Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (53 page)

The brain takes all the inherent pleasures of the popcorn—the crunch, the buttery aroma, the saltiness, the fun of popping it into your mouth—and integrates it with the pleasure you’re experiencing while you eat it: the freeing feeling of singing at the top of your lungs, the sense of belongingness as 1,600 people sing aloud together, the fun of pretending you’re sixteen going on seventeen. Then it adds the two sources of pleasure together. It’s a recipe for getting the absolute most enjoyment out of food. The flip side of this is that it’s the perfect storm for overeating.

“The experience of pleasure is not unimodal. It is not just coming from the taste buds. It is coming from all the other senses, too,” says Shiv.

This holds true for the best meals of your life. It’s likely that they were with friends and family, all having a jolly good time, perhaps even celebrating a momentous occasion. All this non-food-related pleasure is added to any pleasure you get from the sensory experience of the meal, thereby making it one big, huge happy memory. Says Shiv, “Some of the input is related to the tasting experience, some of it is unrelated to the tasting experience. The brain doesn’t make a difference between the source of the emotion.”

Baba Shiv’s marketing research seeks insights that are relevant to the types of companies Mattson has as clients, and can inform the way they market their products. Shiv separates consumer behavior into two components: wanting and
liking. Not only is there a difference in the feelings of wanting and liking a food, these emotions are coded in different parts of the brain.

At the end of the day there’s nothing I want more than a glass of wine. I’d like to think I’m far from a wine snob; rather, I’m just persnickety in terms of what I like. My everyday drinking wine is a white blend from Oregon that retails for $16 a bottle. And I’ll often join Roger in a glass of his soft pinot noirs, which typically sell between $25 and $40 per bottle. Anything more expensive than this is lost on me. I just don’t experience the incremental benefit. But perhaps I would if I used an fMRI machine to track my brain through the process. Shiv has done this with wine drinkers.

He put human test subjects in a scanner and squirted five wines into their mouths one at a time. The consumers were told they’d be sampling different cabernet sauvignons. The conceit was that those running the test would identify the wines by their price point only, instead of assigning them random letters or numbers as is normal research practice. Price was the only information about the wines that they gave the consumers. Of course you can guess that they served the consumers the same wines more than once: at different price points.

As you might also expect, when unsuspecting consumers tasted “$90 cabernet” they gave it higher liking scores than they gave the exact same wine labeled “$10 cabernet.” But this is where it gets interesting. When Shiv’s team looked at the brains of the tasters, the $90 version of the wine resulted in much more activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex—the area that codes for pleasure—than the $10 version of the same wine. The brain seemed to be experiencing more pleasure from the higher price point.

Shiv explains how this works. When presented with a higher price point, we expect a higher reward, since the expensive-means-better model has proved true in most other aspects of life (cars, houses, educations, vacations). As a result, when our brain hears “$90 cabernet,” it gets ready to receive this high-value reward. With our brain primed and ready, the act of actually tasting the wine fuses with the expectation and we experience a higher reward than we do for a wine with a lower quality expectation. This is nothing more than the placebo effect! When you expect a drug to work on your ailment and—more important—when you want it to work, it oftentimes will. When you expect a wine to savor better, and—more important—when you want it to, it will often do just that.

He tells of another experiment he did with beer. (After this story I decided that I needed to visit his research lab at happy hour.) He proved that people have
different reactions to the same beer if it’s served two ways: with a twist-off cap or with a cap that requires a bottle opener. Needing to find and use an opener on a bottle of beer requires a little bit more effort. Not much, but enough that you notice it. But it also does something else that’s extraordinarily important. It prolongs the wanting. It adds another layer of anticipation, which translates into a higher level of liking. As Shiv says, “It is in the anticipation of pleasure that pleasure itself provides.”

This is a big problem in our society today. We have such incredibly easy access to food. It’s usually only a few feet away from us, ready to heat or eat, with no patience required. We do a lot less cooking, outsourcing this task to restaurants, delis, cafeterias, and others, so our wanting of food is easily satisfied. We don’t allow our wanting to build up, and so we cut short a source of pleasure: the anticipation of it.

Imagine the eater’s worst nightmare: You are living in captivity for six months without fresh food or water. You cannot eat anything that hasn’t been freeze-dried or canned. There is not a piece of fresh fruit available. No cold, cool, fresh milk, creamy cheese, or comforting ice cream. No grilling or baking. And worst of all, your body feels, at best,
off.

There are people who volunteer for this kind of torture. They’re called astronauts.

I was curious about how our sense of taste would be affected when the atmosphere changes. Food doesn’t taste as good at 30,000 feet as it does on Earth, but what about a more extreme change? After all, gravity and air are present in a pressurized plane cabin. So I went a bit higher.

I spoke with Michele Perchonok, a PhD in food science, who manages NASA’s Advanced Food Technology Project and the former Shuttle Food System. “I have probably one of the very best jobs a food scientist could have,” says Perchonok about her job at Johnson Space Center. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

Perchonok’s team created the food for astronauts on the recently retired shuttle, as well as those who spend time on the International Space Station, some for stretches as long as six months. Her team’s challenges are many. First and foremost, they have to make sure that the astronauts are well fed and well nourished.
Astronauts’ time is highly valuable when they are in orbit. Each minute some sort of important work or activity is scheduled, and the astronauts must be in peak condition. They cannot afford to be either hungry or stuffed.

Then there’s the issue of storage space when people are eating in outer space. There’s no room for food detritus, such as the empty jars, bottles, cans, wrappers, skins, rinds, and cores that are generated by normal food preparation. As when camping or sailing: whatever you pack in you have to carry around and ultimately pack it out when you go home.

Most of the hot meals that astronauts eat are processed in the same way that canned foods are, so that they’re sterile and don’t require refrigeration. But instead of bulky metal cans, the chicken chunks, brown rice, or franks-and-beans come in foil pouches, like premium albacore tuna pouches you might see at the grocery store. The benefit of foil pouches is that they collapse flat and can be folded or rolled up easily to minimize their volume.

The options for preparing food on a space shuttle or space station are limited. There are no electric or gas grills or stoves, because it’s difficult and dangerous to use high heat in small, closed environments. In fact, no actual cooking is done in space. The food that’s sent up is already fully cooked. The astronauts merely warm or rehydrate it before eating.

Once Perchonok and her team have decided what type of food they are going to send into space and sterilized it in collapsible packages, they have to figure out how to make it taste good. Relying simply on culinary and food science techniques would assume that everything is the same in orbit as on Earth, which is untrue. Let’s start with the eater.

When astronauts first arrive in space, it takes some time for their bodies to adjust. Because of the lack of gravity, bodily fluids tend to move around in unusual ways. Fluid flows from the body core and limbs into the head in ways it never does on Earth. You could approximate this if you hung upside down for an extended period of time, but there’s no good way for you to simulate zero gravity. The astronauts start to experience what they gently refer to as “Charlie Brown face,” meaning that their faces become plump and round from the extra fluids. Besides looking silly, the other effect of this is nasal congestion, which makes eating food about as enjoyable as it is with a head cold. They can experience the five Basic Tastes fairly well, but the aromas are severely muted, so flavor is compromised.

“We get a lot of comments from our crew members saying food just doesn’t taste the same in orbit. Most of the time they say it doesn’t have enough flavor,”
says Perchonok. This is because the meals are designed to be moderate in sodium content. The issue is that high salt consumption in space can lead to water retention and other health problems. And when the new superlow-sodium formulas that Mattson developed make it to the Space Station, there will be even lower salt, meaning lower flavor, less volatiles that are salted out, and less of that yummy salty taste.

The astronauts eat out of individual pouches, as opposed to putting food on plates. “It’s very difficult to transfer food in microgravity (or zero gravity),” says Perchonok, “because it could float away.” The other reason for not putting it on plates or in bowls is that using serving ware results in more solid waste to pack in and out, not to mention having to use precious water to wash them.

The third factor is texture. Canned food loses a lot of its freshness cues. The main ones being texture and color. Green beans, corn, and peas that pop when you bite into them when fresh become mushy and soft when canned. The same goes for just about every other ingredient, save perhaps the water chestnut, a canned food formulator’s dream ingredient. Without the crisp
snap!
sound of fresh vegetables bursting against the teeth, another sensory input is limited: the auditory kind. And of course the brilliant green color of sweet peas becomes drab military green after canning. When the astronauts get to see the food—which happens only while it’s on their fork between scooping it out of the pouch and putting it into their mouths—it is a visual letdown.

Anyone, including crew members, would take less emotional enjoyment from food they have to scoop out of a foil pouch, very carefully, one spoonful at a time, directly into their mouth. It just doesn’t give the same satisfaction as cooking, smelling, and tucking into a big bowl of highly textural, rainbow-hued food.

Finally, the astronauts’ food is merely warm, not hot, which limits the release of the volatile aromas that higher temperatures produce, muting the flavor further. Because they’re in zero gravity, aromas that would normally waft up from the food to the nose may waft, but there is no
up
, per se, so less aroma reaches the olfactory system.

“We send up a lot of condiments,” says Perchonok, most of them spicy, because the sensation of heat comes not from the taste or smell systems, but from pain fibers or tactical sensation. This, apparently, doesn’t change in space. If and when we meet our first extraterrestrial neighbors, we might want to show up with a bunch of dried jalapeños as opposed to a more traditional peace offering.

The condiments also give the astronauts the illusion of choice, which they severely lack in orbit. Every minute of their valuable time in space is preprogrammed with activities, from when they will sleep to when they will perform experiments to when they will eat.

Other psychological effects come with being 190 nautical miles above Earth. The astronauts are under constant low-level stress, far away from loved ones, and this puts unattainable expectations on the meal: it’s the best part of their day. Even if the food were prepared by a James Beard Award–winning chef with the benefit of gravity, no meal could deliver satisfaction, nourishment, control, release, a taste of home, leisure, escape, and everything else someone needs when stepping outside our atmosphere. Space is possibly the worst environment in which to be able to fully experience and enjoy food.

But there’s no better view in the universe.

T
o appreciate the story of how Carlo Middione lost his sense of smell, you need to know his path to the kitchen.

Carlo was born the last of thirteen children to two Sicilian immigrants struggling to feed their brood amid the unfriendly weather of Buffalo, New York. Eventually Carlo’s father, Marco decided to move his large family to Glendale, California, because his green thumb ached for twelve snow-free months a year during which to grow fruits and vegetables and trap their own game. Their self-sufficiency was both thrift and their way of life in 1943 California. Carlo remembers the long trip westward almost entirely in terms of what they ate along the journey: