—and for a well-timed kick in the posterior, without which I’d still be interviewing chefs and flavor scientists! Thanks, too, to my British editors, Ed Faulkner and Elen Jones at Ebury Press. Alexa Pugh and Lydia Brents at Norton patiently answered all my rookie questions, and kept the whole thing moving in the right direction. Rebecca Homiski and Louise Mattarelliano shepherded the manuscript through the production process with care. Nina Hnatov’s meticulous copyediting was a joy to behold. I thought I had an eye for detail, but Nina showed me a whole new level. Susan Groarke’s proofreading ensured that the text made the trip from manuscript to proof intact and error-free. I’m immensely grateful to Chin-Yee Lai for a stunning cover design and Chris Welch for an elegant layout. I’m grateful to Elizabeth Riley, Meredith McGinnis, and Steve Colca in Norton’s marketing department, and to Bill Rusin and his sales team for guiding this book’s journey to your hand.
I couldn’t have done this without personal support. Joel Shurkin, David Quammen, Ed Struzik, and John Acorn shared their book-writing advice. Gordon Fox and Kathy Whitley housed me in Florida, and Mark and Lisa Holmes did the same in New Jersey. My colleagues at New Scientist magazine tolerated my periodic disappearances. Many friends helped keep me sane, but Ed Struzik, Jim and Karin Stewart, Alan Nursall, Heidi Zwickel, and Mike Sullivan deserve special mention. My neighbors, especially Tony and Wanda next door, have tolerated years of indifferent lawn care.
Finally, and most important, I thank my family. My parents, John and Kathleen Holmes, exposed me to lots of unusual flavors as a kid, and have encouraged me ever since. Most of all, I thank my wife, Deb Moon, and our son Ben for all their love and support, and for being willing guinea pigs for lots of flavor experiments.
NOTES
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
INTRODUCTION
> 4 Richard Wrangham argues: Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2009): 105–127.
4 spices have antibacterial properties: Paul W. Sherman and Jennifer Billing, “Darwinian Gastronomy: Why We Use Spices,” BioScience 49 (1999): 453–463.
5 more brain systems: Gordon M. Shepherd, “Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine,” Flavour 4 (2015): 19, doi:10.1186/s13411-014-0030-9.
6 Vegemite: Paul Rozin and Michael Siegal, “Vegemite as a Marker of National Identity,” Gastronomica 3, no. 4 (2003): 63–67.
6 holidays, sex, and family time: J. Westenhoefer and V. Pudel, “Pleasure from Food: Importance for Food Choice and Consequences of Deliberate Restriction,” Appetite 20 (1993): 246.
8 English speakers generally use taste: Paul Rozin, “‘Taste-Smell Confusions’ and the Duality of the Olfactory Sense,” Perception and Psychophysics 31 (1982): 397–401.
11 Bush told reporters: Maureen Dowd, “‘I’m President,’ So No More Broccoli!,” New York Times, March 23, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/23/us/i-m-president-so-no-more-broccoli.html.
CHAPTER 1: BROCCOLI AND TONIC
14 Bartoshuk who first suggested: Linda M. Bartoshuk, Valerie B. Duffy, and Inglis J. Miller, “PTC/PROP Tasting: Anatomy, Psychophysics, and Sex Effects,” Physiology & Behavior 56 (1994): 1165–1171.
17 lose those extraneous tastes: Alexander A. Bachmanov et al., “Genetics of Taste Receptors,” Current Pharmaceutical Design 20 (2014): 2669–2683.
17 vampire bats: Wei Hong and Huabin Zhao, “Vampire Bats Exhibit Evolutionary Reduction of Bitter Taste Receptor Genes Common to Other Bats,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2014), doi:10.1098/rspb.2014.1079.
23 104 diverse bitter-tasting chemicals: Wolfgang Meyerhof et al., “The Molecular Receptive Ranges of Human TAS2R Bitter Taste Receptors,” Chemical Senses 35 (2010): 157–170.
26 published a letter: Robert Ho Man Kwok, “Chinese-Restaurant Syndrome,” New England Journal of Medicine 278 (1968): 796.
26 picked up the story: For a good treatment of the history of Chinese restaurant syndrome, see Ian Mosby, “‘That Won-Ton Soup Headache’: The Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, MSG and the Making of American Food, 1968–1980,” Social History of Medicine (2009): 133–151, doi:10.1093/shm/hkn098.
27 fifty-eight million pounds: Ibid., 7.
27 most damning evidence: L. Tarasoff and M. F. Kelly, “Monosodium L-Glutamate: A Double-Blind Study and Review,” Food and Chemical Toxicology 31 (1993): 1019–1035.
27 when researchers looked back: Ibid.
29 discovered by accident: Anonymous, “The Inventor of Saccharine,” Scientific American, July 17, 1886, 36.
29 Cyclamate: Deborah Jean Warner, Sweet Stuff: An American History of Sweeteners from Sugar to Sucralose (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 195, accessed via Google Books, March 29, 2016.
29 Aspartame: Robert H. Mazur, “Discovery of Aspartame,” in Lewis D. Stegink and L. J. Filer, Jr., eds., Aspartame: Physiology and Biochemistry (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1984), 4.
29 Sucralose: Burkhard Bilger, “The Search for Sweet,” The New Yorker, May 22, 2006, 40.
30 Pepsi is about 11 percent: Daniel Engber, “The Quest for a Natural Sugar Substitute,” New York Times Magazine, January 1, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/magazine/the-quest-for-a-natural-sugar-substitute.html.
30 its own distinctive timing: Paul A. S. Breslin and Alan C. Spector, “Mammalian Taste Perception,” Current Biology 18 (2008): R153.
30 ten seconds later: Engber, “Quest for a Natural Sugar.”
30 four seconds longer: Ibid.
31 9 grams of salt daily: S. L. Drake and M. A. Drake, “Comparison of Salty Taste and Time Intensity of Sea and Land Salts from around the World,” Journal of Sensory Studies 26 (2010): 25.
31 from processed foods: Marjorie Ellin Doyle and Kathleen A. Glass, “Sodium Reduction and Its Effect on Food Safety, Food Quality, and Human Health,” Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety 9 (2010): 44–56.
31 high blood pressure: Ibid., 45.
32 they taste saltier: Tassyana Vieira Marques Freire et al., “Salting Potency and Time-Intensity Profile of Microparticulated Sodium Chloride in Shoestring Potatoes,” Journal of Sensory Studies 30 (2015): 1–9.
33 bitter-tasting medicines: Adam A. Clark, Stephen B. Liggett, and Steven D. Munger, “Extraoral Bitter Taste Receptors as Mediators of Off-Target Drug Effects,” FASEB Journal 26 (2012): 4827–4831.
34 more sinus infections: Robert J. Lee and Noam A. Cohen, “The Emerging Role of the Bitter Taste Receptor T2R38 in Upper Respiratory Infection and Chronic Rhinosinusitis,” American Journal of Rhinology and Allergy 27 (2013): 283–286.
35 receptors on our taste buds: Robin M. Tucker, Richard D. Mattes, and Cordelia A. Running, “Mechanisms and Effects of ‘Fat Taste’ in Humans,” BioFactors 40 (2014): 313–326.
35 a distinct taste: Cordelia A. Running, Bruce A. Craig, and Richard D. Mattes, “Oleogustus: The Unique Taste of Fat,” Chemical Senses 40 (2015), 507–516.
35 oleogustus: Ibid.
36 a taste for calcium: Michael G. Tordoff et al., “T1R3: A Human Calcium Taste Receptor,” Scientific Reports 2 (2012): 496, doi:10.1038/srep00496.
36 for carbon dioxide: Jayaram Chandrashekar et al., “The Taste of Carbonation,” Science 326 (2009): 443–445.
36 a taste for starch: Breslin and Spector, “Mammalian Taste Perception,” R149.
37 calcium-sensing receptor: Motonaka Kuroda and Naohiro Miyamura, “Mechanism of the Perception of ‘Kokumi‘ Substances and the Sensory Characteristics of the ‘Kokumi‘ Peptide, Gamma-Glu-Val-Gly,” Flavour 4 (2015): 11, doi:10.1186/2044-7248-4-11.
37 interact with one another: Russell S. J. Keast and Paul A. S. Breslin, “An Overview of Binary Taste-Taste Interactions,” Food Quality and Preference 14 (2002): 117.
37 ability to taste PROP: Bernd Bufe et al., “The Molecular Basis of Individual Differences in Phenylthiocarbamide and Propylthiouracil Bitterness Perception,” Current Biology 15 (2005): 322–327.
38 That’s probably why: Bartoshuk, Duffy, and Miller, “PTC/PROP Tasting.”
39 support that hunch: For example, John E. Hayes and Valerie B. Duffy, “Revisiting Sugar-Fat Mixtures: Sweetness and Creaminess Vary with Phenotypic Markers of Oral Sensation,” Chemical Senses 32 (2007): 225–236.
39 fail to find a link: For example, Mary E. Fischer et al., “Factors Related to Fungiform Papillae Density: The Beaver Dam Offspring Study,” Chemical Senses 38 (2013): 669–677; Nicole L. Garneau et al., “Crowdsourcing Taste Research: Genetic and Phenotypic Predictors of Bitter Taste Perception as a Model,” Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience 8 (2014): 33, doi:10.3389/fnint.2014.00033.
39 gustin might be involved: Melania Melis et al., “The Gustin (CA6) Gene Polymorphism, rs2274333 (A/G) as a Mechanistic Link between PROP Tasting and Fungiform Taste Papilla Density and Maintenance,” PLoS One 8 (2013): e74151, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0074151.
40 affects sweet perception: Alexey A. Fushan et al., “Allelic Polymorphism within the TAS1R3 Promoter Is Associated with Human Taste Sensitivity to Sucrose,” Current Biology 19 (2009): 1288–1293.
42 two kinds of supertasters: Natalia V. Ullrich et al., “PROP Taster Status and Self-Perceived Food Adventurousness Influence Food Preferences,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 104 (2004): 543–549.
CHAPTER 2: BEER FROM THE BOTTLE
48 unique pattern of molecular vibrations: For the most detailed exposition of this point of view, see Luca Turin, The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell (London: Faber and Faber, 2006).
49 a different chord: This apt analogy is not mine, alas. I first encountered it on the Food Sommelier website, http://www.foodsommelier.com/sensory_reality/.
49 used it in their key paper: Linda Buck and Richard Axel, “A Novel Multigene Family May Encode Odorant Receptors: A Molecular Basis for Odor Recognitio
n,” Cell 65 (1991): 183.
50 But a closer look: This paragraph follows Avery Gilbert, What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (New York: Crown, 2008): 2–4.
53 413 odor receptors: Tsviya Olender et al., “Personal Receptor Repertoires: Olfaction as a Model,” BMC Genomics 13 (2012): 414, doi:10.1186/1471-2164-13-414.
55 ORs all over the place: Ester Feldmesser et al., “Widespread Ectopic Expression of Olfactory Receptor Genes,” BMC Genomics 7 (2006): 121, doi:10.1186/1471-2164-7-121.
55 combine ethyl isobutyrate: E. Le Berre et al., “Just Noticeable Differences in Component Concentrations Modify the Odor Quality of a Blending Mixture,” Chemical Senses 33 (2008), 389–395.
55 one part geraniumy: C. Masanetz, H. Guth, and W. Grosch, “Fishy and Hay-like Off-flavours of Dry Spinach,” Zeitschrift für Lebensmitteluntersuchung und -Forschung A 206 (1998): 108–113.
56 a trillion different odor objects: C. Bushdid et al., “Humans Can Discriminate More Than 1 Trillion Olfactory Stimuli,” Science 243 (2014): 1370–1372.
56 treated with caution: Richard C. Gerkin and Jason B. Castro, “The Number of Olfactory Stimuli That Humans Can Discriminate Is Still Unknown,” eLife 4 (2015): e08127, doi:10.7554/eLife.08127.
57 a terrific book: Gordon M. Shepherd, Neurogastronomy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
57 asked her to close her eyes: Yaara Yeshurun and Noam Sobel, “An Odor Is Not Worth a Thousand Words: From Multidimensional Odors to Unidimensional Odor Objects,” Annual Review of Psychology 61 (2010): 226.