Taste What You're Missing: Surprising Stories and Science Why Food Tastes Good (#183)

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers.
And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Toman. Hi, everyone.
It's Lynn Toman. Welcome to another Three Takeaways episode.
If you're curious about food, what makes food taste good, why people like some foods and dislike others, and how you can appreciate and enjoy food more, you're going to love this conversation with Barb Stuckey. Barb's whole career has revolved around food.
She started by reviewing restaurants, all kinds of restaurants, from cozy neighborhood restaurants to Michelin-starred restaurants. And then she joined the food development company Mattson, where she works as a professional food inventor.
Barb and her wonderful book, Taste, helped me become more attuned to a world of tastes, aromas, textures, sights, and sounds that I didn't even know I was missing. Barb helped me to use her words, see flavors more clearly, hear food more crisply, and glean more detail from everything I ate.
I hope our conversation today and Barb's book, Taste, does the same for you. Welcome, Barb, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today.
Thank you, Lynn. It's my pleasure to be here.
It is my pleasure as well. Barb, where does taste happen? Is it solely in the mouth?

It happens on your tongue where your taste buds are.

But we also have taste buds on the sides of our mouth, on the roof of our mouth, in the

back of our throat.

And then believe it or not, we have taste buds in our stomach, which technically they

are taste buds, even though they are in your stomach.

Kind of makes sense that your digestive system would want to know exactly how to start working to digest the food. So there's some amount of taste that goes into that.
But taste is a term that we use in this country to describe the act of eating food. But taste, and I'm using air quotes here, it's much more complicated than just what is happening on

your tongue. Because if you want to be very literal about what happens on your tongue, there are only five things that you can taste using your taste equipment, your sensory taste system alone.
And those five things are sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and umami, otherwise known as savory or meaty. And so there's a lot more going on than just what is happening in your mouth.
It seems so simple and yet it really is so complicated. I was so shocked that the taste that happens in your mouth is only, what, about 20% or so of the story of taste? It's hard to estimate exactly how much it is, but you can assume that your other senses are adding to the experience.
The most impactful in addition to taste would be smell.

So it's a very interesting conundrum that both taste and smell happen in our mouth. We have five senses we can see, we can hear, we can touch, we can taste, and we can smell.
You'd never confuse the other senses. The reason that we do confuse taste and smell is because of that very fact that they both happen inside your mouth.
So there's one way that you can taste, which is to put food in your mouth and you have to warm it with the temperature of the inside of your mouth. And then when you warm the food that's in your mouth, you begin to have the volatiles that are coming off of the food.
Those are the volatile aroma molecules. They start to move into your olfactory system.
Now, that's what is happening inside your mouth. And that kind of smell is what we call retro nasal olfaction.
That means the food is already in your mouth and that the aromas are going up the back of your throat.

The other way that we experience smell is when you hold something outside your body.

You know, imagine holding a piece of candy or chocolate or something and smelling it

like that.

That's called orthonasal olfaction.

And those two things are slightly different.

And so you're getting slightly different experiences whether you're experiencing the food outside of your body or inside of your body. And the reasons of that are the temperature will differ.
And also, when you put food in your mouth and you chew it, you start to break it down and you start to experience some of the texture and the aromas in your mouth. Interesting.
What happens if we blind taste test? I love your examples of beverages and miscoloring drinks, apple juice, orange juice, and wines. Can you talk about those? Yeah.
Your eyes are so important to your experience of eating. And of course, the eyes are oftentimes viewed as the primary sense for seeing people.
It's the sense that you probably rely on the most to get around in this world. And as a result, our sense of Seeing is very fast.
It happens before other senses are even enabled. And our sight is very accurate, but at the same time, it can easily be fooled.
So when I was promoting the book and I was on book tour, we would do these tasting sessions where we would take a glass of white wine and put a couple of drops of red food coloring in, a couple of drops of caramel color, which are a brown food coloring, and kind of swirl it together until it looked like something that resembled a Zinfandel or a Cabernet Sauvignon or some other kind of red wine. And we would hand these glasses of wine out And I would say, does anyone have a clue what varietal of wine this is? And people would raise their hand, Zinchendel, Cabernet Sauvignon, it's a Pinot Noir.
And in truth, it was a Riesling, a very acidic white, which has no flavors that resemble whatsoever those that are in red wine. So what had happened was the people who were seeing the glass of red wine were fooled by their own sense of seeing.
So our sight is pretty reliable. And so we rely on it very heavily and oftentimes at the detriment

of other senses. So if someone had sat down and you could have put a mask over their eyes and

given them the same red colored white wine, I think the results would be very different

because of course they'd be paying attention to it and they wouldn't be led astray by their sense of sight. It's so interesting.
How about if you give someone a glass of orange colored apple juice? Oh, they will tell you it's orange juice. Absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, it's these tricks. And in some ways, they're party tricks, but the reason that they're party tricks now is because so much research done by wonderful chemical sensory scientists have proven that this happens time and again, and it doesn't matter which kind of food you're testing, food or beverage, doesn't matter whether or not the sensory subjects that you're using are people off the street or whether they are professionals, maybe professional wine tasters, professional juice tasters, professional beer makers.
All of them are fooled. It's really just human nature for us to rely so much on our sense of sight.
We have not talked much about sound.

How does sound or music affect us? Does it have an impact? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
I mean, there were some fascinating studies done with sound in the presence of food. A couple of my favorites.
One of them is, you know, if you're going to do academic research that is controllable and you want to use potato chips, it wouldn't make sense to buy a big bag of regular potato chips because each potato chip is different. But if you want to control the source material that you're using, Pringles, every single Pringle is exactly like the next.
So they're the perfect food for doing research. So some research was done where people were given Pringles to eat and they were asked to put earphones over their ears.
And without their knowledge, as they were eating the potato chips, someone was adjusting the sound of the crunch. So, you know, when you eat a potato chip and it crushes in your mouth, you can kind of hear it inside your head.
This was manipulated while people didn't know it was being manipulated. They thought that the ear coverings were just there to keep other noises out.
But in fact, they were turning the sound of the crisp chip experience in your ear up or down. And it turns out based on the level of sound, when the sound was turned up, people rated those chips as being crispier.
When the sound was turned down, and this is just the decibel levels, just the decibel levels. When the sound was turned down, people would say that the chips were not as crispy.
So yes, we can be fooled. That's just one example of how sound impacts our experience of food.
Other really fun ones are there was an experiment done in a wine store where the wine store carried many, many different types of wine. So there was wine from Spain and wine from Germany and wine from California, wine from France.
And one day of the week in the store, they would play nothing but German music. And then the next day, they would play nothing but French music.
and then the next day they would play nothing but French music. And then the next day they would play nothing but Spanish music.
And it turns out that without knowing that they were doing it, their customers were coming in. And on the days when the German music was being played, people bought more German wine.
On the days when the French music was playing, people bought more French wine. And of course, on the days when the Spanish music was playing, people bought more Spanish wine.
So you think you're in control and you go in and you say, oh, I'm going to buy the bottle of wine that's right for me. And in fact, you can be manipulated with sound as well.
So interesting. How do salt, sweet, bitter, and sour balance each other? It's really interesting to think about.
Each one of them can play together with the others, and sometimes they're all playing together, sometimes just one or two of them. Because there's five senses and there's five

basic tastes, I have these mnemonic devices that I use. I call them, one is the sensory star.
Those are the five senses that I mentioned, which everybody knows because we learn in school. And then the other one is called the taste star, which most people don't know.
Sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and umami are those basic things that we can taste using our taste buds. And so when I'm thinking about balancing food, I'm kind of like clicking through my fingers and saying, okay, well, is this soup that I've just created, is it salty enough? Not salty enough.
Okay, maybe it needs to be a little salty. Oh no, I made it too salty.
Well, now what do I do? Well, maybe I should add a little bit of acid to balance out the salt, perhaps even a little bit of sweetness. And so they really can balance each other out.
And I think these are excellent exercises for people to do to start understanding how they work together. So take, for example, your morning coffee.
Coffee is known to be very, very bitter. And not many people like their coffee black, but many people do.
So I can kind of tell a lot about you by how you take your coffee. But the reality is that many people adjust the bitterness of their coffee using something that's sweet so that might be sugar it might be something else like some non-nutritive sweetener or it might be fat and so what they're doing there is they're adding fat to adjust the ph of the coffee which coffee has a bit of acidity to it so people don't realize that when they're adding sugar or cream or milk to their coffee or oat milk or whatever, they're actually adjusting the basic tastes and the texture because oftentimes you're adding a dairy product or a non-dairy product that has fat.
It's just kind of ingrained in us now. We know how to make the coffee taste the way we want it to, but really what that's doing is helping to balance the bitterness with other basic tastes and texture.
It's amazing how strong and powerful these basic tastes are, and they really are the foundation of food. I like to think of them as if you had a paint-by-n numbers artwork that you were working on, the dark black lines that are the structural black lines are the basic taste.
And what fills in the color is the aromas and the textures, the other senses that you're experiencing. It's a really dynamic system that comes together.
Barb, how can you add complexity to a dish? Depending on your preferences, there's lots of different ways. One of the ways that I like to think of adding complexity is by going through those five basic tastes first.
You can't assume that they're in perfect balance. Are they all in here? If they aren't, which ones are? Is one of them overpowering the others?

And then you can dose them with the tastes that are missing.

That's why we have salt and pepper on the table, you know, so that we can adjust things

to our personal preferences.

Maybe add a little bit of sugar if it's too bitter or if it's too sour.

I like to do something that does not seem intuitive at all, but oftentimes you need to add a little bitter. And I think the majority of people who either follow recipes or cook casually might think that bitter is bad.
Bitter is not bad. It's just one of the basic tastes that we experience.
I think it's so interesting that when bars or restaurants play loud music, that it affects how much people eat and drink or how salty or sweet foods are. Can you talk a little about that? Yeah, sure.
I'll tell a story about a favorite restaurant of mine in San Francisco here where I live.