This week I published my first piece with the Economist.
It’s for 1843, the part of the Economist universe that focuses on long-reads and essays. You can register for free to access the article if you aren’t a subscriber.
I've worked on this essay for a long time, as any of the people who have met me in the past few months and had me explain the ideas in at over and over can attest. Below I’m including some parts of the essay that didn’t make the final cut. I’m really grateful to Dr. Johnny Drain and to Dr Imogen Ramsey, both of whom spoke with me for the essay and helped me think through these ideas. Unfortunately the sections I wrote with their words ended up being cut in the edits, but the piece would still not have been the same without their time speaking with me and helping me to figure through the science of flavour.
Ultimately I was fascinated by two questions:
1) is flavour the last ephemeral thing in the digital age?
2) how do we ever know that what someone else is experiencing is the same as we are?
Many things today have been digitised. Music, video, speech, the dead. But one of the last things that hasn’t been digitised is flavour. According to a paper in Science human beings can discriminate more than 1trillion smells. We have over 400 receptors in our brain that can distinguish between different tastes. Flavour, the term, is the top level of a hierarchy that includes taste, aroma and texture, as well as psychological factors like memory. This is why it is so hard to digitise.
Imagine if it was possible to create a perfect digital record of a flavour. Once we understood exactly how to create a digital approximation of a flavour, the potential to create flavours as yet inconceivable could suddenly be realised. “I spoke recently to a group of perfumiers,” said Josh Silverman, the CEO of Aromyx which is a company I profile in the piece that is trying to digitise flavour. “They immediately asked me; is this going to put me out of a job? I told them that this is exactly what artists said before photoshop and what engineers said about CAD software. These tools simply help the experts do their jobs. We still have artists and we still have engineers.”
Why ferment soybeans, beyond cultural reasons, to create the meaty-umami flavours of miso when you could directly target umami receptors in the brain? This could open the potential for creating perfectly meat-flavoured plant burgers, or non-alcoholic beers that still tasted like a pint. The markets for these products are hardly niche; Impossible Foods, a company selling plant-based meat alternatives is valued at $4bn as of March 2020, and it’s biggest rival, Beyond Meat, which produces the plant-based Beyond Burger, went public last year with a valuation of $1.5bn.
In the realm of the fantastical, it also allows one to imagine a potential future in which flavours could be digitized and transmitted via the internet. In the same way that it required mapping the visual spectrum to be able to create television and eventually a product like Netflix, in the realm of flavour we might be seeing the very first tentative steps in this direction. Dr Nimesha Ranasinghe, the director of UMaine’s Multisensory Interactive Media Lab has already built a digital lollipop that generates taste sensations by electrically stimulating the tongue.
The calculation that Aromyx is making is that measuring flavour should be no different than measuring any other sensory data. “There are three receptors in your eye that detect a million different shades of colour” says Silverman, “in your nose there are four hundred receptors, meaning we can perceive a trillion scents and flavours.” While this means that the problem of mapping these sensors is orders of magnitude more difficult than for sight, it also means that it should ultimately be solvable. He offers the example of the RGB spectrum. “Once we understood that an eye can only perceive Red, Blue or Green, it was simply a case of understanding how to combine these inputs to fire the right combination in your brain to make you perceive a certain colour.” Once this was achievable, it was possible to precisely map the spectrum of visible colours and create quantified codes like the Pantone Colour Matching System.
“Where colour operates in a three-dimensional space,” says Silverman, “flavour operates in a ten or twelve dimensional one.” The potential upside for mapping this space could be vast. Two hundred years ago the only dyes available were those that naturally occurred. Once sensory science understood how the brain perceived colour, it became possible to create colour combinations that did not exist in nature. The same could be possible for flavour. At present, chefs and food companies have only a limited range of tools. When chefs want to push their craft to the outer edges, they are bounded by the limits of the world at their disposal. Fermentation, a process as old as bacterium, is in vogue in the top restaurants in the world at present to try and create intriguing new flavours.
“Even if you do manage to map the twelve-dimensional space of flavour,” says Dr. Johnny Drain, who holds a PhD in material sciences from Oxford and consults some of the top restaurants in the world, “I think that space is pallid without the subjective layer.” There is still academic debate about whether flavour is a separate sensory modality, like vision or hearing, or whether it is a perceptual system. What is undisputed is that there is an interpretive process that is occurring in the brain which allows us to perceive the nuances between different flavours, that we are then able to communicate to others through language.
“We still understand so little about the brain and exactly what is happening when we taste something,” says Dr. Drain, “that perhaps in a hundred years we will have a company called Neuromyx rather than Aroymx.” Flavour, perhaps, is too abstract and encompasses too many of our senses to be easily captured. It might require something more substantial, like a fuller understanding of how our mind works, to get close to its digital approximation. Until then, flavour remains one of the only ephemeral things in the digital age.
I really enjoyed it! Great to see it’s finally been published!
The piece made me wonder whether recreating taste through AI is in fact desirable. What could be some of the negative effects of it? Are there any? While meat-tasting lettuce might sound good, I wonder to what extent it's making it easier to ignore one of the bigger issues: our gradual separation from nature.