Tasty (21 page)

Draeger's, an upscale supermarket in Menlo Park, California, is known for its dizzying specialty food selections: 250 kinds of mustard, 75 kinds of olive oil, and over 300 different jams. In a now-famous experiment done in 1995, Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia University, and Mark Lepper, a psychology professor at Stanford, tested how much choice was too much. In alternating hours, testers dressed as Draeger's employees invited customers to taste from one of two samplers: one with twenty-four kinds of jam, the other with six. After tasting, the customer was given a one-dollar-off coupon to buy a jar. Customers tasted an average of one or two jams at both displays, though more visited the large selection. But in the metric that ­mattered—sales—the smaller display won hands down. Nearly a third of the people who sampled from it bought jam. Only 3 percent of those who tasted the twenty-four-jam cornucopia
bought any afterward. The volume of choices was a deterrent.

Choosing a jam to buy is more complicated than snatching a fruit from a tree. Flavor plays a central role, but so do brand, cost, and whether it will be spread on bread or English muffins. The human frontal cortex, a synapse away from areas that process the senses, memory, pleasure, emotion, and voluntary movement, was built for complex decision making. It pulls those threads together, assessing costs and benefits, gaming future scenarios, nudging the whole brain to action. In fMRI scans of people weighing a choice of foods to buy, scientists have found a small area of the right medial orbitofrontal cortex consistently working hard during the moment of decision. Every new flavor formulation, and every ­multimillion-dollar ad campaign, is ultimately about getting certain neurons in this spot to fire. But add more and more choices and the decision grows more difficult: there's simply too much information to process. At a certain point, no new taste, no matter how seductive, can cut through the clutter.

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Of course, these obstacles didn't slow the march of taste innovation, which relied more and more on new technologies that would make Howard Moskowitz's methods seem as quaint as Joe Murphy's kitchen-table potato chip spice formulations. In the mid-2000s, Kyle Palmer, a biologist who cofounded a taste research startup, Opertech Bio, devised a new method of flavor testing: he replaced humans with rats. Humans have delicate palates and formidable powers of expression and rats are garbage-eating vermin, but the similarities are greater than most people would like to admit. Rats have lived off the waste of human societies for thousands of years. And though
they cannot describe flavors, they do have measurable reactions to food that Palmer found a new way to exploit.

He put his rats in Skinner boxes designed to let them sample dozens of liquid flavor formulations out of small, dimpled trays. Pleasure was measured by the number of times they licked from each mixture. They'd typically lick a sugar solution thirty times; water, about twenty; a bitter mix, only once or twice. With this baseline, any flavor compound could be rated by the number of licks. The rats were also trained to evaluate. If they were testing would-be sweeteners, they pressed one lever if a sample tasted like sugar, a second if it did not. After each sampling, they got a—tasteless—food pellet as a reward. Opertech rats spend their whole lives this way, living out a normal span of about three years; their minders get to know their personalities, and their tastes.

This may seem like a crude way to evaluate flavors, but mindlessness is its greatest virtue. To develop new ingredients, food companies sift through endless lists of chemicals, hoping to find even one with potential. By combining tasting with machine-like repetition, Palmer's system generated impressive amounts of data in a short time, substituting brute force for nuanced observation. Four trained rats could test thousands of candidate compounds over a few days, pinpointing the tastiest for further study.

A competing biotech firm, Senomyx, took this approach a step further, using human tissue in place of lab rats. Senomyx scientists decoded, and patented, the DNA for sweet, umami, and some bitter human taste receptors. (Yes, taste genes and other parts of the human genome can be patented.) They infused these DNA strands into a line of kidney cells used in cancer research. The DNA went to work making taste receptors, giving Senomyx an unlimited supply of taste cells
in petri dishes. These can be dosed with new flavors, the subtleties and flaws of each gauged down to the molecular level. “We can identify when we have a flavor agent that has a bitterness component to it, determine what bitter receptor it's acting on, and basically dial out the bitter off-taste,” said David Linemeyer, a vice president at Senomyx. This system makes Opertech's rats look lazy; it can do in hours what takes them days.

The Senomyx approach had one drawback. The host cells used were descended from stem cells taken from a human fetus that was aborted in the early 1970s. Since then, these cells have been a fixture in medical and biotech research. But Senomyx's job was to develop flavors. However remote, an association with abortion would be devastating to a food or drink brand. Anti-abortion groups found out about this in 2011 and began to protest; a bill was introduced in the Oklahoma state legislature to ban any food developed using this technology. Senomyx, then working with Pepsi, promised not to use that cell line in its soft-drink research.

Both Senomyx and Opertech trained their technology on the hardest taste problem of them all, finding a truly sugary sugar substitute, and both hit on a similar potential solution. Opertech's rats liked a compound called Rebaudioside C, or Reb C for short, a derivative of the stevia leaf. (The stevia extract already used in many products is a related compound called Reb A.) Reb C itself wasn't sweet; however, it made sugar taste sweeter. With such a sweetness enhancer, soft drink makers could reduce the amount of sugar in a drink while maintaining the authentic taste. In 2013, Senomyx and Pepsi announced they had found a similar compound. However revolutionary, though, it was not clear the public would embrace this approach: “Americans Will Be Drugged
to Believe Their Soda Is Sweeter,” read a headline on the website
Gawker.

Pepsi researchers devised another way to enliven the mundane experience of sipping a soda. It was based on a straightforward premise: people form judgments about food by sniffing it first. Experience teaches people that delicious smells precede delicious food: the warm, bracing aroma of coffee, the smell of bacon crackling in a frying pan, the scent of chocolate chip cookies fresh out of the oven. Pepsi's “aroma delivery system,” patented in 2013, was a gelatin capsule, less than half a millimeter across, containing an aroma designed to create a cola or citrus imprint on the senses and brain before the first swig. Twisting open the cap would break the capsules, releasing the pleasing smell. A signature fragrance might evolve into something like the sound of a pop-top can, the signal of a thirst-quenching drink. This is not the only recently discovered way to exploit the associative powers of aromas; in 2013 a Japanese company began selling a smartphone accessory and app that released pleasing smells into the air, including coffee, curry, strawberry, and Korean barbecue.

Food technologies have begun to dispense with nature itself, and with it, food and flavor traditions that reach back thousands of years or more. At an event in London in 2013, Dutch scientists staged a tasting of the world's first hamburgers made from meat grown in a lab. The ecological costs of raising cattle are high; making meat without them might one day free up land for other purposes, reduce the beef industry's environmental impacts, and feed millions. The research was funded by Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who provided a grant of $330,000; the project's creators hoped to scale up and grow meat for the market within a decade or two.

The scientists, led by Mark Post, took adult stem cells
from cattle, then grew them in a culture of antibiotics to prevent microbes in the surroundings from infecting them. They used serums derived from calf and horse fetuses to spur growth and make the stem cells develop into the right kind of muscle tissue. After a few weeks, the small clumps of cells were put into petri dishes. They grew into fibers that knotted together to form small strips of muscle, each about a centimeter long. To add bulk to the muscle tissue, the scientists stretched the meat over a scaffold made of soluble sugar. The stringy strips were then compacted into pellets and packed en masse to make a burger. The finished product comprised 20,000 strands of meat, each containing 40 billion cow muscle cells, along with bread crumbs and a binder added to hold them together. The burgers were cooked in a pan with sunflower oil and butter.

Real beef is red, fatty, and delicious. It grows marinating in a mixture of blood, natural hormones, and amino acids, and carries the imprint of an animal's diet and experience. The lab burgers were white, and had to be colored with a mix of saffron and beet juice. They didn't taste like meat—or like much of anything. Hanni Rützler, a food scientist, described it in pointedly non-meaty terms: “crunchy and hot” and “a bit like cake.” Post planned to add lab-grown fat (which can also be grown from stem cells) to later versions. The burgers may one day approach edibility, or taste good. But they are unlikely to rival the taste of real meat anytime soon.

Sometimes, food and flavor part ways completely. In the early 2010s, Rob Rhinehart, a Silicon Valley software engineer, became fed up with eating. Whatever pleasure he received from savoring tasty foods, or just filling his stomach, was outweighed by the constant inconvenience. He resented having to shop, cook, and wash dishes. He didn't want to go
to a restaurant or wait for takeout to arrive. Rhinehart was also suspicious of most of the food he ate. He knew only that it tasted good, and in truth was probably unhealthy.

The straightforward way to rebel against the tyranny of the food system is to return to natural ingredients and fresh, simple flavors. As author Michael Pollan put it: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” There are many ways to do this, some not especially tasty. They include the Paleolithic diet, based on the idea that our genes and bodies are better suited to eating food that could have been acquired by hunter-­gatherers, such as lean, grass-fed meats, milk, eggs, fruits, and nuts.

But Rhinehart was a tech guy, not a foodie or hipster, and he decided to use technology to create the perfect food, building it from first principles. He researched the human body's nutritional needs and collected the most basic chemical ingredients available—the only recognizable elements were olive oil, fish oil, and salt. The contents were carbohydrates, proteins, fats, cholesterol, sodium, potassium, chloride, fiber, calcium, and iron, and a long list of vitamins and other nutrients. When blended together, they looked something like a milkshake, with a faint coffee-ish tint. To some, it resembled vomit. “At the time I didn't know if it was going to kill me or give me superpowers,” Rhinehart wrote. “I held my nose and tentatively lifted it to my mouth, expecting an awful taste. It was delicious! I felt like I'd just had the best breakfast of my life. It tasted like a sweet, succulent, hearty meal in a glass.”

He called it Soylent, after the 1973 movie
Soylent Green
, set in a dystopian future New York City where the only food available is the eponymous green wafer, supposedly made from processed plankton. The lie is exposed in the movie's final words: “Soylent Green is people!”

Rhinehart ingested nothing but Soylent and water for a month, making himself the guinea pig in an ongoing scientific experiment. He monitored his weight and drew blood daily to test for several important nutritional markers, fine-tuning the Soylent recipe as he went along to ensure he was getting the right balance of nutrients. At one point, his potassium level rose and his heart rate with it; he felt faint, so he reduced the concentration of potassium in the shake. When he began to lose weight, he drank more of it. The formulation cost $154.82 a month, plus shipping for the ingredients; previously, grocery shopping and eating out had cost him close to $500 per month. Pitching this combination of economy, nutrition, and time-saving helped him raise $1.5 million in a Kickstarter fund-raising appeal. He won another $1.5-million infusion of venture capital from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to help bring Soylent to market.

Chemically, Soylent was not much different from the nutrient concoctions used in feeding tubes for decades. Nor did Rhinehart's self-experimentation show much about how other people, let alone masses of consumers, would respond to a Soylent diet. But its effects on his food and flavor experiences were revealing. He felt sharper. He was never hungry, and no longer craved the junk food he had occasionally binged on before. Meeting the body's nutritional needs so precisely, Rhinehart thought, had addressed the central problem of the junk food age, offering relief from the body's constantly over-revved cycles of craving and gratification—a kind of biological reset. But then the monotony problem struck; bland shakes became a chore to drink. After his initial experiment, Rhinehart continued drinking them, but also allowed himself to indulge in old-fashioned eating and drinking a couple of times a week. He spiked his shakes with vodka. He ate sushi
regularly, and came to appreciate its delicate flavors and the craft of the sushi chef, which he now took the time to observe. Only by giving up food was he able to appreciate it.

The apotheosis of this food trend, perhaps decades away or longer, is virtual flavor. When Nimesha Ranasinghe, a computer scientist in Singapore, studied virtual realities, he noticed something missing. Sophisticated head- and handsets could trick the eyes, ears, and even the skin into a feeling of immersion in a fabricated digital space: a spaceship, an alien world, ancient Rome. But without flavors, virtual reality would always be an incomplete and impoverished experience. Ranasinghe took a variant of the tongue electrodes used by Nestlé's scientists and experimented with them to see if he could create tastes out of nothing but a mild electric current. He made a device he named the “digital lollipop”: a small sphere containing one electrode rests on the tongue; a second electrode is in contact with the tongue's underside.