Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good by Barb Stuckey Page B
Authors: Barb Stuckey
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“You take the same molecule. You sniff it, you like it. You put it in your mouth and you don’t like it,” she says, explaining a phenomenon that happens with some food.
Bartoshuk told me about a patient who came into the Center for Smell and Taste after injuring her tongue in a cringe-inducing accident months earlier. The woman had opened a metal can, stuck her tongue into it and licked the sharp inside, slashing the nerves in her tongue in the process. (I told you it was cringe-worthy.) Bartoshuk expected her to complain of a loss of taste , since she’d injured her tongue, where we taste food. But she visited the clinic months after the accident because she was being tortured by the smell of her mother-in-law’s lasagna.
Before the accident, the patient used to love the homemade version of this Italian specialty as prepared by her husband’s mother. After the accident, she would still salivate at the heady aroma of Italian cheeses and tomato sauce bubblingin the oven until gooey-crisp. The problem was that when she finally sat down at the table to eat it, it tasted like cardboard.
Bartoshuk’s first reaction was that this woman was lying in order to get some kind of insurance settlement. As a good practitioner of science, though, she conducted an experiment on herself to try to duplicate the injury’s effect. She ate a bite of a milk chocolate Hershey bar and noted the sensations. Delicious. Creamy. Chocolaty. A little bit sour. Roasty. Then she anesthetized her tongue—which was easy for her to do since the Center is affiliated with the school of dentistry—but didn’t do anything to alter her sense of smell, because she was trying to duplicate the medical condition of the woman who had a slashed nerve in her tongue but an intact sense of smell. With her leaden tongue, Bartoshuk then ate a piece of that same chocolate bar. She was shocked:
It wasn’t chocolate anymore. The retronasal olfaction should have been just like normal. It should have gone right up, back, and into my nose, no problem. Here’s what I think goes on. The brain looks for a cue, to tell itself whether that particular odor came in through the nostrils or from the mouth. The cue is: When you sniff, the brain knows the smell came in through your nostrils. When you’re chewing, swallowing, and getting taste and touch in your mouth, the brain knows it’s coming from your mouth. It sends that olfactory information to different parts of the brain for processing, depending on that cue.
Now what happened to this woman with the cut nerves, she didn’t get either cue. She wasn’t sniffing it when she put the lasagna in her mouth. But the brain wasn’t getting the clue from the mouth either, since the nerves had been cut, so it threw the information away. Somehow the brain needs the information from the taste system to process retronasal olfaction [mouth-smelling].
Normal people with functioning taste and smell senses wildly underappreciate mouth-smelling. Scientists do not. This is a hot area of research. You can experience mouth-smelling without tasting, in the exercise at the end of this chapter.
Breathing Scented Air
Molecular gastronomy, the high-concept trend in cooking that took off sometime after the turn of this century, uses food science to create mind-blowing food thatis visually beautiful or arresting and presented in challenging new forms, tastes, and textures. It is often also delicious. Chefs describe their dishes as being freeze-dried, foamed, or sealed under vacuum and cooked in a controlled-temperature water bath (sous vide); these are some of the same techniques that we use at Mattson. Many of the ingredients that make molecular gastronomy possible, as well as the techniques, are common to our business. For example, at Mattson we’ve been using hydrocolloids (compounds used in food to manipulate texture and viscosity) as functional ingredients for more than three decades. In professional food development,
“You take the same molecule. You sniff it, you like it. You put it in your mouth and you don’t like it,” she says, explaining a phenomenon that happens with some food.
Bartoshuk told me about a patient who came into the Center for Smell and Taste after injuring her tongue in a cringe-inducing accident months earlier. The woman had opened a metal can, stuck her tongue into it and licked the sharp inside, slashing the nerves in her tongue in the process. (I told you it was cringe-worthy.) Bartoshuk expected her to complain of a loss of taste , since she’d injured her tongue, where we taste food. But she visited the clinic months after the accident because she was being tortured by the smell of her mother-in-law’s lasagna.
Before the accident, the patient used to love the homemade version of this Italian specialty as prepared by her husband’s mother. After the accident, she would still salivate at the heady aroma of Italian cheeses and tomato sauce bubblingin the oven until gooey-crisp. The problem was that when she finally sat down at the table to eat it, it tasted like cardboard.
Bartoshuk’s first reaction was that this woman was lying in order to get some kind of insurance settlement. As a good practitioner of science, though, she conducted an experiment on herself to try to duplicate the injury’s effect. She ate a bite of a milk chocolate Hershey bar and noted the sensations. Delicious. Creamy. Chocolaty. A little bit sour. Roasty. Then she anesthetized her tongue—which was easy for her to do since the Center is affiliated with the school of dentistry—but didn’t do anything to alter her sense of smell, because she was trying to duplicate the medical condition of the woman who had a slashed nerve in her tongue but an intact sense of smell. With her leaden tongue, Bartoshuk then ate a piece of that same chocolate bar. She was shocked:
It wasn’t chocolate anymore. The retronasal olfaction should have been just like normal. It should have gone right up, back, and into my nose, no problem. Here’s what I think goes on. The brain looks for a cue, to tell itself whether that particular odor came in through the nostrils or from the mouth. The cue is: When you sniff, the brain knows the smell came in through your nostrils. When you’re chewing, swallowing, and getting taste and touch in your mouth, the brain knows it’s coming from your mouth. It sends that olfactory information to different parts of the brain for processing, depending on that cue.
Now what happened to this woman with the cut nerves, she didn’t get either cue. She wasn’t sniffing it when she put the lasagna in her mouth. But the brain wasn’t getting the clue from the mouth either, since the nerves had been cut, so it threw the information away. Somehow the brain needs the information from the taste system to process retronasal olfaction [mouth-smelling].
Normal people with functioning taste and smell senses wildly underappreciate mouth-smelling. Scientists do not. This is a hot area of research. You can experience mouth-smelling without tasting, in the exercise at the end of this chapter.
Breathing Scented Air
Molecular gastronomy, the high-concept trend in cooking that took off sometime after the turn of this century, uses food science to create mind-blowing food thatis visually beautiful or arresting and presented in challenging new forms, tastes, and textures. It is often also delicious. Chefs describe their dishes as being freeze-dried, foamed, or sealed under vacuum and cooked in a controlled-temperature water bath (sous vide); these are some of the same techniques that we use at Mattson. Many of the ingredients that make molecular gastronomy possible, as well as the techniques, are common to our business. For example, at Mattson we’ve been using hydrocolloids (compounds used in food to manipulate texture and viscosity) as functional ingredients for more than three decades. In professional food development,
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