“Ultra-Processed People”

Chris van Tulleken: Ultra-Processed People
(Published June, 2023)

Reading this book was a very fascinating experience, and very different from my expectations. It’s not just another rant about big food companies, it’s a detailed survey of the science of ways that humans can be caused to eat too much. It's about how the brain can create the conditions for obesity when you give it a chance. But above all, it's about how artificially created flavors, nutrients, emulsifiers, and other manufactured ingredients have changed the modern diet, and have contributed to a big increase in obesity and related diseases, especially diabetes. The author builds the case for this carefully and in detail, which I'm not qualified to try to replicate in my review.

For example, think about these: saccharine, high-fructose corn syrup, xanthan gum, aspartame, dimethyl cellulose, modified food starch, canola oil, sodium stearoyl lactylate, calcium sulfate, ammonium sulfate, calcium propionate, sodium acid pyrophosphate — random ingredients from packaged food labels that I searched for on the web. 

Are these really foods? Yes and no! Van Tulleken provides a general view of the enormous expansion of ultra-processed food in our diet since the invention of saccharine in 1879, and the explosion of new additives in the last quarter of the 20th century. He talks about the motive of food companies: making money, and how they market these foods to achieve their ends. He explains: 

"Usually the aim of UPF is to replace the ingredients of a traditional and much loved food with cheaper alternatives and additives that extend shelf life, facilitate centralised distribution and, it turns out, drive excess consumption. Pies, fried chicken, pizza, butter, pancake mix, pastries, gravies, mayonnaise – all these began as real food. But the non-UPF versions are expensive, so their traditional ingredients are often replaced with cheap, sometimes entirely synthetic, alternatives." (p. 20). 

An enormous number of such substitutes and additives are included in a diet of ultra-processed food:

"It’s not clear how much or even how many additives we eat. In the EU, there are more than 2,000 permitted for use. In the US, the number is (terrifyingly) unknown, but is thought to be higher than 10,000. As production has become entirely automated, with computer-controlled robots cutting vegetables, grinding meat, mixing batter, extruding dough and wrapping the final product, many additives are required so that food can withstand the process. If colours or flavours are lost as food is subjected to this robotic mauling, then, as we’ve seen, they can simply be chemically replaced." (p. 210). 

The consequences of more than a century of creating food and drugs that derail the brain’s natural control over hunger and satiety are documented in a fascinating way, which I can’t begin to summarize. I've picked one passage that I find essential:

"UPF, especially products with particular combinations of salt, fat, sugar and protein, can drive our ancient evolved systems for ‘wanting’: ‘Some ultra-processed foods may activate the brain reward system in a way that is similar to what happens when people use drugs like alcohol, or even nicotine or morphine.’ This neuroscience is persuasive, if still in its early stages. There is a growing body of brain-scan data showing that energy-dense, hyperpalatable food (ultra-processed but probably also something a really good chef might be able to make) can stimulate changes in many of the same brain circuits and structures affected by addictive drugs." (p. 153).

Even if you think you know all about ultra-processed foods and how they affect their consumers, you really ought to read this book and find out more than you already know! You may be more ignorant than you realize — I thought I had read a lot about the subject, and I certainly was ignorant. You may also have seen quibbles that say that no one really knows what ultra-processed food is. Reading the book, I concluded that this argument is tendentious. Maybe you can find some marginal items. So what.

Throughout the book, van Tulleken reviews the research literature on each scientific topic, which is fascinating and also challenging. I was particularly interested in his analysis of which researchers were compromised because they accepted funding from the food and additive industries, which often resulted in their finding what the big food corporations wished they would find. This is a sad state of affairs, but often documented by other writers as well.

Everywhere, since I read van Tulleken’s book, I see journalists' accounts that seem to support or amplify the major points of he made. Ultra-Processed People does not discuss one huge current trend: the use of injectable drugs to change human cravings for food and thus to offer a new way for people to lose weight. These articles are documenting the way the newly popular drugs reverse effects that in many cases could be due to consequences of ultra-processed food. I hope that van Tulleken will eventually add this topic to his book and to this: “Most UPF is not food. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.”

Ultra-processed food is everywhere!

Here are two examples of articles on topics relevant to the book that appeared in the New York Times on January 16, 2024, just to show how this seems to be everywhere:

• “Diabetes Is Fueling an Amputation Crisis for Men in San Antonio” 
• "In the Ozempic Age, Has ‘Craveable’ Lost Its Selling Power?"

Review © 2024 mae sander

Recent Reading

Dwight Garner, a book critic, has given us a rather strange book titled The Upstairs Delicatessen: on Eating, Reading, Reading about Eating & Eating while Reading. This account treats his two favorite pastimes: eating mindlessly and unceasingly without reflection, and reading about food. He endlessly quotes little phrases and sentences about food from famous writers, modern writers, fiction writers, narrative writers, old and new writers, trendy and unfashionable writers, song writers, pop culture writers, and more. Reading it is a bit of a blur. But the essence is: he loves to eat and he doesn't think about it much.

A quote from Dwight Garner:

"Salty, fatty, crispy, and spicy: the basic food groups, essential building blocks for happiness, more all-American than apple pie. Lunch is when I eat fast food, when I do. This is Americana, democracy in a paper wrapper. It makes sense that Evel Knievel’s first audiences were the diners outside at an A&W drive-in, when you ordered from a carhop instead of via a dented speaker. Maybe Jack and Diane, from the John Mellencamp song, were there, instead of sucking on chili dogs outside the Tastee Freez. “Tastee Freez in Fiction” will not be on a college syllabus anytime soon. Yet the characters in S. A. Cosby’s superb Southern crime novels are obsessive about Tastee Freez double chocolate milkshakes. Chuck Klosterman, in Fargo Rock City, is a student of cheap thrills. “Listening to Van Halen is like having the best sex of your life with three foxy nursing students you met at a Tastee Freez,” he wrote. On the other hand, listening to Eric Clapton is like “getting a sensual massage from a woman you’ve loved for the past ten years.” Eve Babitz saw things similarly. “The Byrds and the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas,” she wrote, “all sounded as though they came out of a Frostie Freeze machine pipe organ.” (Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading p. 82).  

In contrast, Michael Moss, in Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit our Addictions, writes in a journalistic, systematic way. He systematically explores the science and neuroscience of food memories, including rather detailed descriptions of how the brain processes desires, cravings, reactions, and memories of food, and how the combination of sugar and fat and salt (that's the combination referred to in the quote above) is an irresistible trigger for many brains. 

Hooked offers a very interesting and unexpected connection to Garner's much more disparate and vaguely disorganized thoughts. The same core questions appear in both books: what is food to a human mind? What is it like to eat mindlessly while doing other things, like reading. What is your brain doing and how are you driven to act like Garner when he spends the afternoon scarfing snacks while reading library books? What triggers our food obsessions or additions or just cravings?

The two books seem to be a random juxtaposition of two ways to see, by authors with very different methods of probing some of the same ideas. I happened to read them together for no particular reason.

A quote from Michael Moss: 

"When we eat with purpose and deliberation, giving some thought to the preparation and consumption of food, the hippocampus gets engaged. It helps keep the go brain from getting us in trouble. Slowing down and chewing our food leisurely allows the hippocampus to absorb the information from that eating experience and to learn. ...  By contrast, when we do things by rote, or by habit, as in eating a candy bar while staring at a computer, this mode of eating shows up in a part of the brain called the striatum, Latin for striped, because it has bands of white and gray matter... new research has connected it with our behavior in response to stimulus. In the striatum, we are reacting to inducements, like the sight or smell or memory of candy, without applying the kind of oversight that can put the brakes on a bad decision. When we file information away in the striatum, it creates what scientists have dubbed habit memory." (Michael Moss, Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions, p. 63). 

I guess you could get all philosophical about this, but I won't. 

Review  © 2023 mae sander

What makes eating so satisfying? (Repost from 2013)

Looking forward to wine and crunchy snacks on the patio,
while the weather is still keeping us waiting for spring!
This post is linked to the weekly celebration of drinks at Elizabeth's blog. 

"With wine, there are actually two layers of flavour in the initial nosing. The first aromas to hit are those such as bubble gum, banana or butterscotch from the most volatile elements that, says Smith, 'have probably arisen from fermentation.' Then, after the glass is agitated to break the surface tension, a second set of volatiles is released. 'That's when you get the fruit aroma – raspberry, pear, melon,' Smith adds." (The Guardian) 

Several years ago, in 2013, I did a reading project about the sense of smell. I continue to find the study of "neurogastronomy," or how the brain processes aromas and tastes, a compelling one (documented here). I often look for new articles about ongoing research on the subject. However, today, I'd like to repeat a post that I wrote back then, beginning with a link to an article in the Guardian -- "What makes eating so satisfying?" This article summarized some of the research on how the brain and sensory organs work together to create flavor and enjoyment in eating and drinking. This fit very well with my reading project of that time. It also fits well with several books and articles I have read this year, in 2022.

The author had several things to say about the complex pleasure of smelling and tasting wine.When you sniff a wine, the article points out, you perceive the most volatile aromas first, followed by those that are stirred up when you swirl the contents of your glass.

From the article: With wine, it is easy to confuse the two separate
entities of taste and smell. Photograph: David Levene

The complexity of the taste receptors on the tongue isn't quite what one learned in the past: the old "map" of taste buds has been superseded by recent research, says the Guardian. "The current consensus is that tastebuds all over the mouth carry receptors for all the basic tastes, it's just that there are higher concentrations of those four tastes in their designated areas."

The following example illustrates the article's point that perceptions of flavors in fact reside in the brain and on memories and learned reactions, citing Professor Barry Smith of London University's Centre for the Study of the Senses:

It is easy to confuse the two separate entities of taste and smell, and the latter holds great sway over how something will taste when it reaches your mouth. For example, westerners associate the aroma vanilla with sweetness (which is a taste – we can't actually smell sweet) so strongly that if vanilla is added to food, we'll think it tastes sweeter than it really is. But connections such as this are, adds Smith, "learned by the brain, not by you". If you are given a drink that has traces of sugar and vanilla that you wouldn't detect if they were on their own, the two together will taste sweet to you. Unless you're from Asia, where vanilla tends to be associated with salty food. 

The role of the brain in creating flavor is the subject of an entire book that I have read more than once: Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters by Gordon Shepherd. The connection made me find this example especially interesting.

Enjoyment of food also depends on visual cues, especially color, and on the sounds one hears while eating, says the Guardian:

In 2008, the Oxford professor Charles Spence won the Ig Nobel prize for proving the importance of noise when eating crunchy snacks. The study showed that people think Pringles "taste" stale when they're less crunchy, even though the taste and smell remain normal. He then put headphones on his munching participants, amplifying the sounds of their own crunching. The louder the crunch, the fresher and crisper the Pringles were reported to be. This is why, says Smith, "they make bags of crisps so noisy, to get the brain to think: fresh fresh fresh." 

Quite a fascinating article!

Blog post © 2013, 2022 by mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com. 

"The Curious Cook"

Harold McGee's book The Curious Cook was published in 1992. That didn't stop me from learning all kinds of interesting new things when I read it this week.

As in his earlier book, On Food and Cooking, McGee's main interest is the science of cooking. He looks at currently interesting issues like salmonella in eggs or how to keep lettuce leaves or guacamole from turning brown. He also explores older questions such as whether searing meat really keeps in "the juices" or whether ice cubes freeze faster if you start with boiling water instead of tap water.

The Curious Cook also has an interesting focus on unusual histories such as the history of persimmons or jerusalem artichokes. He offers summaries of earlier food science such as the work of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753-1814), and on the history of food words such as the word mayonnaise.

Let me start by telling you a few things I learned from McGee about mayonnaise.

I am a lover of mayonnaise; these are the two I have on hand.

• Purists insist that mayonnaise must be made from egg yolks, olive oil, and a hint of lemon juice or vinegar. McGee points out that the definition of this sauce was once much broader, including some very surprising ingredients, like mashed potato.
• Mayonnaise was first mentioned in print near the beginning of the 19th century. An important early discussion of mayonnaise appeared in the work of the famous chef Antoine Carême (1784-1833). 
• By the end of the 19th century, says McGee, mayonnaise was a very popular condiment in both Europe and America: an example of American use is Waldorf Salad, first offered in around 1895.
• The chemistry of mayonnaise involves emulsifying oil and egg yolk. McGee did extensive research on how this process works, including exploring the limits of how much oil can be emulsified into a small amount of egg yolk. Techniques for salmonella-safe mayo using cooked egg are also provided in his hands-on report. As he does with many topics, he challenges conventional cooking wisdom and long-standing myths.
• Where did the word mayonnaise originate? McGee cites a wide variety of theories. Some people, says McGee, think that it's named after the battle of Mahon, which the French won in 1756. Others believe that this is unlikely because the word wasn't used for around 50 years after the battle, and because the city of Mahon isn't known for its gastronomic successes. Another French word could be the root: moyeu, egg yolk; but that word obsolete by the 19th century. 
• "The true root word according to Carême, is manier: to work to manipulate," because of the process of working the liquids together. And "The most recent educated guess ... derives mayonnaise from the old verb mailler, meaning to beat, crush, or grind." (p. 130) 
• Modern bottled mayonnaise dates to near the beginning of the 20th century. This started when growing interest in photography caused a surplus of egg yolks -- albumen from large quantities of egg whites was essential in the booming photographic industry. To cope with the surplus, it was discovered that frozen egg yolks kept very well. Then it was discovered that the frozen yolks were a fine ingredient in long-lasting mayonnaise. Throughout the 20th century mayo became more and more widely used in American cuisine.

I pursued the topic of mayo history, and discovered that in 2013, the popular American brand Hellman's Mayonnaise celebrated 100 years of production. In honor of that anniversary, many writers discussed the same history that McGee had covered 20 years earlier, as well as topics like why some people love mayo and some hate it; why some think its blasphemy to use it on corned beef; or why others find it totally improper to put mayo on a BLT. Here are a few links to the articles I found useful: "On the Etymology of the Word Mayonnaise" from Bon Appétit, "A Brief History of Mayonnaise" from Slate, and a history of the word mayonnaise from the blog Word Histories.

You might be a curious cook yourself, so I'll tell you what McGee said about searing meat, freezing ice cubes, and keeping green stuff from turning brown. If you want to read about his very careful experiments and discoveries on these subjects, you need to get a copy of the book for yourself! His conclusions:

"Searing meat does not seal in juices. Nor does searing reduce the loss of juices. The juiciness of meat is determined by the doneness to which the meat is cooked: the rarer the juicier." (p. 21)

"Hot water can sometimes freeze faster than cold water. In my freezer, ice-cube trays filled with hot or cold water take about the same time to freeze." (p. 190)

"Blemished lettuce leaves darken more rapidly in a salad than leaves with intact surfaces.  ... As long as your knife is sharp, it doesn't matter whether you cut or tear the leaves ... Both vinegar and oil harm the appearance of lettuce, but oil acts more rapidly. ... Leaving the avocado pit in the bowl will keep green only the guacamole in direct contact with it." (p. 72) 

You may think you know how a lot of things work in the kitchen, but McGee doesn't let myths, traditional authorities, or old-wives' tales get in the way of his experiments. While TV food science programs and many others have redone some of the tests, especially about searing steaks to "keep the juices in," his ideas are still intriguing and many are not well-known. He may have made a few mistakes (especially about the physics of heat, according to my husband, a physicist), but his results are mostly still very useful.

The copy of The Curious Cook that I read came from the library -- I think I once owned a copy but I don't think I have it any more, and I have no idea why it took me so long to get around to reading such an interesting book!

This Wordy Wednesday blog post copyright © 2020 mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com.

"The Bad Food Bible" by Aaron Carroll, MD

"Eating is one of the great joys of life. Don't let people use misinformation or bad science to deprive you of the pleasure of good food." -- The Bad Food Bible, p. 198.

Aaron Carroll writes essays in the New York Times that debunk commonly held misconceptions about food. He calls out the perpetrators of misinformation, and tries to help people think more clearly about conflicting claims. His columns have interested me for a while, so I was happy to learn that he recently published a book along the same lines: The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully.

Most of the chapters of Carroll's book deal with foods that valid research has shown aren't nearly as bad as their reputations make them out to be. Carroll has a great sense of humor and irony, and doesn't tolerate fools gladly, which makes it a very readable book as well as enlightening. He effectively cites his own experience as a father, a physician, and a human being in explaining what motivated him to explore food myths and science.

I was especially interested in what Carroll disclosed about diet sodas and the artificial sweeteners in them, MSG, coffee, and alcohol. The overwhelming result of research studies about each on is that they aren't nearly as bad as people believe they are -- and in fact, consuming them in reasonable quantities probably offers health benefits. 

Carroll debunks the widespread confidence in gluten-free diets, except for properly diagnosed celiac and allergy sufferers, and he summarizes the risks of adopting gluten-free substitutes for things like bagels or cereal. He discusses research about topics like GMOs and organic foods. He puts the risks and rewards of eating meat, butter, and eggs into perspective -- and concludes that you can eat them in reasonable quantities without incurring the dangers that are often attributed to them. It's a very useful set of information: but you have to be open to learning about the scientific results, not to trusting in journalists, popularizers, and even quacks.

The value of Carroll's book is in the details. He explains how to identify scientific studies that are valid and valuable, and to recognize when writers have cherry-picked studies that confirm what people want to believe. He reviews the literature on each topic, explaining why studies that use human subjects are considerably more useful than those that use rats (which, he reveals, are particularly susceptible to bladder cancer, making the scare value of many studies less important). And he is never afraid to call out bias or bad science. Above all, he asks his readers to consider the real evidence, not the prevalent demonizations of foods like gluten, eggs, or GMOs. The one food that he doesn't defend is sugar.

Here are a few of his conclusions: if you want to critique these results, you really need to read the details before you fall back on what you think you know:

• "You have to bend the truth -- or at least do some pretty selective reasoning -- to make a scientific case that meat is bad for you." (p. 21)
• "If I have to choose between diet drinks and those with added sugar, I'll go with the diet. There's a potential -- and likely very real -- harm from consuming added sugar. There is none from artificial sweeteners." (p. 153)
• "Experimental research into MSG has revealed that it has few, if any, effects on humans." (p. 167)
• "There's no evidence that coffee is bad for the average person. The data do not support the idea that we, collectively, are drinking too much of it, nor that coffee is associated with poor health outcomes. In fact, the opposite appears to be true." (p. 127)
• Evidence points to these conclusions about alcohol: 
• "First, the majority of the research suggests that moderate alcohol consumption is associated with decreased rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and death." (p. 100) 
• "Second, it also seems to be associated with increased rates of some cancers (especially breast cancer), cirrhosis, chronic pancreatitis, and accidents, although this negative impact from alcohol seems to be smaller than its positive impact on cardiovascular health." (p. 100)
• "Drinking too much alcohol is bad for you, and you shouldn't do it. Period." (p. 104)

If you think you already know why butter, eggs, diet drinks, coffee, salt, and so on are bad for you, it might be useful for you to read this book.

A Thought-Provoking Book about Animal Capablities

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal explores the history and successes of a particular scientific endeavor called ethology: "the biological study of animal behavior" (p. 29). The book covers the state of the art of studying animal intelligence, non-human mental capacities, insights into animal minds from neuroscience, cognition and social interactions in various species, and other behaviors. Many of the observations made by de Waal and his colleagues over his long career in the field were in direct conflict with rigid assumptions about non-human characteristics held by earlier behaviorists.

Are We Smart Enough...  is full of descriptions of how the earlier researchers floundered in blind alleys while systematically excluding and mocking those who disagreed with their view of the limited nature of any creatures that were not humans. This is interesting, but what I found much more interesting was de Waal's many stories about the actual behavior of animals including a wide variety of species with numerous adaptations. He discusses the highly developed social life, social learning, and food-gathering methods of various species including chimps, monkeys, and corvids like crows and jackdaws, and even describes the clever hunting techniques of the octopus. We learn of many ways that these creatures make and use tools. We learn about their cognitive capacities, evidence of their consciousness and self-awareness, and several other characteristics once believed unique to humans. The question of consciousness, a problematic concept whether in humans or animals, is especially intriguing: from a conference on the subject de Waal quotes this: "The weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness." (p. 234)

There are many fascinating descriptions of apes, small monkeys, and even birds creating tools from available materials like twigs. One type of monkey even employed a sharpened stick to kill a small animal in its hole and pull it out to eat it. Moreover, a number of different animals apparently foresee when they would need the tools, bringing them to a site where food may be available, and then using them to overcome challenging situations where food is hard to get. Here's an example of one of de Waal's very informative original illustrations about wild chimps using tools --

De Waal describes quite a bit about how chimps go about this elaborate activity, especially how young chips patiently watch their mothers breaking the hard nut shells. At first the young chips ineffectively imitate their able mothers in a skill that's not in fact that easy for a human to do; after several years they become adept. An important fact about this observation is that it occurs in wild chimps, not in captive individuals. Here's more:

"The Japanese primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa tracked the development of this skill at the 'factory,' an open space where apes bring their nuts to anvil stones and fill the jungle with a steady rhythm of banging noise. Youngsters hang around the hardworking adults, occasionally pilfering kernels from their mothers. This way they learn the taste of nuts as well as the connection with stones. They make hundreds of futile attempts, hitting the nuts with their hands and feet, or aimlessly pushing nuts and stones around. That they still learn the skill is a great testament to the irrelevance of reinforcement, because none of these activities is ever rewarded until, by about three years of age, the juvenile starts to coordinate to the point that a nut is occasionally cracked. It is only by the age of six or seven that their skill reaches adult level." (p. 80).

Exaggerated claims about animal capacities are in a way the other side of the extreme views of animal limitations. For example, de Waal provides much detail about the claim that the famous parrot Alex was really using language just as humans do. De Waal doesn't think Alex's ability was the same as human language. However, he respects the endeavors with Alex and other language-trained non-humans, saying:

"The immense effort to find language outside our own species has, ironically, led to a greater appreciation of how special the language capacity is. It is fed by specific learning mechanisms that allow a toddler to linguistically outpace any trained animal. It is in fact an excellent example of biologically prepared learning in our species. Yet this realization by no means invalidates the revelations we owe animal language research. That would be like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It has given us Alex, Washoe, Kanzi, and other prodigies who have helped put animal cognition on the map. These animals convinced skeptics and the general public alike that there is much more to their behavior than rote learning. One cannot watch a parrot successfully count up items in his head and still believe that the only thing these birds are good at is parroting." (pp. 112-113)

There's much more here than I can possibly cover in a brief review. A very thought-provoking book!

To quote the review in the New York Times by Jon Mooallem:

"We sometimes fall into what de Waal calls 'neo-creationist' thinking: We accept evolution but assume 'evolution stopped at the human head' — believing our bodies may have evolved from monkeys, but that our brains are their own miraculous and discrete inventions. But cognition must be understood as an evolutionary product, like any other biological phenomenon; it exists on a spectrum, de Waal argues, with familiar forms shading into absolutely alien-looking ones. He introduces what he calls the rule of 'cognitive ripples': We tend to notice intelligence in primates because it’s most conspicuous. It looks the most like our intelligence. But 'after the apes break down the dam between the humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, the floodgates often open to include species after species.'" (NYT Review, April 26, 2016)

"Tasty" by John McQuaid: A very satisfactory book!

A few things I learned from Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat by John McQuaid (published 2015) --

• The history of humans cultivating sugarcane -- "the world's primary source of refined sugar for thousands of years" -- began around 6000 BC in Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea. Extracting sugar from sugarcane required much cooperation from groups of humans. By 2500 years ago, sugar refining in India was becoming "an industrial art," and several forms of candy and sweetener were popular. I was especially fascinated by a myth about the Buddha being given sugar by a group of passing merchants, "a few weeks after his enlightenment." Enlightenment led to rejection of human cravings, and "thanks to his enlightened state, Siddhartha apparently ate the sweet treat with no trace of these cravings [for food, sex, money, and success], just simple enjoyment." (p. 110-111)

• Perception of hot tastes, especially capsicum chiles, involves a mysterious combination of pain and relief from pain leading to pleasure. The neuroscience of how people react to chilis, especially incredibly hot ones, is described along with the efforts of chili growers to develop the world's hottest chili pepper. The history given here of the century-long scientific effort to understand how tasting chilis work is really amazing, and although I've read about it before, like many chapters in the book it put information together in a most enlightening way. And, we learn: eating chilis might make one live a longer, healthier life. 

• The famous "map" of tastes on the tongue is entirely false. All taste buds have receptors for the five basic tastes -- sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami. And maybe for fat and starch as well. The often-invoked theory that different regions of the tongue had receptors for different flavors was an error that unfortunately became widely accepted and repeated. The exact way that taste receptors work and their genetic basis is still being discovered.

• 

  Archaeologists at work at Gesher ben Ya'aquov --
  image from Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

  The earliest known kitchen dates from roughly 780,000 years ago. At Gesher ben Ya'aqov in the North of Israel archaeologists found that cave dwellers -- either homo sapiens or a pre-human species -- were cooking grains, acorns, other seeds, olives, fish, deer, elephants, and other foods. "Fire was only the most potent of a whole suite of tools used in food preparation: these early humans had a kitchen. One area was devoted to gutting fish. A space used for processing nuts had hammer-stones and pitted anvils that had been used as bases for smashing the shells of acorns before roasting them." (p. 33)

• Coffee combines a variety of bitter flavors, brought out by the exact method of selecting beans, roasting them, and extracting the flavors with high-pressure almost-boiling water from an espresso machine. You can separate a shot of espresso into three parts, which separately taste bad but together taste good, at least to coffee lovers! The chapter about bitter tastes, including coffee, explains how people's reaction to bitter flavors -- in coffee or anything else -- is complicated, involving genes, early experiences with food, cultural norms, and more. 

• Darwin described facial expressions for human reactions (name them) in a way that still has validity. Study of these, especially the "disgust" reaction offers insight into many food-related studies, reinforcing the idea that many human expressions are fairly consistent across ethnic groups and cultural backgrounds.

In reading about the senses of smell and taste, I've become very interested in topics covered by this book, such as neuro-gastronomy and related ways of describing human anatomy, perception, etc. But each book I have read recently has been more or less like the ones before. McQuaid's Tasty is different! I felt that I was learning something new on every page.

Rather than a more usual review, I thought I would just summarize the above interesting things I learned while reading. The book is full of fascinating topics; among them: fermentation and its role in food preparation; global warming and how it will change wine production; ways that the brain perceives tastes, and many more. The organization of the book is in fact very clear and coherent, and this isn't meant to be a summary!

"Flavor" by Bob Holmes

"We are the only species that seasons its food,
deliberately altering it with the highly flavored
plant parts we call herbs and spices." (p. 4)

"The notion that you can somehow “taste the soil” in a wine is completely false. Grape vines take up only water and simple nutrients like nitrogen, potassium, and calcium from the soil. They make all their more complex biomolecules— including the flavor volatiles— in-house. To put it more bluntly, none of the volatile molecules that determine a wine’s flavor come directly from the soil. ... Instead, a vineyard’s soil affects flavor indirectly, by altering how the vine grows and, especially, how quickly the grapes ripen." -- Bob Holmes. Flavor: The Science of Our Most Neglected Sense (p. 216- 217). 

Flavor and how it's perceived: two fascinating concepts. Recently, neuroscientists and other researchers have been making remarkable progress in understanding our sensory perception of the volatile molecules in food and drink -- the elements that make flavors vary. Tomatoes, ripe strawberries, fake strawberry flavor, wine grapes, bitter vegetables, seared steaks, artificial chicken stock, and other foods are the subjects of Canadian journalist Bob Holmes' reporting.

As illustrated in the quote above, Holmes explores some of the myths about what we taste and how these tastes get into our food. I choose his discussion of wine -- only a small part of his book -- to illustrate how many revealing details he presents. His explanation of the actual role that soil quality plays in creating wine-grape flavor is something I've been hoping to learn for a long time. The same clone of a particular type of grapes does indeed yield wines of varied flavors -- the vines experience different degrees of stress which affect their sugar content and their flavor elements (mainly volatile chemicals).

The way the grapes are handled during and after the harvest is another surprising source of variation. Here's another quote that shows how this works:

"If you pluck a grape off the vine and chew it, you won’t notice much passion fruit flavor, because the thiol molecules haven’t formed yet— only their odorless precursors are present. The thiols themselves form during fermentation, as the yeast attack the precursors and split off thiol molecules. Rough handling of the grapes causes them to accumulate more of the precursors, so machine-harvested grapes yield wines with about ten times as much thiol as handpicked ones. This, incidentally, may be part of the reason that New Zealand sauvignon blanc, which is generally mechanically harvested, tends to have a much more pronounced passion fruit flavor than French sauvignon blanc, which is usually hand harvested. Even trucking the grapes from vineyard to winery leads to more thiols in the finished wine." (pp. 217-218). 

And finally, he writes about fermentation: "different yeasts can yield very different wines from the same juice. Winemakers are very aware of this, and put a great deal of thought into their choice of yeast." (p. 218).

Through most of the book, Holmes explains how human sensory apparatus enables people's widely varying response to foods. He shows not only the role of our taste buds and our olfactory system, but also other perceptions of food like how we hear it crunch and how it appears on a plate, and how the stinging and burning of chilies is perceived with our heat-and-touch sensors. He reports on a variety of studies that highlight the role of the context where we eat in how we respond to tastes -- even ambient lighting and noise.

The role of genes that control perception of volatile chemicals (the natural or artificial substances that account for varied flavors) seems to be a critical part of how human variation occurs. Genetics of taste is a study that's in its early stages and in some ways offers more confusion than clarity about how individual responses differ, according to Holmes' account of current research. "Clearly," writes Holmes, "the link among genes, taste perceptions, and actual food choices is not a simple one." (p. 41).

The difficulty neuroscientists encounter in analyzing the genetic component of taste arises for at least two reasons. One is that each person's experience with foods, especially in childhood, creates individual reactions to the various chemicals, so two individuals, despite having the same genes, can react differently anyway. Even so-called super-tasters don't all have the same response to the tastes they perceive. Further, the working of the taste buds and olfactory receptors differ for various taste elements in foods. For example, receptors for the so-called fifth taste, umami, are different from those for salt or bitter taste: "Our umami receptors max out at low intensity, so we’re physically unable to experience very umami in the same way we can taste very salty or very bitter simply by piling on the salt or brewing a cup of extra-strong espresso." (p. 25).

Holmes interviewed a very wide variety of experts including neuroscientists, agronomists, flavor scientists in commercial labs, and wine growers, among others. I have read several other books on the general topic of how humans perceive flavor and taste, including several books that were written by his interview subjects, or books that interviewed the same sources. As a result, I found some of the chapters a bit boring as I had read the same material before, often in much the same form. But on the whole it's a really great book, and its updates on the current state of science and technology of food, challenges to chefs who want to apply this science, and overall understanding of flavor and taste are wonderful!

Everything you didn't want to know about food

I've occasionally written briefly about issues of ethical food, safe food, healthy food, and quality in food. Grub Street/New York Magazine writers Nick Tabor and James D. Walsh have now put together every possible objection to a just about every food I can think of: "The Neurotic Eater's Grocery List." Don't read it if you are squeamish about animal welfare, environmental destruction, or dangerous microorganisms in your food. The authors also include a few remarks about politics reflected in the grocery aisles.

Here are a few notable quotes from the article:

• Eggs farms are true hell.
• Salmon are drug addicts.
• Scallops try to escape. Clams cower in fear. Oysters don’t want to die.
• Octopuses are geniuses.
• Slaves harvested your shrimp.
• However bad you imagine beef is — it’s worse.
• Your banana habit might be supporting terrorism.
• Cabbage can hear you eating it.
• Potatoes are Republican.
• Chocolate is made by child slaves.

The authors don't even mention pesticides on produce until the end of the section about fruit and vegetables, when they say:

"But really, pesticides bathe just about everything. About 1.1 billion pounds of pesticides are dumped on crops in the U.S. annually, and the farmers exposed to them have higher rates of cancer of all kinds: leukemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and soft-tissue sarcoma as well as cancers of the skin, lip, stomach, brain, and prostate."

Is that paranoid enough for you? Read it and weep, or maybe read it and gag.

The Senses

Grenouille, the central character in Patrick Süskind's bestseller Perfume, is missing something: something needed to make him fully or even minimally human. As a baby, born to an unmarried fishwife in mid-18th century Paris, he's rejected by his wet nurse. She perceives that physically what he's missing is any odor. "He's possessed by the devil," she says.

The priest who is responsible for the baby responds: "Impossible! It is absolutely impossible for an infant to be possessed by the devil.... Does some evil stench come from him?"

The nurse replies, "He doesn't smell at all." The priest demands details. She explains that the baby Grenouille doesn't smell "like human children ought to smell," which after quite a bit of questioning on the part of the priest she explains thus:

"They smell good all over. ... Their feet, for instance, they smell like a smooth, warm stone -- or no, more like curds... or like butter, like fresh butter.... And their bodies smell like ... like a griddle cake that's been soaked in milk. And their heads... smell best of all. [The crown of a baby's head] smells like caramel, it smells so sweet, so wonderful.... And that's how little children have to smell -- and no other way." (p. 12-14)

Odors, aromas, smells, stinks, miasmas, and above all perfumes dominate the intensely vivid descriptions of the book. It begins with all the stinks of the streets, markets, tanneries, stables, and waterways of Paris in that era, as the odorless baby and then child develops into a strange, unlikeable, and self-absorbed person. Having no smell himself, Grenouille nevertheless has a heightened sense of smell, a phenomenal memory for aromas and odors, and a vaguely inhuman way of reacting to them.

But Grenouille isn't just a man without his own natural smell, he's a man without humanity. In an effort to compensate for his missing human odor, he desperately apprentices himself to a perfumer, where he demonstrates remarkable abilities to create pomades, perfumes, elixirs, and other cosmetic preparations. He learns to capture aromas from both the inanimate (like a metal door knob) and the living (like a puppy). However, with a cold-blooded lack of compassion or any feeling at all, he grasps that it's necessary to kill in order to capture the aroma he finds most compelling -- that of a beautiful girl on the threshold of womanhood. The last part of the book turns into a horror story as he becomes an increasingly inhuman serial killer, and ends with a surprising and dreadful conclusion.

So many editions of Perfume in this screen shot from google images suggest how very popular it's been since publication in 1985.

Recent books I've read about the neuroscience of the senses of smell and taste and how the brain processes them often mention Süskind's book, which was published in 1985, at about the same time as the earliest modern studies of the subject. Süskind's descriptions of the mechanisms of smell are very interesting in this context. Grenouille can recall every smell he ever sensed. He can distinguish individual aromas in blended perfumes or streets full of multiple smells. These abilities seem to go far beyond what scientific tests show actual humans are capable of. 

Scientific studies usually focus on the interaction of smell and taste, what one author calls "how the brain creates flavors."  Süskind's character seems to find the taste of food unrelated to the complex and well-developed sense of smell that distinguishes him from other humans. In one long section, Grenouille lives as a recluse in a mountain cave, during which time he eats lizards and other vermin with no sense of disgust. Maybe his name -- meaning frog in French -- is relevant to this part of the tale. Other than his having been a very greedy baby (another fault found by the wet nurse) and despite his constant obsession with aromas, there's little about food, flavors, or cooking in the book at all -- only smells.

"Stinky Feet Cheese"

For a long time, I have wondered about foods that are politely viewed as an "acquired taste." Or impolitely classified as "stinky" or worse, like the "stinky feet cheese" on the tables in an Italian restaurant that kids teased about when I was much younger.

Once you acquire a taste for Italian cheese or blue, ultra-strong coffee, Vegemite, caviar, fermented fish sauce, sauerkraut, raw blubber, peanut butter, or many other distinctive flavors, you might really savor them. But people who grew up with different tastes and different foods probably find your choices unappetizing or disgusting. I've been observing lately that certain tastes are really hard to acquire and they really disgust people who don't share them. It seems to me that these flavors are very frequently the result of fermentation -- Korean kim chee or British Marmite, for example.

A very wonderful book titled What the Nose Knows by Avery Gilbert offers an explanation into this question I've been thinking about. He says that acquiring these challenging tastes is a signal of belonging to your own national or ethnic group:

"Every culture has a foul-smelling food for membership. You are not really Taiwanese unless you eat 'stinky tofu' (chunks of fermented soybean curd). You are not really Icelandic unless you eat harkarl (rotten shark meat). Real Japanese eat natto (a gluey mass of fermented soybeans that smells like creosote). Then there is the fabulously stinky durian, or jackfruit, of southeast Asia. Singapore being Singapore, one is allowed to eat its sweet, custardy innards, but it is illegal to carry it on public transportation. I’m personally a big fan of kimchi, the national condiment of Korea. It’s made from fermented Chinese cabbage, garlic, fish sauce, and lots of red pepper. It packs a punch— a bottle of it once exploded in my refrigerator. Its postingestive consequences are spectacular: the humorist P. J. O’Rourke described them as 'a miasma of eyeglass-fogging kimchi breath, throat-searing kimchi burps, and terrible, pants-splitting kimchi farts.'" (What the Nose Knows, Kindle Locations 1634-1641).

Michael Pollan's book Cooked agrees with this idea, pointing out that "as much as a third of the food in the world's diet is produced in a process involving fermentation." He names "coffee, chocolate, vanilla, bread, cheese, wine and beer, yogurt, ketchup and most other condiments, vinegar, soy sauce, miso, certain teas, corned beef and pastrami, prosciutto and salami," and says "Fermented foods are typically both strongly flavored and strongly prized in their cultures." (p. 304) And he elaborates:

"What's curious is how culturally specific so many of the flavors of fermentation turn out to be. Unlike sweetness or umami these are not the kinds of simple flavors humans are hardwired to like. To the contrary, these are 'acquired tastes,' by which we mean that to enjoy them we often must overcome a hardwired aversion, something it usually takes the force of culture, and probably repeated exposure as a child, to achieve. The most common term children and adults alike will use to describe the fermented foods of another culture is some variation on the word 'rotten.' A wrinkle of the nose is how we react to both rottenness and foreignness. Many of these foods occupy a biological frontier -- on the edge of decomposition -- that turns out to be a well-patrolled cultural frontier as well." (Cooked, p. 309)

I like this explanation of acquired tastes very much, and feel as if it answers the question I've been pondering, about why people so often hate the fermented foods of other cultures than their own. And more generally, I've enjoyed reading both of these complex and fascinating books, which offer a vast number of insights about food, aromas, tastes, cooking, and chemistry. Obviously there's far more to learn from them than just what's in these brief quotes.

Also, by the way: the "stinky feet cheese" that my friends teased about when I was a kid -- it was grated Parmesan in a shaker. As I said, the local Italian restaurant where we encountered this cheese was the place where we were all also acquiring a taste for pizza. You might be astounded to hear that most of our parents had never tried pizza, so eating pizza was a sign of membership in our own adolescent peer group. That was long ago, now pizza is practically global.

Well, sort of global: millions of people in China think that ALL cheese is disgusting food for westerners and that the western diet makes them smell funny if not downright bad. Or as Pollan states it: the Chinese regard stinky cheeses "so disgusting as to be utterly incomprehensible as food." (Cooked, p. 369)

But the cheese in those shakers? By Italian standards, it was rancid from sitting out on the tables of the restaurant for ages after it had been grated. Real freshly-grated Parmesan isn't stinky like that at all. Or at least I don't think so -- maybe it wasn't rancid but I'm just used to it now. Tastes change, right?

Molecular Gastronomy

French scientist and author Hervé This claims to be the inventor of molecular gastronomy. He and physicist Nicholas Kurti invented the name molecular gastronomy in 1992. Their goals were to explore recipes; collect and test cooking lore; invent new dishes; introduce new tools, utensils, ingredients; and use cooking to popularize science in general. While these goals have changed over time, molecular cuisine is still expanding and producing new research results and new influences. (The Science of the Oven, Kindle location 161)

Hervé This is also active in molecular cuisine: that is, cooking that applies the knowledge from molecular gastronomy. Under the influence of himself and his fellow molecular scientists, he says, "today's cooks use liquid nitrogen to make their ice cream and sorbet, and ... they distill, infuse, and jell with the aid of jelling agents long used by the food industry." (The Science of the Oven, Kindle location 173)

Hervé This from Nature article

The laboratory of Hervé This has been a major source of techniques for the inventions of molecular cuisine, including the world-famous innovative ideas of Spanish chef Fernand Adrià. An article in the Guardian described their relationship: "Adrià's scientific approach [was] inspired by the work of, among others, French physical chemist Hervé This, who led Adrià to deconstruct ingredients and dishes." (source/link)

An interview in the journal Nature provides some insight into his methods. He states:

"Meat, fish, fruits and vegetables are organized mixtures of compounds. Cooking traditionally means mixing mixtures, and is not precise. This is why I proposed the concept of note-by-note cooking — using specific compounds to build consistency, taste and odour. It is difficult, but a huge unexplored continent is ahead of us." (Nature, vol 464, March 18, 2010, p. 355)

In the book The Science of the Oven Hervé This reviews a wide variety of research on specific reactions that take place during cooking or food preparation. He talks about "note by note" cooking, an advance beyond the original molecular cuisine. Purified flavors (specific molecular extracts) are added to a dish one by one, in contrast to the normal way using basic foods. Recognizable food products such as vegetables or chicken have many flavors -- in  his view, too many unpredictable flavors. He asks: "In the twenty-first century, why could we not produce a sauce beginning with water, glucose, tartaric acid ... and polyphenols, such as certain producers extract from grape seeds, for example?" (Kindle location 2654)

In one example, Hervé This explores the question of whether one can make a jelly from tea. The chemicals in a cup of brewed tea aren't compatible with gelation -- so he suggests making the tea, removing the chemicals that prevent jelling, and adding back distillations of the flavor molecules. (Kindle location 1512)

To me this sounds like what industrial food processors do. In fact, many of the techniques used by Hervé This and the chefs under his influence sound like an artisanal version of industrial food to me, and he seems to admire some of the work of food chemists who work in their laboratories. In the Nature interview, he says: "The food industry already recaptures and reincorporates ‘essential oils’ that are lost during cooking processes. As a result, jams and orange juice, for example, are now much better." I wonder if he's read some of the American books about the food industry and how they manipulate consumers' tastes! Or similar French ones, if there are any.

Unfortunately, in his books  Hervé This often repeats various linguistic quibbles, such as his dislike of the word "flavor," or his attacks on the term "applied science," where he spends a lot of time on peevishly attacking the names of a lot of existing university applied science departments, research programs, and publications. Aside from this annoyance, Hervé This is a very interesting author of many books, at least five available in English, and teacher of influential courses.

Hervé This acknowledges a variety of predecessors in exploring science as it relates to cooking. One of these is Edouard de Pomiane, the medical scientist and cookbook author that I've been researching. The book Cours de gastronomie moléculaire n° 2: Les précisions culinaires (not translated into English) offers a several page biography of Pomiane and summarizes many of the books he published between 1920 and his death in 1964. While acknowledging Pomiane's accomplishments, Hervé This is critical because Pomiane didn't do the type of laboratory research that has been done recently. He points out that Pomiane made some mistakes, or uncritically accepted commonly held ideas about (for example) the process of making mayonnaise and other chemical or physical reactions. He doesn't accept that Pomiane was a scientist -- though he's a little harsh considering that some of the science was still in the future.

"The Emperors of Chocolate"

Yesterday night: culinary book group again. Book selection: The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret world of Hershey and Mars by Joel Glenn Brenner.

Agreed by the six participants who had read it: the book was great!


Also agreed: the Reese's PB Cups (brought by one of us) were a great way to kick off the discussion.


Reese's Cups and Reese's pieces, Snickers, 3 Musketeers, Hershey Bars, M&Ms, Milky Ways, and many of the other candy bars from these corporations are their best-known products, but we were also surprised to learn that Mars makes pet food and Hershey is a major producer of pasta.

From Time

Any mention of candy bars anywhere is a big deal: in Time magazine this week, there's an article on "The 13 Most Influential Candy Bars of All Time." The Hershey bar, Milky Way, and Snickers, as featured in our book, are all on the list, along with more obscure bars like "Chicken Dinner" which was available from the 1920s to 1960s, with vintage pictures of some of their original labels. This perpetual relevance made Brenner's work all the more fun to read.

This book is a work of profoundly important research, as the author was allowed to interview people and read documents that are now off-limits to journalists or researchers. The author describes culinary history, social history, economic history, food manufacturing history, and more -- and makes them all very appealing to read about. The Emperors of Chocolate is around 15 years old, and we all would have liked to know more about the recent past (some of us googled it) and about the larger chocolate industry. No doubt, this is a classic book.

A few of the things we liked about the book:

• The historical coverage of the founding of each of the two biggest players in the history and present of candy bars -- Mars and Hershey's. We read how candy making went from small-batch, local production to mass production and mass consumption. Detailed descriptions of the experiments that went into chocolate processing and creating the flavors and colors of the candy were fascinating. Attitudes of European chocolate makers and cognoscenti towards American chocolate are also interesting: mainly, they are contemptuous of the sour flavor of Hershey's milk chocolate. But the book stays pretty much on the topic of the two American dynasties.
• The personalities and family dynamics of Mars, still a privately held corporation and Hershey, long dominated by Milton Hershey. We were intrigued by the horrible relationship between Forrest Mars, Sr. and his sons and daughter who inherited the company. Also by the relationship of Milton Hershey with his parents and his immediate employees, and his legacy. Though public, much of the Hershey corporate stock is owned by a foundation that he created, which runs a school for orphans or children with difficult family situations.
• Rivalry of the two companies over time. This story of business and adverising is also compelling. They vied with each other to supply chocolate for the troops in World War II; they cooperated in the creation of M&Ms (the first M is for Mars but the second is for Murrie, a Hershey executive's son -- hired then driven out of Mars when the family wanted to compete rather than take advantage of Hershey), and then they rivaled each other for popularity and for shelf space in supermarkets and anywhere candy is sold. Still do!
• The blindness of the Mars family to modern business practice because the owners are secretive and neurotic, and some of the slips at Hershey's because they weren't aware of the need to promote their product. Above all, we liked the story of the Mars family's refusal to let M&Ms be used in the film "ET" -- instead as everyone knows, ET ate Reese's Pieces, a Hershey's product, which were just becoming popular and received a huge sales boost from the film.

Next time we are reading Wine and War, which describes the events of World War II in France through the eyes of wine growers, wine merchants, and other French men and women in the wine trade, beginning in about 1939 and proceeding historically as the Nazis conquered France. I've read it before and wrote about here: Wine and War. As always I'm looking forward to another lively discussion.

How we smell and taste

A recent article in the Guardian -- "What makes eating so satisfying?" -- summarized some of the research on how the brain and sensory organs work together to create flavor and enjoyment in eating and drinking. This fit very well with my recent project to learn more about human responses to aromas and smells as I have been writing here.

The author had several things to say about the complex pleasure of smelling and tasting wine.When you sniff a wine, the article points out, you perceive the most volatile aromas first, followed by those that are stirred up when you swirl the contents of your glass.

From the article: With wine, it is easy to confuse the two separate
entities of taste and smell. Photograph: David Levene 

The complexity of the taste receptors on the tongue isn't quite what one learned in the past: the old "map" of taste buds has been superseded by recent research, says the Guardian. "The current consensus is that tastebuds all over the mouth carry receptors for all the basic tastes, it's just that there are higher concentrations of those four tastes in their designated areas."

The following example illustrates the article's point that perceptions of flavors in fact reside in the brain and on memories and learned reactions, citing Professor Barry Smith of London University's Centre for the Study of the Senses:

It is easy to confuse the two separate entities of taste and smell, and the latter holds great sway over how something will taste when it reaches your mouth. For example, westerners associate the aroma vanilla with sweetness (which is a taste – we can't actually smell sweet) so strongly that if vanilla is added to food, we'll think it tastes sweeter than it really is. But connections such as this are, adds Smith, "learned by the brain, not by you". If you are given a drink that has traces of sugar and vanilla that you wouldn't detect if they were on their own, the two together will taste sweet to you. Unless you're from Asia, where vanilla tends to be associated with salty food. 

The role of the brain in creating flavor is the subject of an entire book that I read in the course of my project: Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters by Gordon Shepherd. The connection made me find this example especially interesting.

Enjoyment of food also depends on visual cues, especially color, and on the sounds one hears while eating, says the Guardian:

In 2008, the Oxford professor Charles Spence won the Ig Nobel prize for proving the importance of noise when eating crunchy snacks. The study showed that people think Pringles "taste" stale when they're less crunchy, even though the taste and smell remain normal. He then put headphones on his munching participants, amplifying the sounds of their own crunching. The louder the crunch, the fresher and crisper the Pringles were reported to be. This is why, says Smith, "they make bags of crisps so noisy, to get the brain to think: fresh fresh fresh." 

Quite a fascinating article!

Garlic Smells

"Can I smell the pickles?" I used to ask when I was a small child and my father took me to a delicatessan. I only vaguely remember the deli, which we must have walked to (no car), but I remember the wooden pickle barrel, which was almost as tall as I was. The deli man would take off the barrel's lid, and I would put my nose near but not too near to the curing cucumbers and green tomatoes in greenish brine, and sniff -- garlic, dill, vinegar.

My father would ask for a half-sour pickle or pickled tomato and buy half a pound of corned beef, if my memory is right. The deli man knew which pickles had been in the barrel just the right amount of time. I think he and my father knew each other from some other time or place, but my memories are vague, except for the delicious smell from the pickles. Kosher-garlic-pickle smell is still noticeable in the blend of smells in a deli, along with the garlic from the pastrami.

Smell-resistant American culture in the past, like proper British culture, classified garlic as foreign and offensive, but Americans slowly got used to garlic as group after group of immigrants enjoyed it and then popularized it along with their cuisines. I guess garlic came in by a back door near the famous "golden door." Americans looked down on Italians at first, but soon learned to love pizza, spaghetti, and garlic bread, getting used to the cheesy, yeasty, herbal and garlicy aroma of Italian restaurants in the early 20th century.

Chinese restaurants became trendy in America several times, beginning, surprisingly, as early as the mid-19th century. Fresh garlic and ginger sauteed in hot oil are the now-familiar start of many stir-fried Chinese dishes, so the smell of garlic is definitely a component of the characteristic Chinese-restaurant aroma. Korean restaurants, which also use lots of garlic in strong-flavored dishes like kim chee, are growing in popularity now. Though I've never tried any of the famous foods from a Korean taco truck, I imagine a powerful aroma that's partly garlic and fermented cabbage and partly tortillas, maybe with a whiff of hot lard for frying as I would expect in a taqueria.

"The first thing you smell at the Huy Fong Foods factory in suburban Los Angeles is the overwhelming aroma of garlic, a key ingredient in the company’s signature product: Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce," wrote Caleb Hannan in "Sriracha Hot Sauce Catches Fire, Yet 'There's Only One Rooster,'" in Bloomberg Business week recently. "Last year, the company sold 20 million bottles." Originally part of Thai cuisine, sriracha sauce in America has become synonymous with the Huy Fong LA version and its rooster logo. The popularity of garlic-heavy Thai food and above all sriracha sauce is a recent thing in America.

Japanese cooking isn't known for garlic, but a Japanese friend told me that families there use garlic in cooking only on Friday and Saturday night to avoid offensive garlic breath when they go to work or to school on weekdays. Though not a traditional flavor in the type of sushi that's very popular here, garlic is used in raw beef dishes in Japan and in a few other foods. Similarly, garlic isn't a dominant flavor in the Indian food that Americans are accustomed to, but has its place in some regions. Maybe the garlic-flavored preparations from these cultures will reach American diners some day.

French cuisine dominated fine dining in America in the 19th and much of the 20th century. Garlic was a pretty muted element in French haute cuisine, and I suspect that even chefs who trained in France tended to avoid garlic aromas when adapting their cuisine to America or England. But maybe not completely -- consider this:

 "La Cuisine Pratique [a recipe collection from 1902 used at the cooking classes held at the Cordon Bleu school in Paris] occasionally contains stories about chefs. One, 'Le Secret de Francatelli,' discusses the salads he prepared during his tenure at the Reform Club in London. A customer commented on the wonderful aroma that wafted from the salad when it arrived at the table. The secret? Garlic, crushed in the chef's teeth while he tossed the salad. The smell of his breath helped create that indefinable aroma. The piece ends by saying that the customer thanked Francatelli profusely, but remarked that perhaps he would not admire the salads as much in the future." (from Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession by Amy B. Trubek, p. 28)

The smell of garlic has a complicated reputation. If you eat garlic, some people believe, mosquitos will avoid you; maybe this works. Italian mothers once burdened their children with necklaces of garlic. This made the children unpopular, but the mothers insisted because they thought the smell prevented colds or other diseases. In Eastern European folklore, garlic cloves and garlic breath or body odor functioned not only as an effective vampire repellant, but also as a charm against the evil eye and other malicious spirits or devils. (The Andaman Islanders that I wrote about aren't the only ones whose spirits can smell you. For lots more garlic superstitions and history, check this American Folklore page.)

Garlic can be loved or hated. If your mother ate garlic before you were born, you probably like it better than if she did not: garlic, in a prenatal diet, can be detected in the amniotic fluid, as can other types of flavor/aroma. The presence of garlic has an influence on "after-birth preference lasting into childhood. ... the neural system for the basic hedonic responses to taste, in terms of attraction or repulsion, is in the brain stem and is active in the newborn. The learning of these preferences in utero and their emotional expression are therefore incorporated into this hardwired system." (from Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why it Matters by Gordon M. Shepherd,  p. 234)

Photo from Wikimedia commons. This post also appears on my travel blog.