Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (17 page)

This exercise will illustrate how much longer flavors last when you keep them in your mouth and employ mouth-smelling to extend the flavor experience.

YOU WILL NEED:

Prepared gelatin dessert (such as Jell-O) for everyone tasting

1 spoon for each taster

Saltine crackers and water for cleansing your palate

Pens and paper for writing down scores

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. For each sample, the goal is to count how long the flavor of the gelatin lasts in your mouth. Start counting from the time the gelatin enters your mouth to the time the flavor is completely extinguished.

2. Toss a spoonful of gelatin to the back of the mouth and swallow it as fast as possible. The goal is to get it down quickly, without much chewing.

3. Count how long the flavor of the gelatin lasts.

4. Eat a saltine and drink some water to cleanse your palate.

5. Place a spoonful of the gelatin on the center of the tongue, close the mouth, and keep it there as long as possible, being sure to breathe in and out as long as it’s in the mouth. Move it around while you keep breathing. The goal is to hold it in your mouth as long as possible before swallowing.

6. Count how long the flavor of the gelatin lasts.

DISCUSS:

• How much longer did the flavor of the gelatin you held in your mouth last?

• Imagine if you could get more flavor out of everything you eat this simply!

• All it takes is being more careful to hold food in your mouth, move it around to touch all the tastebuds, and breathe continuously so that you can experience the volatile aromas.

I
magine yourself
feeling
a fresh tomato. It’s likely that you are envisioning yourself touching it with your hand. This makes sense, given that you have to use your hand to put a tomato into your mouth. It also makes sense because your hand is your most sensitive body part. The next most sensitive body parts are your lips and tongue. After touching the tomato with your hand, if you want to get the most feel from it, it would make the most sense to stick it in your mouth. Your lips and tongue have almost as many nerve endings as your fingertips.

The image below is a graphic representation of the sensitivity of touch, called the Sensory Homunculus. The size of each body part has been increased or decreased in accordance with how discriminating it is. Notice how big the hands, lips, and tongue are.

The sensory Homunculus

Imagine that a friend has bought a new cashmere sweater that she really loves. “It’s so soft,” she might say to you. “Go ahead, feel it.” It’s unlikely that you will lean in close, gather up a handful of her sweater, and stick it in your mouth. Yet this is exactly what babies do! At some point in your maturation, you learn that tonguing your friends’ sweaters is socially unacceptable behavior, even though this action would help you get the most feel out of the sweater. Soft sweaters aside, your sense of touch is inextricably linked with what you savor.

Most people wildly underappreciate how much their sense of touch influences what they eat. Cameron Fredman, a thirtysomething litigator born and bred in Los Angeles, considers himself the unofficial spokesman for the appreciation of food texture.

Fredman derives great pleasure from food even though he’s never in his thirty-some years smelled or tasted it. He enjoys cooking and eats out often. Yet he is a connoisseur of food texture by default. That’s because Fredman was born with ageusia and anosmia: total absence of the senses of taste and smell. He will never truly know what food flavor is: the combination of the taste, smell, and texture. Fredman’s entire experience of flavor is solely texture.

As persuasively as lawyers defend their clients in court, Fredman finds himself defending the importance of texture in food. He talks about food texture the way chefs talk about flavor. “When discussing taste with people, I’m often
pitching texture. I’m arguing that a lot of what they like about food is
texture
, which gets credited to the taste of the food. Good food has good texture. Poorly prepared food has poor texture.”

Fredman waxes poetic about the layers and complexity of food texture. In describing one of his favorite foods, he says, “With sushi you have many bitesize, uniquely prepared varieties of texture.” He describes good sushi as being made with properly cooked, firm rice placed next to taut-textured, meaty fish. In contrast, poorly made sushi is a much more homogeneous textural experience.

Most people think rice cakes savor like Styrofoam (almost literally) because they lack a strong signature taste or aroma. But to Fredman, who relies solely on texture, there’s nothing missing from the snack disks that many people consider punitive diet food. “Rice cakes are just sort of interesting, texturally, if you stop and think about the way that the rice breaks off from the rest of it,” he says. “I think it’s more interesting than other kinds of crackers.”

One problem with Fredman’s reliance on food texture is that he is quick to lose his appetite when the texture of a food doesn’t match his expectations. A walnut hidden in a scoop of fresh yogurt might trigger a gag reflex. Most people would taste the bitterness of the walnut skin, then experience the mouth-smelling that would signal
walnut.
Fredman doesn’t get those taste and smell cues. To him, a walnut in his yogurt could just as easily be a severed body part or a piece of plastic. He usually gags out foreign textures, which is his own way of dealing with potentially dangerous food. He also adheres strictly to the expiration dates on packaged foods because he’s unable to stick his nose into a carton of milk to smell if it’s fresh. He relies heavily on visual spoilage cues, such as the mold that develops on cheese or the slime that coats a rotten vegetable. He’s not always successful at avoiding harm, though. When the texture of a food is correct, but the taste or smell is not, there’s a chance that dangerous things can get past his gullet. As on the sweltering night he spent in Venice Beach, California, without air conditioning.

Fredman was sweaty, tired, dehydrated, and uncomfortable in the dark. His girlfriend always had a bottle of water handy, so he asked her where it was. While they were lying in bed, she told him her bottle of water was on the table. He sat up, reached around until he felt it, then grabbed the bottle and chugged.
After a few swallows, Fredman realized the resulting dizziness and nausea he was experiencing wasn’t from sitting upright quickly in the heat; they were from whatever the hell it was he was drinking. When his girlfriend turned on the light, he saw immediately from the horrified look on her face that something was terribly wrong. Then he looked at the bottle he was holding. It read:
P
INE
-S
OL
.

Fredman lacks the two sensory systems that would alert most people to the danger of drinking Pine-Sol: smell and taste. Without another sensory element to differentiate it from water, Fredman was drinking blind. He sensed no textural difference between water and Pine-Sol. There was no auditory difference. And he couldn’t see the color or label because it was night and the lights were out.

Yet that didn’t mean his body accepted the liquid as water. He vomited for hours, but the dispatcher at the end of the 911 line told them this was a good sign. Once it was clear that Fredman would live through this frightening experience, his girlfriend couldn’t help but find the humor in it. “You should vomit on the bathroom floor,” she suggested of his sudsy discharge, “and wipe it up between bursts.” He wasn’t just a boyfriend; he was a floor wax, too.

Cameron Fredman’s pleasure in eating, in which he uses only his senses of sight, sound, and touch, shows us that we can—and do—derive great pleasure from food texture. Yet when we remember food experiences, it’s rare that texture is at the top of our minds, except perhaps when something is extraordinarily high in fat. My mother goes giddy over the silken texture of the flan at her favorite Mexican restaurant. I’ve listened to Roger talk reverently about the texture of Humphry Slocombe Secret Breakfast ice cream, which he loves because it stays soft due to its high alcohol content, even when it’s been stored at zero degrees. The bourbon paired with cornflakes in vanilla ice cream simulates a bracing, hair-of-the-dog breakfast. Not that I would know about that.

One of the great American textural food experiences is the famously chunky superpremium ice creams available in every grocery store these days. But this was not always the case. In 1978, two men set out to make great ice cream with superhigh butterfat content. The more butterfat the ice cream has, the creamier, richer, and more luxurious its mouthfeel—or how it feels in your mouth.

It so happened that one of the founders of the dairy company suffered from one of the same conditions as Cameron Fredman,
anosmia
, the lack of the ability to smell. During the early days when the founders were developing the recipes themselves, the anosmic one used to push for more and more stuff in the ice cream: more chunks of chocolate, more walnuts, more brownie pieces, more cherries. He couldn’t smell the fruity-almondy aroma of a cherry; the roasty, nutty aroma of chocolate; or the burnt-sugar flavor of the caramel. He wanted texture to replace that missing olfactory input. Loading up their ice cream with swirls, chunks, fruit, and other inclusions gave the founder a little compensation for what he was missing.

This combination of high-quality ice cream and a-chunk-in-every-bite texture would become Ben & Jerry’s signature. Ben Cohen’s anosmia was partly responsible for the iconic textural indulgence that even today marks his and his partner Jerry’s ice creams. Many competitors have mimicked their style, but Ben & Jerry’s is still the texture-lovers’ ice cream choice, with varieties like Chubby Hubby: fudge-covered peanut butter-filled pretzels in vanilla malt ice cream with swirls of fudge and peanut butter.

Texture is the part of flavor we experience through our sense of touch. A food experience becomes complete when you layer on the other senses of sight, hearing, taste, and smell. Good restaurateurs know how to stimulate all five.

Joshua Skenes, the flaky but fantastically brilliant chef who owns the lovely restaurant Saison in San Francisco, serves a multicourse tasting menu that challenges the diner to think differently about food pairings and flavors. When Saison opened, it was a shock to the senses and to conventional expectations. It was in a converted catering kitchen space, on a back alley in a neighborhood not known for fine dining, and you had to walk through the dishwashing station to get to the dozen or so wooden tables in the afterthought of a dining room. Eventually, Skenes’s talent broke through and his customers wanted a setting that matched the hefty price tag he wasn’t shy about charging and they weren’t regretful about paying. When he decided to remodel his restaurant, he considered the sense of touch in a unique way: “You need great food, great service, great wine, great comfort. And comfort means everything. It means the materials you touch, the plates, the whole idea
that the silverware was the right weight. We put throws on the back of the chairs,” said Skenes.