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FLAVOR

The Science of Our Most Neglected Sense

BOB HOLMES

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY Independent Publishers Since 1923

New York | London

For Deb, my partner in flavor and in life

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1. BROCCOLI AND TONIC

Chapter 2. BEER FROM THE BOTTLE

Chapter 3. THE PURSUIT OF PAIN

Chapter 4. THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON WINE

Chapter 5. FEEDING YOUR HUNGER

Chapter 6. WHY NOT IGUANA?

Chapter 7. THE KILLER TOMATO

Chapter 8. THE CAULIFLOWER BLOODY MARY AND OTHER CHEFLY INSPIRATIONS

Epilogue: THE FUTURE OF FLAVOR

Acknowledgments Notes Index

FLAVOR

INTRODUCTION

Have you ever wondered why beer and salted peanuts go so well together? Scientists know the answer: Salty tastes inhibit bitter ones, so the nuts tame the beer’s bite and allow some of its other flavors to step forward. Once you know this principle, you can apply it in many other ways. Serve the nuts (or pretzels) with gin and tonic. Add a little extra salt if tonight’s broccoli is especially bitter. Put a pinch of salt on your morning grapefruit.

The science of flavor is full of insights like that, but hardly anyone knows about them. That’s because flavor barely registers in the screenplay of our daily lives. We rarely examine the flavors we experience, and as a result we don’t know how to talk about them or think about them. Here’s a thought experiment to prove it: Take a moment and bring to mind one of your favorite pieces of music. Recall how it’s put together and what makes it special for you. Is it the subtle use of the saxophone in the bridge section? The way the first violin and cello trade the theme back and forth? The moment of breath-holding suspense just before the vocals start? Chances are, you can put your finger on several specific elements that make that music sing for you. You can name the instruments that are playing, you can pick out the melody, bass line, and vocals, you know how fast the beat is.

Now try to describe your favorite apple variety in the same detail. Why do you like, say, Fujis better than any other? Most likely, you’ll stammer out a few generalities about crispness or sweetness or “more flavor.” But unless you’re a trained apple taster (and such people do exist), you probably won’t be able to manage much more than that. You certainly won’t be able to name the apple’s flavor elements as nimbly as you named the instruments in your favorite music, and you probably won’t have much to say about how the flavor profile of each bite builds and ebbs.

And our imprecision is not confined to just apples. Can you describe how the flavor of halibut differs from red snapper? Or how Brie cheese differs from Cheddar? The fact is that for most of us, flavor remains a vague, undeveloped concept. We say “dinner tasted good,” or “I like those peaches,” but we never dip beneath the surface of those superficial responses. It’s not that we’re blind to flavor. If you can recognize that a Fuji

apple differs from a Spartan, or that Brie differs from Cheddar—and almost all of us can—you have the basic perceptual tools to explore the world of flavor in greater depth.

What holds most of us back is that although we experience flavor every day, we just don’t know much about it. We sip our morning coffee or enjoy our dinner while largely ignorant of the complex interplay of taste, smell, touch, sight, and even expectation that creates the sensation we know as flavor. Without that knowledge, we lack the means to describe what we experience, and as a result, far too often we simply don’t notice the fine details of what we eat and drink. It’s as though the entire world of flavor has been relegated to the background—elevator music for the palate, as it were.

Sometimes that’s fine, of course. Sometimes all we really want is background music, or a quick bite to eat without bothering too much about the details. But in our musical world, most of us take that extra step now and then. We pay attention and dig a little deeper, and our lives are much richer for it. We can have the same rich experience in our flavor lives, too— but only if we learn more about the world of flavor: how we perceive flavor, where it comes from, and how we can maximize it, both on the farm and in our kitchens. That’s where this book can help.

Paying attention to flavor makes life not just richer but deeper, because flavor appreciation may be a uniquely human gift. The biology of our species—the fact that we live in social groups, inhabit essentially every environment on Earth, and eat a diverse, omnivorous diet—means that our ancestors had to become very good at certain skills. They had to recognize faces to tell friend from foe, neighbor from relative, and honest dealer from cheater. As a result, all of us, with a few rare, pathological exceptions, are indeed skilled at picking out the subtle differences that distinguish one face from the next. We recognize, and often remember, the face of someone we went to school with years ago, and the stranger we met casually at a party yesterday. And we do it instantaneously, at a glance, not by laboriously piecing together evidence from nose, ears, cheekbones, and eyes. This recognition skill is special and unique to faces. It’s not just a consequence of sharp perception and attention to detail—we have nowhere near the same ability to recognize people by their hands, for example.

Flavor recognition is another of humans’ special skills. As omnivores, our ancestors had to judge what they could eat and what they couldn’t, and

flavor is how they made that decision. Those skills are now part of our evolutionary heritage. “All humans are flavor experts in the same sense that we’re face experts,” says Paul Breslin, a leading psychologist who studies flavor perception. “It is literally a life-or-death matter. If you eat the wrong things, you’re dead.” We recognize the flavor of a strawberry or a pineapple or a green bean in a flash, even if we can’t put a name to it without prompting.

In fact, our flavor sense may have played a large role in making humans into the species we are. Anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that we could never have evolved our huge, expensive brains without the easy calories made available by cooking. Raw foods simply don’t yield enough calories to get our modern, big-brained bodies through the day. Our cousins the chimps spend hours each day laboriously chewing their raw foods to extract the calories—time and energy that humans can put to better use. And people who follow a raw-food diet typically lose significant weight, even with blenders and juicers to take the place of constant chewing. Cooking breaks down indigestible tissues into smaller, more digestible fragments, and thus helps us get more from our meals for less effort. And in the process, it creates a whole host of delicious new flavors.

We are also the only species that seasons its food, deliberately altering it with the highly flavored plant parts we call herbs and spices. It’s quite possible that our taste for spices has an evolutionary root, too. Many spices have antibacterial properties—in fact, common seasonings such as garlic, onion, and oregano inhibit the growth of almost every bacterium tested. And the cultures that make the heaviest use of spices—think of the garlic and black pepper of Thai food, the ginger and coriander of India, the chili peppers of Mexico—come from warmer climates, where bacterial spoilage is a bigger issue. In contrast, the most lightly spiced cuisines—those of Scandinavia and northern Europe—hail from cooler climates. Once again, our uniquely human attention to flavor, in this case the flavor of spices, turns out to have arisen as a matter of life and death.

Our unusual anatomy cooperates in making humans connoisseurs of flavor. Our upright posture and oddly shaped head (compared with other mammals) helps our noses focus less on smells coming from the outside world and more on the flavors wafting up from the food in our mouths. And flavor engages a disproportionate share of our big, powerful brains. When you enjoy a delicious piece of cheese, or a glass of wine, or a cookie, you’re

engaging more brain systems than for any other behavior. Flavor taps into sensory systems for taste, smell, texture, sound, and sight. It involves motor systems for coordinating the muscles that allow you to chew and swallow. It activates the unconscious linkages that regulate appetite, hunger, and satiety. And, not least, it fires up the higher-level thought processes that help you identify, evaluate, remember, and react to what you’re eating. That’s a big bundle of brain activity from a simple bite of food.

Flavor pulls on our brains in subtle but powerful ways. When odor information—the most important component of flavor—enters the brain, it goes directly to the ancient parts of the brain responsible for emotion and memory. It doesn’t reach the conscious, logical part of the cerebral cortex until several stops later. That’s the neuroscientific basis for flavor’s remarkable ability to move us: A taste of a favorite food can transport us back to our childhood more powerfully than a song or a photo ever could. It’s no accident that Marcel Proust’s seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past was sparked by the flavor of a madeleine, or tea cake. That emotional pull may also explain why immigrants hold on to the flavors of their native country long after they’ve adopted new languages, new modes of dress— even, sometimes, new religions. Food binds ethnic groups together across generations and across oceans and national boundaries. We so often use flavors as ethnic markers, with the treasures of one culture being seen (at least initially) as disgusting by others. The French have their stinky cheeses, the Americans their peanut butter, the Australians Vegemite, and the Japanese the mucilaginous fermented soybeans known as natto.

For many of us, venturing outside our own ethnic markers is one of the best bridges into another culture. “I’ve been to many countries in the world, and one of the things I’ve done in every country is visit food markets,” says Breslin. “I’ve never really thought about why that is, but I can’t imagine not doing it. It’s always been a rewarding experience.” Most people share that response to some degree. Who, after all, would take a trip to Italy and eat only at McDonald’s, or live on pizza in China?

The roots of flavor, it seems, run deep into the human condition. But flavor also spices our daily life. All of us have to eat every day, and most of us seek out tastier foods when we have the choice. Grocery shoppers consistently report that flavor is their main guide in deciding what to buy each week, trumping considerations of health, price, and environmental impact. And people rate the pleasure of a fine meal higher than sports,

hobbies, reading, or entertainment. Only holidays, sex, and family time ranked higher. And when asked why that fine meal is so pleasurable, more people cite flavor than any other reason.

For millions of people, the act of cooking a daily meal is a creative, rewarding experience. If you’ve picked this book off a bookshelf, you’re probably one of that group. I know I am. We read cookbooks, trawl the Internet for interesting new recipes, and gradually build our kitchen repertoires. Yet most home cooks approach flavor haphazardly. We do what the recipe says, or what we’ve always done. Sometimes we mix things up by following our intuition and tossing in a handful of basil or sprinkling a grating of nutmeg. But we’re just following instructions, or intuition, or tradition; we lack the deeper understanding of flavor that could give shape to our efforts. In a way, we’re like the self-taught guitarist who can copy riffs by ear but can’t read music and has no formal training in harmony. We bumble along pretty well, and occasionally stumble on something that works beautifully. But think how much more we could accomplish with a better understanding of what we’re doing.

For an eye-opening (palate-opening?) demonstration of how little most people know about flavor, take what I call the jelly bean test. Get hold of some jelly beans or other candies that come in a mix of flavors. The fancy, many-flavored jelly beans you can buy everywhere these days are ideal, but a tube of rainbow-flavored Life Savers would work just fine, too, or Jolly Rancher hard candies. It doesn’t matter—the important thing is just that you have several flavors to choose from. Now close your eyes, pinch your nose, and have a friend hand you one of the candies. Pop it in your mouth—still pinching your nose—and pay attention to the flavor. Not much there, right? You’ll get the sweetness of the sugar, of course, and maybe a little sourness or saltiness, depending on the candy. But what flavor is the jelly bean? You won’t be able to tell.

Now release your nose, and see how the flavor suddenly explodes into your mouth. What was once merely sweet and a bit sour is now suddenly LEMON! or CHERRY! What’s changed is that you’ve brought your sense of smell into the game. The lesson here is that what appears to be a simple taste perception is more complex than we realize: Even though we refer to

the “taste” of the jelly bean, taste itself is the least important part of the equation. Most of the flavor we actually experience is the result of smell, not taste. (For an even more vivid illustration of this point, hold your nose and try to tell the difference between a cube of apple and a cube of onion. It’s harder than you’d think.)

The English language contributes to the confusion. We have separate nouns, “taste” and “flavor,” but we use them in greatly overlapping ways. Decades ago, psychologist Paul Rozin found that English speakers generally use taste when they’re referring to sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, which—along with the less widely known umami—form the five basic tastes that our tongue can detect. But we use taste and flavor almost interchangeably to refer to the bigger picture—the whole jelly bean, if you will. And when it comes to verbs, we make no distinction at all, using taste for everything, all the time. We say that dinner tasted good and mean much more than merely that it was properly salted and not too bitter. Indeed, when we have a cold we say we can’t taste anything—even though, in fact, taste is all we have left when our nose is plugged. One word, two meanings —that just about guarantees confusion. We also have the verb “savor,” but it doesn’t help much. To savor something usually implies that we ate with pleasure. No one would say, “I savored dinner and didn’t like it.” (Other languages are no better. Rozin polled native speakers of nine other languages and found that most use just a single word to cover both taste [in the strict sense] and flavor. Only two—French and Hungarian—have two different words, and even the French blur the distinction somewhat.) There’s no easy solution to the confusion. Throughout Flavor, I do my best to be clear about whether I’m talking about a taste or a flavor, but I fall back on the verb “taste” for both. I hope the context clarifies which meaning I intend.

In fact, flavor has even more dimensions than just taste and smell. Every one of our five senses—taste, smell, touch, sound, and even sight— contributes meaningfully to the way we perceive flavor. The best way to think about flavor is that it is the sum of all the sensations we get when we have food in the mouth. That leads to some surprising discoveries: the weight of a bowl, the color of a plate, the crunch of a potato chip, and even the choice of background music can have a direct effect on how we perceive flavor.

The meals we cook and the foods we eat are more than just a daily source of pleasure, of course. They also affect our health in profound ways. That’s especially true now, when poor diet and excess calories have fed an epidemic of obesity that threatens, for the first time in centuries, to shorten our life expectancy. More Americans are overweight than not, and the rest of the Western world is catching up quickly. Many experts point to our taste for sweetened soft drinks and high-fat, high-carbohydrate, high-calorie fast food as a primary cause.

Once again, that puts flavor at the center of the picture. If we’re to do something about obesity, as individuals and as a society, we’ll need to understand why we eat what we eat. We’ll need to know how flavor drives our food choices, and whether we can use it as a lever to shift our consumption patterns. We’ll need to understand how flavor helps tell us when we’re full, and whether we overeat when meals are especially tasty. These turn out to be complex questions that scientists don’t fully understand yet, but some of the answers they’ve found may surprise you.

Until recently, a book exploring the science of flavor would have been much shorter and more limited in scope. Within the past few years, however, scientists have made huge strides toward understanding every step of the pathway from food to perception to behavior. It’s no exaggeration to say that the science of flavor is one of the fastest-moving and most exciting disciplines around these days. A large proportion of the hundreds of scientific papers I read in the course of research for this book are just a year or two old. No doubt even more big discoveries await in the next few years. And as a bonus, it’s science that everyone can relate to, because it’s about the foods we eat every day, the pleasure we take in a glass of wine, a mug of beer, or a cup of coffee, and the question every one of us faces every day: What would I like to eat for dinner?

In the early 1990s, biologists Linda Buck and Richard Axel identified the receptors responsible for detecting odor molecules, work that earned them a Nobel Prize in 2004. With receptors finally in hand, and aided by the human genome sequence completed early this century, other researchers are racing to crack the code by which the nose encodes the many different smells— possibly many millions—that compose the flavors of the foods we eat.

Others are identifying the chemical receptors that detect a chili pepper’s fire and the cool of mint. Even the five basic tastes that we’ve known for a century are having to share the tongue with at least one, and possibly several, other tastes, as we’ll see.

As scientists refine our understanding, we’re coming to realize that every person on the planet lives in their own unique flavor world defined by their genetic endowment, their upbringing and later food experiences, and the culture in which they live. We’re beginning to learn how these unique flavor worlds help define some of our strong likes and dislikes for certain foods. Take for example, former U.S. president George H. W. Bush’s famous distaste for broccoli. (“I do not like broccoli,’’ Bush told reporters back in 1990. ‘‘And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!’’) We can’t know for sure without testing the former president’s genes, but it’s a pretty good bet that Bush carries a particular genetic variant of one specific bitter taste receptor, which makes broccoli and other mustard-family vegetables taste especially bitter to him. Your own genes undoubtedly shape your food preferences in similar ways —although genetics is not destiny: not everyone who tastes the bitterness hates it.

From our senses to the kitchen, flavor is a much deeper and more complex subject than most people realize. In these pages, I provide what you can think of as a user’s guide to your flavor senses. By the end, I hope you’ll have a better understanding of what flavor is, how we perceive it, and how we can use that knowledge to enjoy a richer flavor experience.

Flavor is a book for anyone who enjoys flavor—that is, for almost anyone. You don’t have to be a flavor virtuoso to find a deeper appreciation of what’s on your plate or what’s in your glass. I’m certainly no virtuoso. I’m just an amateur cook of middling ability and above-average enthusiasm, with a nose of roughly average ability. If I can find my way into a world of high-definition flavor, anyone can.

Chapter 1

BROCCOLI AND TONIC

As a journalist, and a classically polite Canadian, I don’t often stick my tongue out at the people I’m interviewing. It seems bad form, somehow. But I’m doing it now to Linda Bartoshuk, the grande dame of taste research. Fortunately, she doesn’t seem to mind.

“Oh, your tongue is gorgeous,” she gushes. She leans close and paints the tip of my tongue with a Q-Tip dipped in blue food coloring, which highlights the taste buds on my tongue. (To be accurate, they’re not actually taste buds, which are microscopic. Those mushroom-shaped bumps on the surface of the tongue that most people call taste buds are, technically speaking, really fungiform papillae, an impressive-sounding Latin term that means “mushroom-shaped bumps.”)

I hold up a mirror to see what Bartoshuk sees on my tongue. Tiny pink islands stand out in a sea of blue dye. “You see those red dots on the front? Those are fungiform papillae,” she says. “You have a lot. Oh, and you have them all the way back! You’re very close to a supertaster.”

Understanding this notion of the supertaster—that some people have a much more acute sense of taste than others—is what has brought me to Bartoshuk’s lab here at the University of Florida in Gainesville. It was Bartoshuk who first suggested, back in 1991, that people tend to fall into three groups, based on their ability to taste a bitter compound known as propylthiouracil, or PROP.

You may have encountered PROP in a high school biology lab or at a science museum somewhere. You’re handed a little piece of filter paper infused with a modest amount of PROP, which you put on your tongue. Some people—the nontasters—just shrug, tasting basically nothing apart from filter paper. Others—the tasters—notice an unpleasant bitter taste, while the third group experiences extreme bitterness. This third group, the supertasters, are easy to recognize: They’re the ones who make an

anguished face and rush off to find something—anything—to wash that horrible taste out of their mouth. Bartoshuk often asks people to rate the intensity of PROP’s bitterness on a scale from 0 to 100, where 100 is the most intense sensation they’ve ever experienced—the pain of childbirth, say, or a broken bone, or the visual sensation of looking directly at the sun. Supertasters often rate the bitterness of PROP in the 60–80 range, nearly in broken-bone territory. Sure enough, I’d score it a 60: nasty, but not debilitating. “That’s into supertaster territory,” says Bartoshuk. “That’s in the area where you’re not screaming, but you’re definitely much higher than normal, and your tongue looks it.”

And it’s not just bitterness. Supertasters tend to rate sweets as sweeter, salt as saltier, and chili peppers as hotter. They even report that food aromas are more intense, says Bartoshuk—probably because taste and smell reinforce each other in the brain.

Before I get too smug about my taste acuity, though, Bartoshuk points out that supertasters tend to be pretty boring eaters. Most of them prefer to avoid the intense taste experiences that come with highly flavored foods, so their diets are often bland and narrow. (I knew a man once who lived on a habitual diet of lima beans and milk. I would bet good money he was a supertaster.) In particular, bitter greens and other vegetables don’t show up very often on the plates of most supertasters.

That’s where I start to get confused, because that doesn’t sound like me. I love collard greens, rapini, and other bitter vegetables; I always pick the hoppiest beer I can find; I drink my coffee black and without sugar; tonic water is my soft drink of choice—indeed, the only one I ever drink. In contrast, Bartoshuk—a nontaster—has very pronounced food aversions. She detests tonic water, for example. “When I first tasted it, I couldn’t believe it was a beverage,” she says. “I cannot stand greens. The bitter taste is just beyond belief to me.”

So what’s going on? It’s time to look more closely at this whole supertaster notion, which turns out to be more complex than it appears at first glance.

A little background: Even though we talk loosely about “tasting” complex foods like wine and cheese, most of their flavor actually comes from our

sense of smell. In fact, even though we usually treat smell and taste as one and the same, they actually have different jobs to do. Smell is all about identification—it answers the question, “What is it?” It tells you the difference between rosemary and oregano, Brie and Stilton, or Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir. It tells you when something is burning on the stove, and it tells you that the dog needs a bath. We can even recognize the odor of our own bodies and those of our sweethearts.

Taste, in contrast, answers a different question: “Do I want to eat this?” Taste is all about broad categories of good and bad, the yes/no, red- light/green-light decisions that would have been so crucial for our hunter- gatherer ancestors. As omnivores without access to grocery stores, they had to make these calls every day, and our taste repertoire bears witness. Everyone knows the “four basic tastes”: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. If you’ve been paying attention the past few years, you’ve probably heard of a fifth: umami, a Japanese term that means “delicious flavor” and is usually translated as “savory,” “brothy,” or “meaty.” (There might be additional basic tastes, too, as we’ll see.) A closer look at each of those five tastes reveals a lot about what was important to our ancestors.

Sweet tastes, most obviously, mark the presence of sugars, an important source of calories. Even starchy foods such as potatoes and grains yield a hint of sweetness as we chew, because enzymes in our saliva break down the starches into sweet-tasting sugars. Umami comes from amino acids—in particular, one called glutamate, though others contribute as well—that indicate the presence of proteins, another major class of nutrients. And our taste for salt would have helped our ancestors identify the electrolytes that were so precious and hard to find before salt shakers sat on every table. Hardly surprising, then, that we’re hardwired, even as infants, to be drawn to sweet, umami, and salty tastes.

But taste also warns us when we’re about to eat something that might be harmful. Many toxins taste bitter, so we’re hardwired to reject bitter foods. Just watch the face of a toddler who unknowingly sips from a glass of tonic water—or, for that matter, an adult who gets surprised by a bitter-tasting berry or a first taste of aquavit or Fernet-Branca. The bitterness triggers our poison-avoidance reflex, and we make a “yucky face,” sticking out the tongue in a reflex that pushes the threatening food out of the mouth. Similarly, we tend to reject sourness, which could signal spoilage or unripe, indigestible fruit. With experience, and practice, we often learn to override

that hardwiring for certain foods—coffee, hoppy beers, brussels sprouts, sour candy—but few, if any, people like them right away. Remember your first sip of coffee?

Other species, with narrower diets, have fewer decisions to make and can often get by with fewer tastes. In the use-it-or-lose-it world of evolution, that often means they lose those extraneous tastes. Cats, for example, are entirely carnivorous, so they would never need to recognize high-sugar foods—and, in fact, they seem indifferent to sweetness. Sure enough, when researchers looked more closely, they found that cats have lost a crucial gene that would allow them to taste sweetness. Other carnivores, such as otters, sea lions, and hyenas, have also lost the ability to taste sweet. In each case, a different genetic defect was responsible, suggesting that the taste for sweet has been lost several different times on the evolutionary tree— presumably, each time an omnivorous ancestor switched to an exclusively carnivorous diet. In contrast, pandas, which eat nothing but bamboo, have no need to detect protein in their diet and have lost the taste for umami. Other scientists recently discovered an even more extreme example of taste loss: vampire bats, with their blood-only diet, live in a taste world focused so tightly on recognizing the saltiness of blood that they lack the ability to taste sweet, umami, or bitter.

And by the way, while we’re talking tastes: You’ve no doubt seen one of those “taste maps” of the tongue that purports to show that we taste sweet at the tip, salty and sour along the sides, and bitter at the back. If you’re up to date on your reading, you may also have heard that it’s completely wrong. As it turns out, though, both sides of the debate are guilty of a little exaggeration. There do seem to be minor differences in sensitivity to the various tastes across the tongue, with some regions a little more sensitive to sweet and others a little more sensitive to bitter, but the differences probably don’t matter much. And you can easily verify that the tastes aren’t tightly segregated into distinct zones, simply by dipping a Q-Tip in salt water and painting the tip of your tongue. You’ll taste the saltiness, even though you’re in what’s supposed to be the “sweet” zone. Best to just forget the whole notion of the taste map.

Those five basic tastes seem like a pretty unimpressive set compared with the vast array of aromas we encounter in our food. Is taste really all that important to us, or is it only a minor part of our flavor experience? To answer that question, I headed from Bartoshuk’s lab in Florida to the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

You could think of Monell as the Vatican City of flavor research, but without the fancy architecture. The nondescript brick office building, on the fringes of the University of Pennsylvania campus just west of downtown, could house anything: doctors’ offices, accountants, engineers. Only a giant bronze sculpture of a nose and mouth, on a concrete plinth next to the front door, hints that something more unusual is inside: one of the planet’s greatest concentrations of researchers on the basic biology of the flavor senses.

Inside, Monell’s boardroom looks much as you’d expect for such an august institution: long, dark wood table polished to a high gloss, high- backed leather chairs, off-white walls hung with framed memorabilia and interesting-but-not-too-interesting art. It all adds up to a clear message: significant discussions of important ideas take place here.

Over the years, many of those ideas have come from Gary Beauchamp, the center’s longtime director. (He stepped down in 2014.) Beauchamp is a small, dapper man with silver hair, a neatly trimmed goatee, and a dignified manner. It’s easy to imagine him charming a sizable check out of a deep- pocketed donor. Right now, though, he’s leaning back in his chair at the head of the table, gazing thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Glaarglglglgl,” he says gently.

“Glaarglglglgl,” we all gargle in response. We each lean forward to spit into a plastic cup, then wipe stray droplets from lips and face.

This peculiar boardroom meeting had its genesis at a conference three months earlier, where I met Beauchamp for the first time. We’d been talking about the relative importance of taste versus smell in determining flavor. Most experts come down rather heavily on the side of smell as carrying the lion’s share of flavor, since it carries so much more information than just sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. Some say smell accounts for 70 percent of flavor; others put it at 90 percent or more.

But Beauchamp wasn’t buying it. In fact, he disagreed vehemently when I suggested this at the conference. “Clearly, olfaction is very, very

important,” he said. “But the idea that it’s 70 percent of flavor is complete bullshit, in my view.” Olfaction gets all the attention, he went on, because we all know what it’s like to lose the sense of smell. Anyone who’s ever had a head cold knows that a plugged nose makes food bland and tasteless (though in fact, “tasteless” is actually the exact opposite of the truth—what you’re experiencing is taste alone, in isolation, with smell taken out of the equation). And the jelly bean test gives an even more dramatic demonstration, because it’s so quickly reversible.

On the other hand, most of us have never had the inverse experience, since nothing in our everyday life can take away the sense of taste while leaving smell intact. There is no reverse jelly bean test where you can hold your tongue to keep yourself from tasting. Doctors, too, often see patients who have lost their sense of smell as a result of head injury, viral infection, or just as a consequence of aging. By contrast, relatively few people lose their sense of taste. The big exception is cancer patients who undergo radiation to their head and neck, which often damages taste receptors and nerves. And their experience tells a terrible story, said Beauchamp, whose wife’s uncle was one of the unlucky ones: as bad as it is to lose your sense of smell, losing taste is far, far worse. “When people lose their sense of taste, they don’t eat. They starve themselves to death,” he said. “My view is that taste is absolutely the bedrock of flavor.”

Moreover, Beauchamp thought he had a way to test that claim—an experiment that would be, in effect, something fairly close to a reverse jelly bean test. Certain drugs, it turns out, can block the perception of salt and sweetness, two of the most important tastes in many meals. “When those things are gone, my guess would be that your dinner would be absolutely awful,” Beauchamp said. He’d taken the salt-blocking drug before, out of curiosity, but had never tried knocking out both tastes at once. We agreed that it would be an interesting test to try sometime.

Which brings us back to the Monell boardroom, several months later. Beauchamp, two of his colleagues, and I are gargling with chlorhexidine, an over-the-counter mouthwash sometimes used to treat gum disease, which has the odd side effect of blocking the taste of salt. Each of us tosses back four little cough-syrup cups of the bitter-tasting stuff, one after another, swishing each around in our mouth for thirty seconds and gargling occasionally to make sure the solution reaches well back in the throat, before spitting it out. We follow that with four more cough-syrup cups of a

swampy-flavored tea made from a South American plant called Gymnema, which knocks out sweet taste.

Sure enough, all that gargling and swishing seems to have obliterated those two tastes. A sip of Pepsi yields a brief prickling on my tongue—the mouthfeel, or touch, sensation from the carbonation—then its flavor vanishes completely. I dip my finger in salt crystals and lick it off: nothing, except a tiny residual saltiness at the very back of my throat where the chlorhexidine didn’t quite reach. Now we turn to our experimental “lunch,” a burger and fries from the food truck parked in front of the building, now quartered into individual servings. Without the most important parts of our sense of taste, would we be able to stomach the meal, or would we, like Beauchamp’s wife’s uncle, just give up?

Sure enough, downing the burger is like eating a mouthful of textured clay or soft plastic pellets. Have you ever accidentally left the salt out of homemade bread and been bored by the blahness of the resulting loaf? This burger is like that, but much more so—and we’ve only knocked out two of the five basic tastes. When I eliminate smell, too, by pinching my nose shut, it’s even worse: a totally nondescript experience. But even the loss of taste alone is really crippling—much worse than doing without smell, as I have when eating a burger while nursing a cold. So it looks like the burger, at least, bears out Beauchamp’s theory that taste trumps smell.

The fries, though, aren’t so bad—partly because I get a little residual saltiness at the back of my tongue, where the gargle didn’t reach, but partly because there’s still something interesting going on when I put them in my mouth. Could this be the “fat taste” that many researchers now think belongs in the canon, or the fat’s pleasant mouthfeel? Then, too, the ketchup still gives a pleasantly tart/umami kick, though it’s oddly altered by the lack of sweetness.

All in all, I think Beauchamp might be right. If I had to pick one flavor sense to lose, I’d probably rather give up smell and keep taste. Food that lacks the basic tastes is not actively bad or repugnant, just utterly unfoodlike. If every meal was like this, I’d certainly have a hard time sitting down to eat three times a day.

You’d think that such a vital sensory system—especially one that’s relatively simple, with only a handful of basic tastes—would be completely understood by now. Not so: Huge gaps remain in our understanding of how taste works. Scientists can’t even agree on how many basic tastes there are.

At the simplest level, we know a fair bit about some parts of the story. Tasting happens when the thing we taste—the tastant—binds to receptors on taste cells on the tongue or palate. The tastants for salty and sour— sodium and acids, respectively—go right into the taste cells and activate them, in a process that’s still not fully understood. The process is pretty well worked out for sweet, umami, and bitter, though, so let’s look at them in a little more detail.

Leo Tolstoy famously wrote that happy families are all alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Taste is kind of like that, too. The good tastes, umami and sweet, are each recognized by a single receptor, a two-part protein that’s woven into the outer membrane of taste cells. (There may be other, unrelated receptor molecules that are also sensitive to sweet and umami tastes, but the evidence there isn’t conclusive yet.) For umami, the two parts are called T1R1 and T1R3, while for sweet it’s T1R2 and T1R3. The amino acid glutamate, or one of several sugars, slip into fitted pockets on these combo receptors. The traditional metaphor here is a key fitting into a lock, but you could also think of the way an expensive camera slots into a foam carrying case. If you have the wrong case for the camera, it doesn’t fit. If they match, the camera slips in perfectly.

The bad, bitter taste, on the other hand, makes use of a huge committee of receptors called T2R receptors. Each member of the committee—there are at least twenty-five in humans—handles a different range of bitter compounds. Some, like T2R10, T2R14, and T2R46, are what the scientists like to call “promiscuous,” mating with a wide range of bitter compounds. In fact, if you just had those three T2Rs and no others, you’d be able to detect more than half of a test sample of 104 diverse bitter-tasting chemicals. Some other bitter receptors, like T2R3, seem to be monogamous, with only a single chemical known to activate them. It works the other way, too: Some chemicals activate many different T2Rs, while other chemicals trigger just a single bitter receptor. What’s more, bitter receptors seem to come and go over the course of evolution: The human genome is littered with the rusting hulks of bitter receptor genes that no longer function. These

must have been important in our evolutionary past, but—like the sweet receptors of cats—they have become irrelevant enough that we no longer need them, and we haven’t noticed their absence.

Scientists still don’t know whether all those bitter receptors send identical signals to the brain—in which case there’s just a single taste we call “bitter”—or whether we can actually taste the difference among different classes of bitter. Part of the problem is that when you compare, say, the bitter of a hoppy ale to that of coffee, you’re not just comparing the output of particular bitter receptors, particularly T2R1 for hops and T2R7 for caffeine. Instead, you’re really comparing the whole flavor profile of the two drinks. Even if you hold your nose while drinking—which few of us do in a social setting—the two differ in other tastes such as sweet and sour. We don’t generally experience, let alone compare, pure bitter tastes in our everyday lives. But research scientists do, and at least one expert is convinced that there’s more than one bitter taste. “When you do a lot of bitter research, and taste these things side by side, you realize they taste different,” says John Hayes, a flavor researcher at Penn State University. And that plays out in our food preferences, he thinks. “I like my beers very hoppy,” he continues. “I love a good IPA. And yet I can’t stand grapefruit, because I find it bitter. If there was only one kind of bitterness, then the learning process that I went through to learn to like my IPAs presumably would have generalized over to grapefruit juice. And the fact that it hasn’t generalized, to me, starts to provide some of the argument for why there’s more than one kind of bitterness.” He’s now hard at work in his lab trying to prove this hunch.

There’s a lot left to learn about umami, too. Now that scientists have found the receptor responsible for umami, there’s little doubt that it deserves to be considered the fifth basic taste. But for most people, it’s still a little hard to accept. After all, everyone knows exactly what you mean when you talk about sweet, salty, sour, or bitter. If umami is just as fundamental a taste, then why does it so often need to be explained? What makes umami so obscure?

Two reasons, says taste researcher Paul Breslin of Monell. First, we routinely experience the other tastes in nearly pure form: the sweetness of

honey, the sourness of lemon juice, the bitterness of radicchio, a pinch of salt. “You get, like, a pure shot of those,” he says. “But you’re never going to experience pure glutamate in the world. You’re not going to find a pile of it that you can lick. We really only experience it in combination with a lot of other things.”

That inability to isolate the taste of umami is reinforced by Breslin’s second reason: 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. Thanks to our perceptual apparatus, umami can never be anything more than a subtle sensation. It’s as though you could understand the color red from referring to a crimson rose, yellow from a lemon, and green from a midsummer forest, but then had to try to figure out blue from skim milk.

There’s also a cultural component to our umami blindness, however. Most people from Western countries struggle to put a name to umami taste sensations, but that’s not the case for people from Asian countries. “If you look at Japanese kids, you put MSG in their mouth and they say ‘umami’ like that,” says Danielle Reed, Breslin’s colleague at Monell, with a snap of her fingers, “like American kids put sugar in their mouth and say ‘sweet.’” As umami becomes a more prominent part of our food culture—with food writers tossing the term around freely now, and restaurants like Umami Burger part of the general conversation—it’s likely that our umami blindness will gradually recede into the past.

When that happens, it will be interesting to see whether our appreciation of umami rescues the reputation of MSG. MSG—monosodium glutamate— is, after all, merely sodium, which is pure salty taste, and glutamate, which is pure umami taste. When chefs work hard to enhance umami by adding dashi or soy sauce to stocks, incorporating mushrooms in stews, aging their meat, or incorporating fermented ingredients, they are simply boosting the glutamate content of the finished dish—and we love the result. Why, then, do so many of us shudder at the thought of boosting glutamate directly, by adding it in pure form? We routinely see signs in restaurant windows or labels on packaged foods proclaiming “No MSG!” But what self-respecting cook would ever boast of doing without salt, sugar, or lemon juice?

The reason for MSG’s bad reputation, of course, is that many people feel that it causes an unpleasant reaction when they eat food that has had MSG

added. This notion, which is now commonplace, is actually a relatively new idea. It first appeared in 1968 when a Chinese American doctor, Robert Ho Man Kwok, published a letter in a leading medical journal describing “numbness at the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness and palpitation” beginning a few minutes after starting a meal at a Chinese restaurant. Kwok wasn’t sure what caused this “Chinese restaurant syndrome,” but he suggested MSG as one possibility.

The news media quickly picked up the story, and similar anecdotes began popping up all over. Soon researchers began giving MSG to volunteers, who reported symptoms similar to Kwok’s syndrome and added others, such as headache, to the list. The idea that MSG could be bad for you became widespread. Soon Ralph Nader and others were urging governments to regulate its use.

But even then, skeptics wondered: If MSG really produces such unpleasant symptoms, why didn’t anyone notice this sooner? After all, the food industry had been using MSG for decades, and not just in Chinese food. By the time Kwok published his letter, the United States alone produced fifty-eight million pounds of MSG every year, and it showed up in everything from baby food to canned soup to TV dinners. Yet no one had remarked on a “TV dinner syndrome” or “canned soup syndrome.”

All this made MSG research a hot topic during the 1970s. As scientists dug deeper into the compound’s effects, though, Chinese restaurant syndrome began to look more and more iffy. The most damning evidence came from several studies of people who claimed to be sensitive to MSG. Researchers gave all the volunteers a capsule to swallow, without telling them whether it was MSG or a dummy capsule containing inert ingredients. (Using a swallowable capsule prevented the volunteers from tasting the difference.) If there was any truth to their self-professed sensitivity, participants should have developed symptoms of Chinese restaurant syndrome when they consumed MSG, but not when they took the placebo. In fact, though, the volunteers reported just as many symptoms with the placebo as with MSG—strong evidence that their symptoms stemmed from what they expected to happen, rather than from what they actually ate.

That’s not as surprising as it sounds. Most of us have felt a little funny after eating now and then. Maybe you ate a bit too much, or too fast, or were feeling tense for other reasons. And many of us are especially cautious after eating something new, as Chinese food would have been for many

people in the 1960s. Once one unsettling experience has planted a seed of doubt, our expectations can start to turn our future responses into a self- fulfilling prophecy.

In fact, when researchers looked back at the early studies that first suggested a link between MSG and Chinese restaurant syndrome, most of them suffered from this expectation problem. Usually, the researchers had not bothered to hide the taste of MSG, so that participants in the study could probably guess whether they’d consumed MSG or a placebo. Some studies didn’t even attempt a placebo but simply gave MSG to people and asked them if they felt any symptoms—an ideal situation for expectations to take the driver’s seat.

Even so, there are no doubt a few people out there with a genuine sensitivity to MSG. But if pure MSG causes problems, those people should also have trouble with dishes containing mushrooms, soy sauce, Parmesan cheese, and other foods naturally rich in umami flavor. And of course, overuse of MSG could bring its own problems, just like overuse of salt or lemon juice or any other seasoning. With those cautions in mind, though, there’s no reason why most cooks shouldn’t incorporate MSG into their repertoire of seasonings. After all, most kitchens have recourse to pure chemical seasonings to boost the tastes of salt (sodium chloride), sweet (sucrose), and sour (acetic acid, aka vinegar). Why not keep a little MSG on hand for those times when a dish needs a boost of pure umami?

When it comes to industrial taste research, though, umami is small potatoes. The big money is in sweet. Like umami, sweetness is all about a single taste receptor, as far as we know (although, as we’ll see in a moment, there may be some reason to suspect other receptors, too). And that simplicity has sparked a huge effort from scientists—mostly working for Big Food—to find alternative ways to tickle that receptor that aren’t accompanied by the caloric charge of real sugar.

Most of the artificial sweeteners already on the market are the result of pure dumb luck. The oldest was discovered by accident in 1878 when Constantin Fahlberg, a chemist working on coal tar products in Baltimore, forgot to wash his hands before supper and noticed that his bread tasted “unspeakably sweet.” He thought nothing of it until he noticed the same

sweetness on his napkin, his water glass, and, eventually, his thumb. Fascinated, Fahlberg dashed back to the lab and started tasting everything he could find. Fortunately, he found the sweet compound, which we now know as saccharin, before he got to anything too toxic.

Cyclamate has much the same story: in 1937, a chemist at the University of Illinois set his cigarette down on the corner of his lab bench and noticed when he picked it up again that it tasted sweet. Aspartame: a chemist working on antiulcer drugs in 1965 licked his finger to help pick up a piece of paper and noticed a sweet taste. Sucralose: a chemist in London was asked by his boss in 1976 to “test” a new chemical, but misheard it as “taste”—a potentially lethal error for a chemist, but one that worked out well for the company.

Artificial sweeteners reduce calories for two reasons. Some, such as saccharin and sucralose, are not broken down by the body and thus provide no calories. Others, such as aspartame, taste sweet at lower concentrations than regular sugar, so even though they are digestible, they deliver their sweetness with fewer calories. There’s a catch—even though some of these chemicals start tasting sweet at low concentrations, their sweetness often maxes out early, too. No matter how much saccharin you dump in your coffee, for example, it never tastes sweeter than a 10.1 percent sugar solution. That’s a problem for soft drink manufacturers, because regular Coke is 10.4 percent sugar, and Pepsi is about 11 percent.

That’s not the only reason artificially sweetened drinks taste a little weird to many people. Another is that most of the artificial sweeteners trigger not just the sweet receptor but also one of our many bitter receptors, producing a bitter aftertaste that many people find highly objectionable. Since people have different sets of bitter receptors, some of us are bothered by certain sweeteners and not others. I get a bitter taste from saccharin, for example, which suggests that my T2R31 bitter receptor works well. On the other hand, I get no bitter taste from the low-calorie natural sweetener stevia, so I probably have a broken version of whichever bitter receptor (still unknown) responds to that sweetener.

But bitterness isn’t the only problem with the taste of artificial sweeteners. Linda Bartoshuk, for example, can’t taste the bitterness of aspartame or saccharin, yet she knows them when she tastes them. “The sweet of saccharin is nothing like the sweet of sucrose. I don’t know how anybody could ever confuse them,” she says. “And if I accidentally get a

beverage with aspartame in it, I’m not confused for a moment. I don’t like it. So it’s pretty clear that not all sweets are the same.”

Part of the reason for that is that each sweetener has its own distinctive timing for triggering the sweet receptor. Real sugar reaches its peak sweetness in about four seconds, then the taste trails off about ten seconds later. Most artificial sweeteners hang on too long, producing a cloying aftertaste. Aspartame, for example, starts a second later and lasts four seconds longer. But Bartoshuk thinks the taste differences might also point to the existence of a second kind of sweet receptor, as yet unknown. It’s hard to believe that we don’t know everything yet about something as obvious—and as lucrative for Big Food companies—as sweetness, but there you are.

If artificial sweeteners are the king of taste research, dollar-wise, then salt substitutes would have to be the queen. The average American consumes about 9 grams of salt daily, almost half again as much as the recommended maximum of 5.8 grams per day, and the majority of that comes from processed foods. That high salt intake is a big reason why sixty-five million American adults have high blood pressure. As a result, food-processing companies are under a lot of pressure to find ways of reducing the sodium in their products.

The problem is, that’s not easy to do. As anyone who’s spent time in a kitchen knows, salt contributes much more than just a salty taste to the flavor of a dish. Used judiciously, salt can enhance all the other flavors, making meat meatier, beans beanier, and potatoes potatoier. That’s largely because the sodium ions help draw other flavor compounds—mostly components that enhance smell, not taste—out of the ingredients and into solution, where we can detect them. Omit the salt, and your food literally has less flavor. This explains why a skilled cook can often tell by smell whether a dish needs more salt.

To find out how food scientists are working around the problem, I asked Peter de Kok, who works for the food science company NIZO in the Netherlands. De Kok—who, like most Dutch scientists, speaks flawless English—comes across as a cheerful fellow with a boundless enthusiasm for salt reduction. There are three ways to deliver all the flavor bang of

regular salt with less sodium, he says. You already know about the first one if you’ve ever bought “low-sodium salt” in the grocery store: simply replace some or all of the sodium with another salt ion. The more chemically similar your replacement is to sodium, the better job it does of substituting. In practice, that pretty much restricts the choice to potassium, which is about 60 percent as salty as sodium. (Lithium would actually be a better substitute, flavor-wise, but it has powerful psychological effects— just ask anyone with bipolar disorder.) Unfortunately, many people— though I’m not one of them—also get a bitter taste from potassium, so companies can only swap out part of the sodium in their low-sodium salt.

If you don’t want to replace sodium with a different ion, a second approach is to find a way to get more flavor from the same amount of salt. Smaller salt crystals dissolve more quickly, so they taste saltier when sprinkled atop food. (The converse is also true, of course—when you eat a pretzel topped with the traditional big salt grains, you’re actually getting more sodium than necessary for the amount of salty flavor it delivers.) De Kok and his colleagues also try to find ways of getting more of a food’s sodium out of the food and into your mouth, where you can taste it. For example, they’ve been working on changing the texture of sausages to make them juicier. In essence, he says, when you chew these juicier sausages you squeeze more of the salty moisture out into your mouth, so the sausages taste just as salty with 15 percent less salt. Yet another strategy exploits the value of contrast: They’ve patented a method of making bread with alternating layers of salted and unsalted dough. As you bite through the layers, the contrast makes the salty parts stand out, so that the whole bread tastes about 30 percent saltier than it otherwise would.

The third way to cut back on salt without reducing flavor is a bit more devious: Trick the brain into thinking the food is saltier than it is. As we’ll see, your brain blends aromas and tastes together into a unified perception of flavor. Knowing this, de Kok and his team have been experimenting with adding aromas that we’re used to smelling in high-salt contexts. Because anchovies are typically salty, for example, you mentally “add salt” whenever you get a whiff of anchovies, whether the salt is really there or not. You can’t flavor everything with anchovies, though, so de Kok found an alternative that’s more universally beloved but still salty: bacon. The researchers isolated about two dozen different aroma compounds from bacon, then tested each one to see if it enhanced people’s perception of

saltiness. Sure enough, they found three that did. By selecting meat that’s naturally high in those three compounds, de Kok’s team was able to make sausages that still tasted right but used 25 percent less salt.