Episode 1: The Golden Spoon

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Drumroll, please.

Oh, okay.

Welcome to the very first episode of Gastropod.

I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And I'm Nicola Twilley, and we are the proud hosts and co-parents of this shiny new podcast.

You might be a bit curious about Gastropod, what it is, why we decided to bring it to your ears.

It is not, contrary to what Wikipedia would have you believe, a snail or a slug.

Sorry, biologists, natural historians, and lovers of accurate taxonomy.

But this gastropod is something else altogether.

Better than the best snail you've ever dreamed of.

Raising the bar for snails everywhere.

Okay, so we're both journalists and we both have a major overwhelming passion.

Food, food, and everything food related.

And so we've teamed up to bring you Gastropod, the podcast about all things gastro.

I want to point out that this isn't a cooking show.

We're never going to tell you the best recipe for pizza dough or the best beer to pair with chocolate ice cream.

And I want to point out that I would happily do the research on both if called upon.

So generous of you.

But speaking of research, this is a show that looks at food through the lens of history and science.

Sometimes we'll focus more on the history and sometimes more on the science, but we'll be striving to bring you stories that highlight at least a bit of both.

Because these are topics that fascinate us.

And we thought if we're so interested in the history and science of what we eat, you might be too.

This first episode is actually a perfect balance of these two aspects, and it's not exactly about food, but rather what we eat it with.

Cutlery, or flatware, whichever you prefer.

Once you start looking into it, it turns out that the forks we use to get food into our mouths are relatively recent inventions.

And that there's a whole new emerging science of spoon flavor.

Stick with us this episode and you too can amaze your friends with the shocking history and atomic secrets of cutlery.

Nikki, you're picking up the first interview.

It's with Bea Wilson.

She's a food writer and historian based in the UK, and she wrote a book called Consider the Fork.

It's the kind of book where every other page you learn something you can hardly believe.

The whole idea is to look at kitchen tools, pots, pans, can openers, garlic presses, and so on.

All of these things have changed over time, and that has changed how and what we eat.

It's full of amazing details, like, did you know that before kitchen timers became common in the 18th century, recipes often gave timings in prayers rather than minutes?

So, for example, people would say to let the cabbage boil for two ave maria's or whatever.

Seriously, I'd think it'd take at least three, but what do I know?

I'm Jewish.

I have no idea how long an ave maria is.

Me neither.

But I do know you don't want to overcook cabbage.

Fortunately, we now have kitchen timers, or rather iPhones.

But the whole book is like that.

But it was the chapter on cutlery that truly blew my mind.

Hi, my name's Bea Wilson.

I'm a food writer and historian, and I'm the author of Consider the Fork.

The first thing I asked Bea about is what we ate with before cutlery.

We always had hands and we always had from very early times some sort of version of a spoon.

You can clearly make some version of a spoon using a shell and that's what people would have done long, long ago.

They'd have taken a shell and lashed it onto a stick.

And we know this from the ancient Roman word for spoon, which is cochleari, meaning shell.

But equally, fingers, as people in Arab cultures or lots of other places in the world where they still eat with fingers rather than cutlery, are pretty handy devices for eating with, so long as what you're eating isn't liquid and it's not too hot.

And for centuries in Europe, people would have just carried a personal knife with them, which they would have brought out anytime they needed to cut something challenging.

And other than that, they would have managed with a combination of bowls and spoons and their own hands.

And the fork, when it first was introduced into Europe, in most places was seen as this bizarre, weird, slightly fetishistic device.

Why would you want to put metal prongs into your mouth along with the food?

It just didn't seem like a natural way to eat.

Except in Italy, the reason being pasta, the Italians were far quicker to adopt forks than any other European country.

And they started off with these single-pronged devices called puntavrole.

And then they figured out that if one prong was very good for eating noodles with, then two prongs would be better and three might be better still.

But it took centuries after the Italians for people in England or France to see the need of forks.

That makes sense.

I can't really imagine eating spaghetti without a fork.

Nikki, this makes me wonder what on earth the Italians were eating pasta with beforehand.

Well, there was that puntarolo thing that Bea mentioned, which is basically an awl, like a carpentry awl.

From reading descriptions in medieval Italian cookbooks, it seems as though the puntarolo worked sort of like a spear for lasagna and ravioli, or a rod to twirl around for noodles.

But actually, poor people, which is a lot of people, they ate pasta with their hands.

It's bizarre, but apparently one of the main tourist attractions in Naples in the 18th and 19th centuries was watching street kids in Naples eating spaghetti just using their hands.

You could buy postcards of them tipping their heads back and dangling the long strands into their mouths.

Sounds really messy.

Yeah, so you would think.

So I looked into this too.

And the thing is that when pasta first got popular in Italy, it wasn't this sauce-drenched thing we eat today.

Originally, Italians didn't even add oil to their cooked pasta, just grated cheese and maybe some pepper.

The first tomato arrived in Italy in 1548, but no one made pasta sauce with it for another 300 years.

Pesto and other sauces existed, but they were served with meat, not pasta.

But plain pasta, sure, I mean, after I make a bunch of pasta and it's either in the colander or in a dry bowl, I can't help sneaking pieces with my hands.

But still, cheese melted?

That doesn't sound pleasant.

Or actually, Parmesan doesn't melt too much.

Yeah, I guess it's like that dish, pasta con caccio e pepe, without all the butter and olive oil I always add.

But we're getting off track here.

We promised no recipes.

Okay, I'll stop bugging you about the history of pasta and let you get back to bee and the history of forks.

And did those early forks look the same as ours do today?

Or, you know, did it take a while for the fork shape to get standardised?

It took a while.

It's sometimes said that the first forks had only two tines as opposed to three or four as is standard now.

But that looks as if it's probably not so.

There are early examples of forks with multiple tines.

It wasn't just one fork fits every occasion, as it might be today.

There were these specialised tiny sweetmeat forks, which were adopted in England way ahead of any other type of fork, called sucket forks or sucket spoons.

And they had two tiny little tines on one end and they had a little spoon on the other end.

So it's kind of a proto-spork.

And that would be if you picture yourself eating something like preserved ginger in syrup, it would be the perfect utensil because you could use the two little tines to pick up the sticky sweet meat without your hands getting dirty.

And then the other end could be used to spoon up the delicious sweet juices.

And then there would be other forks, I mean, much larger forks, which after all we still have today for serving.

It looks as if forks were culinary utensils in most countries before they were eating utensils.

So you'd have large, long, two-tined forks that would be very good for either impaling or stabilising mostly pieces of meat while you were carving it.

What did eating our food using prongs rather than hands or a spoon,

how did that change the way we eat?

It changed the way we eat in so many ways.

I mean, one of the things is that once you have the fork and its new companion, the table knife, laid on a table for whoever happens to sit down, cutlery becomes something much less personal.

So as I said, people used to carry their own personal knife with them wherever they went.

And it was as much a weapon as it was a piece of cutlery.

But it was very much a personal object.

You would no more eat with a stranger's knife than you would brush with a stranger's toothbrush today.

Whereas once you had the knife and fork laid out together, that's just something whoever happens to sit at that place will use them and then they'll be washed and used again.

And they're not personal in the same way, but equally, they go along with a whole new set of values about politeness at the table.

And part of the reason, I mean, these things are chicken and egg, part of the reason why the fork was finally adopted was that it went along with new ideas about civilization and a dawning horror at the old table manners and the old idea that you would have sharp knives at table, which suddenly seemed barbaric.

So that's interesting.

Forks come along and suddenly cutlery has a whole set of manners associated with it.

I was wondering in your book you mentioned fork anxiety as a phenomenon and I was wondering if you could talk about some of the different sort of protocols and

manners that got set up around fork usage.

Yes, I love this phrase fork anxiety.

I got it from the food writer Dara Goldstein and she sort of talks about how

the proliferation of silverware in the 19th century with a special fork for any conceivable food, forks for olives, forks for ice cream even.

Seriously, Nikki?

Forks for ice cream?

Perhaps to slow you down, like a kind of diet aid?

I don't know.

But ice cream forks are just the tip of the fork iceberg.

Bee just kept going.

Forks for sardines, forks for terrapins, forks for salads.

And as soon as you have all these forks, you get an anxiety about how to use them.

There's that sort of classic scene, which I think is in Pretty Woman, along with half a dozen other Hollywood movies, where the heroine is sitting at the table thinking, How on earth do I use these forks?

Which one comes first?

And it also gave rise to this fascinating division in table manners between the US and Britain.

In America, you cut everything up and then Emily Post christened this zigzag eating, so the fork is then taken in the right hand and used to chase the food around the plate.

Whereas in England, the idea is still holding the knife and fork together in this stately dance where they're never put down until you finally are trying to signal to the rest of the table that you've finished.

There's a kind of semaphore that goes on with knives and forks.

There are all these rules about putting your knife and fork at six o'clock, which means that the meal is finished, or if you just wish to leave the table for a moment, you put it at a different place on the plate.

It's quite bizarre when you think about it.

We assume that these forms of eating gadgetry are enabling us to eat more easily, whereas, in a way, they're just creating all these obstacles to the process of just putting food in our mouths.

Oh god, this is hitting a nerve.

You want to talk about serious fork anxiety?

It's not just that everyone mocks me for my American accent when I go home to London.

My parents have literally made fun of me when I pick up my fork with my right hand as you Americans do.

And even though they're only teasing, I see a genuine horror in their eyes.

Why?

How would you use a fork in the UK?

It's like Bea said, the fork stays in the left hand hand in England.

You should never use it upside down in your right hand like a shovel.

Even in primary school, this was the rule.

Even with peas, you're supposed to use a sticky food like mashed potatoes to help stick your peas to the top of your fork.

There is literally no excuse for moving your fork to your right hand ever.

And it's really that stressful?

I never even noticed when I was in London last night.

Well, we don't expect Americans to know how to behave.

Thanks.

Sorry.

Anyway, now that I've shared my deepest, darkest fork anxieties, and maybe a little of my fork snobbery too, you'll be glad to hear that there's nothing straightforward about spoons either.

Let me introduce you to John Emery, the spoon fanatic.

And he is a remarkable historian of spoons.

He wrote this quite obscure book published in 1976 called European Spoons Before 1700.

And he was very unusual as a food historian in that he was equally interested in making spoons and therefore was very familiar with the ways in which different spoon shapes could enable you or disable you from eating certain foods.

And he was very aware that actually when we speak of a spoon, it's two completely different objects.

It could be a kind of cup for drinking things from or it could be a kind of shovel for ferrying foods to your mouth.

And he studied spoons and he found that in certain places such as medieval Scotland you would find these beautiful flat spoons which were clearly more of a shovel and more intended for eating things like porridge and on the other hand you would find these cup-shaped spoons I mean the main ones probably would be for eating things like broth the Romans had these ones called ligula which had a kind of deeper bowl than other spoons John Emery was very dissatisfied with the main type of spoon which took hold in 17th century and still holds to this day, which is called the triffid,

which was in his view a really unsatisfactory compromise between the cup and and the shovel.

You know, Cynthia, I'd never thought of this before, Bea said it, but it's true.

When I use an ordinary spoon to sip soup or shovel up some rice, it's fine, but it's not the perfect shape for either job.

It's a compromise.

And I'd never even considered the shape of a spoon before.

Whereas a spooner fanatic such as Emery would like there to be a spoon for every eating occasion and for it to be properly tailored to the function.

So things like in the past, the Georgian period of Britain, people were obsessed with mustard as a condiment so there'd be special miniaturized ladles devised for mustard or edwardians loved eating soft boiled eggs with soldiers of toast and they had beautiful mother-of-pearl eggspoons which do actually have a function aside from their beauty which is that the mother-of-pearl is less likely to get stained by the yolk.

And we've largely left this idea of specialised spoons behind, except that we all have teaspoons.

But I think in most kitchens, they're not really used as they would have been once at a refined English afternoon tea.

They're really just a very handy-sized spoon for measuring things.

So shape is very important in terms of eating utensils, but so is the material that they're made of.

So how do different metals affect the taste of our foods?

I think the first thing to be said is, I mean, now we think of wooden spoons as something that we cook with, and it's still one of the most beloved objects in most kitchens.

But historically, people ate with wood as well.

It's just that very, very few wooden eating spoons have survived because it's a much more transient material than metal.

And I think eating with wood would have really changed the experience of food in that it's so much less conductive.

And I think, I mean, one of the main things now that we still eat with wood is Raymond noodles.

And if you picture eating a piping hot broth and how much better it is to eat that with wood, which doesn't then make your mouth get burnt at the same time, than it would be with metal.

But one of the main problems with putting metal in your mouth before the 20th century was that there was no stainless steel.

So if you attempted to eat something like fish and put a squirt of delicious lemon on it, it wouldn't be so delicious because you'd get this horrible tang from the carbon steel as the acid reacted.

And then anything copper was potentially really dodgy and you get this I mean this is more to do with cookware but you get these this instruction in cookbooks saying, let your pans be frequently re-tinned.

Because if you didn't make sure that the inside of your copper pans is re-tinned, you were putting yourself at danger of copper poisoning.

Whereas stainless steel just makes life so much simpler.

I rank the invention of stainless steel and then widespread distribution, which only happens really after the Second World War, as one of the greatest additions to human happiness at the table.

Wow, that's a pretty strong statement.

One of the greatest additions to human happiness at the table.

But this is exactly what I talked to Zoe Laughlin about, which you'll hear about in a few minutes: the way that the materials actually taste when they're in our mouths.

But I have a quick question, Nikki.

What was the metal people were using before the invention of stainless steel?

Well, there were wooden spoons, of course, as Bea mentions, but before stainless steel, people used plain steel, which is iron with a tiny bit of added carbon.

It's strong and it can be sharpened, but when it comes into contact with anything acidic, like vinegar, lemon juice, even tomatoes, the iron reacts, the metal itself turns black, and it makes the food it touches taste totally disgusting.

Stainless steel has a little bit of chromium in it and that is a total game changer.

As with many of the great devices in our kitchens, it originally had military applications and people were experimenting in the very early decades of the 20th century with stainless steel for yachts and gun barrels.

But then people spotted that it was a way of finally putting shiny non-corrosive cutlery within the reach of the masses.

Because before then, if you wanted to have non-corrosive forks and knives, really the only option was silver.

And that was obviously an extreme minority who could afford it.

And silver also explains the phenomenon of fish knives.

I think now

people view fish knives as these rather ridiculous, snobbish objects.

I mean, who would be so fussy as to have a specially shaped knife for their fish?

There's certainly kind of butt of humour in Britain where is just seen as somebody that would make a fuss about fish knives would just be such a social climber.

Whereas, yes, you would have had to be very rich to own fish knives because they were made of silver, but there was actually, again, a function behind them.

The point was to distinguish in the drawer: these are the knives that you can eat with fish and lemon, and they're not going to taste strange.

And then here are these other knives that you might use for meat.

Okay, we've talked about forks, we've talked about spoons, the nice, simple image of both that I had in my head has been utterly scrambled.

But now, Cynthia, we're moving on to knives, and I should warn you, things are gonna get weird.

Really?

Weirder than eating ice cream with a fork?

Believe me, eating ice cream with a fork has nothing on this.

You make a fascinating argument for the way that the different shape of kitchen knives in, say, France and China ends up creating different cuisines.

But what I wanted to do was stick with cutlery and talk about how table knives change the shape of our faces.

Wait, I'm sorry, Nikki, but did you just say change the shape of our faces?

I warned you it was going to get weird.

This is really bizarre.

I was amazed when I came across the research of an American anthropologist very appropriately named called C.

Loring Brace.

And he's appropriately named in that his great intellectual obsession or one of them was teeth.

He got very interested in the problem of the human overbite.

It's a way of describing the structure of our jaws really and if you think of our teeth they don't fit together in an edge-to-edge bite as the teeth of apes would do but the top layer of teeth fits over the bottom layer like the lid on a box and Brace assumed when he first got interested in this in the 60s and 70s well this must be something that goes back you know tens of thousands of years it must have some kind of evolutionary cause or maybe it's linked with the birth of agriculture because human diet changed a great deal at that point.

But then he found to his surprise that actually the overbite only goes back around 200 to 250 years in the West.

And he tried to come up with various explanations and the only one that would fit was the adoption of the knife and fork at table.

That by cutting our food into small morsels and popping it into our mouths, rather than just eating with fingers and a knife and therefore clamping food between our teeth several times a day, that this actually changed the way that our teeth grew and therefore the structure of our jaws.

And as with any sort of speculative anthropology, it's a little bit far-fetched.

We can't ever know for sure.

There's never going to be proof.

But the clincher for me was

reading what Brace has to say about China.

So in China, they had a very different attitude to knives.

As you said, they had this one knife, the two, with which food was cut into very tiny morsels and then eaten with chopsticks.

And what Brace found was that when he was examining Chinese skulls, the overbite emerges 900 years earlier.

The reason being he assumes chopsticks.

And I just thought this was astonishing when I read this, because so often I think we think of something like a knife and fork as being a relatively trivial question to do with etiquette.

And this shows that actually these technologies can then have an impact back on the human body.

Yeah, it makes you wonder about: could we have orthodontic knives and forks so that you could sort of anticipate future and you know end up with perfect teeth?

Who knows?

that would be very good, if so.

Exactly, a blessing for all British people.

Yes, I could do that.

You know, we just have braces over here.

If only I had grown up in America, my teeth could be perfect too.

But seriously, it's astonishingly weird to think about redesigning cutlery to change the shape of our mouths.

I was shocked by that part of the interview.

It's strange to think about physical changes happening that quickly and dramatically.

But it's also wild to think about cutlery changing how our food tastes.

Right, Bea was talking about the importance of silver fish knives and how stainless steel was the greatest gift to the world because it didn't make acidic food taste funny.

And we wanted to learn more about the science behind that.

Fortunately, there are some really interesting people in London studying just that topic, and I happen to already have a trip planned to London.

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So welcome to the Institute Making.

I got to meet up with Zoe Laughlin.

She's the creative director at this cross-disciplinary research club, which is part of University College London.

And before we started talking about the science of spoons, she showed me around.

This is our materials library, so floor-to-ceiling, wonder stuff, and our little ladder, which you can slide along and climb up and handle and poke and prod and

bite and lick.

I'm ridiculously jealous.

Did you get to see the aerogel?

I did.

This is a piece of aerogel.

It's 99.8% air, so only 0.2 of it is the material, and the materials are kind of silicon foam.

It's basically a foam with nanoscale bubbles, pores, and it's almost as light as air.

It's developed by NASA to catch stardust.

They take it up into space,

wang it around outside in the atmosphere.

They chased comets with it, and little tiny flecks of comets that were flying up through the atmosphere stuck to the material.

It's like a light-as-air stardust catcher.

Supposedly, if you hold it on your hand, you can barely feel it's there.

Supposedly?

You mean you didn't get to feel it?

Nope, when they let visitors handle a piece in the past, it literally doubled in weight because it picked up oils and dead skin from their hands.

Ew, gross.

Yeah.

But the whole place is super cool.

Examples of all sorts of materials that are meant to encourage people to play with them, touch them, try them out, think of materials in our world.

There's also a space to make stuff in the back.

And anyway, Zoe, she runs the Institute and hosts other scientists and makers and plans big festivals.

And she does her own research into the sensoesthetic property of materials.

The what?

Right.

It's basically how our senses interact with materials, how they feel different or sound different, and why.

Here's me trying out two cubes exactly the same size and shape.

We made these four centimeter cubes.

If you want to pick this one up,

and then with the same hand.

Oh, wow.

This is a lot heavier.

Yeah.

One was aluminum and the other tungsten, both metals, pure elements, and they just differ in their atomic mass.

And then she showed me tuning forks, all the exact same size and shape again, but all these different metals have very different acoustic properties.

So this one is copper.

Quite low, not long duration.

And here's brass.

She also rang some bells for me.

Again, the only difference in the sound comes from the materials.

If I ring this, you'll hear the sound.

And then

we'll compare that to a brass tuning fork.

I mean, brass bell, sorry.

We'll compare that to a brass bell.

After we finished holding metals and listening to metals, I went upstairs with Zoe to have a quieter conversation about spoons.

I see.

She started by looking into how different metals feel and then how they sound and then she decided to taste them.

Exactly.

She's working her way through the senses and the science behind it.

But before we get into all of that, where, why, how, what's the science, I asked her how in the world she thought of doing such an experiment on cutlery.

I've always had favourites.

Cutlery.

My mum would definitely...

Like a favourite piece of cutlery or a favourite type of cutlery?

What do you mean?

Well, so when we were growing up, there was a a mishmash of cutlery in the fam you know, in the cutlery drawer.

And at meals, I would rearrange if the knife and fork that I liked using had been laid in someone else's plate, I'd rearrange it all so it was where I normally sat, or would go to great lengths to make sure that I used certain cutlery, you know, from the family drawer.

And everyone would think sort of slightly tease me about that and think I was just being fussy.

But I'd I'd feel really earnest and serious about no, I just don't like something about it.

And it could be the weight of the object, the

form of the edge in your mouth, you know, or the size of it.

All these things were important.

And I remember some of them I thought tasted weird as well.

And so I always was sort of hyper-aware of the cutlery I would use and

in certain places think, oh, I'm just not enjoying this meal because they've got terrible cutlery.

Like the most, and I just couldn't ever believe it.

Like you'd go to a restaurant and they would be serving this fantastic food, but the cutlery would be horrendous.

So in the back of my mind, I've always wanted to think about making the best cutlery you possibly could and the kind of quest to make the spooniest spoon.

And that, yeah, that was something that really meant something to me to try and conquer spoonness.

Well, and so, in this case, this is in conquering spoonness.

It seems like it's less about the shape, heft, all those things that might have you might have been picking up on as a kid, but actually, how these different materials taste.

So, essentially, it was the first, you've got to isolate something when you're conducting an experiment.

So, there's still a piece of work to be done, and I have done some of it around the idea of shape and form, and the measuring of mouth, and what's the interaction between that shape in your mouth and the weight of things.

And those pieces of work are being done.

But the first thing was to work out: is there an effect of the material on the experience of the taste of the food and also just the taste of the spoon?

So, to isolate taste first was the kind of a good first step, But then you realize it's not necessarily so straightforward.

You're dealing with something that's relatively subjective, actually, the experience of taste.

So the first sort of question was, is there any agreement first and foremost?

Cynthia, I feel like we should introduce Zoe to John Emery.

Who knew there were so many spoon fanatics out there?

But seriously, I have a question.

Had scientists really never looked into the taste of metal before?

I asked her that when we were in the materials library.

She told me something interesting, that when researchers have studied taste, they basically had people swish metal salts around in their mouths.

That's not remotely how we experience cutlery, it's not how we interact with metal in the real world.

So, they designed a set of spoons that are all the exact same size and shape and weight, and they differ only in the material that's plated on them.

None of them are toxic, of course, and they couldn't use wood because they couldn't get the same shape and weight if they changed wood and they couldn't sterilize it as easily.

So, we've got gold, copper, stainless steel, chrome, silver, tin, and zinc.

They took these seven spoons and conducted a blind taste test.

So, the first rounds of experiments, we essentially blindfolded the subjects, and they were handed spoons without any food on them, just the spoon, and they would place it in their mouth and essentially suck on it and rate

their perception of its taste according to some words that we gave them.

So, for example, we'd hand them a spoon, and we'd say, Okay, rate this from one to seven on how salty it tastes.

And they'd be like, Oh, it doesn't taste at all salty, zero.

Or, oh, it's really salty, six.

They asked about sweet, salty, bitter, strong, metallic.

And what was great is we found that there were agreements.

So, lots of people agreed that zinc was unpleasant, and copper was bitter, and that gold was a little bit sweet.

So, it that was our first finding, which was really nice to see.

It wasn't just randomly, some people think some things, some people think others, or that nobody thinks anything.

Everyone thinks they don't taste of anything.

There were agreed points of taste.

Wow, so different metals do have different tastes.

But why?

Why on earth does copper taste bitter?

Well, one main reason is how reactive it is.

That's what the group did next.

They paired the subjective answers up to actual physical properties of the metals.

So more reactive metals lose electrons more easily.

They matched how reactive the metals were with the different tastes people reported.

And so yes, copper is quite reactive.

So their hypothesis is that it reacts with the saliva, and that's what makes copper taste strong and bitter.

The way Zoe described it in the scientific paper she wrote about the experiment is that when you put a reactive metal like zinc or copper in your mouth, it almost forms a battery with your saliva.

A battery?

Like putting a AA duracel in your mouth?

Well, not quite as drastic, but the same idea.

It's all those metal ions rushing around that makes it taste so unpleasant and bitter and metallic.

And less reactive metals like gold and chrome are not exchanging electrons like crazy with your saliva, and so they taste neutral, or in the case of gold, almost sweet.

There are, of course, other aspects that we're tasting, but that's the first most important, how reactive it is.

Okay, so I'm still processing that image of a spoon forming a battery in my mouth, but here's the thing.

I don't know about you, Cynthia, but I don't spend a lot of time sucking on empty spoons at mealtimes.

So what I really want to know is, how does the taste of the metal spoon affect the taste of the food I'm using it to eat?

That's what Zoe and her colleagues tested next.

They took creams and added sugar, lemon juice, and salt, so the creams were sweet, acidic, salty, and then plain cream.

The participants dipped the spoons and ate the creams off, and they evaluated how the tastes of the creams changed with the different spoons.

What we found was that, for example, something like sweetness, when eaten off a bitter material, so the copper and the zinc, which on their own people perceived as bitter, once they ate the cream off it, actually the cream was perceived to be sweeter than it really was.

perhaps because of that contrast to being eaten off something bitter.

So actually you could see a scenario where you would design containers, you know, the lip of your drinking can, or you'd use copper and zinc in order to then make things taste sweeter than they really were.

And then you could lower sugar content in things because of that material contrast.

All of this is interesting science, but here's where it gets really fun.

They threw a dinner party.

Zoe worked with a top chef in London at an Indian restaurant to develop a series of dishes.

She invited researchers and chefs and food writers.

We had this fantastic cod dish that was a blackened cod, like backened baked cod, which had a real sweetness on it.

And then, once you started to have it with the bitter spoons, the sweetness of the cod really resonated.

And we had a tomato dish, which was in there to be quite provocative.

It was very spicy and a little bit acidic from the tomatoes.

And that was truly foul when eaten with the copper because it strips the acid strips that copper away and is incredibly strong tasting.

But then we had a lamb dish, a lamb and pistachio dish, which was amazing with the tin.

And that was a total surprise.

Like,

we still don't know why, but we found the tin really added something to the dish and rounded it off and made it deeper,

richer, kind of like a purring engine.

It was incredible.

And I don't know why.

I don't know why.

But everyone around the table was like, have you tried the tin?

I love it.

A spoon tasting party.

Like a wine or beer pairing event, but for science and design nerds.

We found people doing live experiments amongst each other.

And when we got round to things like the dessert where we had this mango sorbet, again, different people suddenly said, Oh, actually, I prefer it with the silver.

And other people, no, no, it has to be gold.

But for me, yeah, it's gold all the way.

Why was it gold all the way with the mango sorbet?

Well, for me, then the non-taste of the gold spoon

is just sort of divine.

And it's got this ever such a slight sweetness to it, or maybe it's just it reveals your own mouth chemistry as slightly sweet, but there's something about it that's just incredibly delicious and makes everything you eat feel more delicious because you're, you know, you've never tasted mango sorbet until you've eaten it off a gold spoon.

Because every other time you've eaten it, you've eaten it off a material that somehow contaminated it.

And only now are you truly tasting mango sorbet.

That's what it was like.

That was that was the moment when I thought,

I can't believe I'm ever going to eat off anything ever again other than gold.

But sadly, I do.

I'm not sure we can all afford to eat off nothing but gold.

No.

No.

So I want to turn this a little bit to science at home.

So if somebody wanted to try out this, you know, what do things taste like?

How does it interact with food?

What would you recommend people could do at home?

I would recommend going,

bringing home with you, you can find now wooden forks and spoons, you can easily get hold of some plastic cutlery, and you've got metal cutlery at home.

So there, you've got three radically different materials that you can then start to try out at home.

But then, equally, you can go and quite easily get hold of some silver cutlery.

Maybe your family have got some as a sort of heirloom set, or you've found some in an

antique shop.

But again, try silver with different things because actually, I think it's not very nice.

This idea that having silver cutlery is great, and that it's sort of got this cultural cachet to it, and it looks really nice, but actually, I think it tastes pretty disgusting.

So, again, if you want to

try having a meal with both silver and stainless steel alongside each other and see what you think for yourself, because especially if you're eating something slightly acidic, like a tomato-based dish,

the silver, you can really start to taste it.

And in puddings as well, I think you can really taste it very strongly if you start to have ice creams and things with silver.

I should clarify for American listeners that here puddings mean all sorts of desserts.

Obviously.

Obviously to you.

So I had thought that silver was fairly inert, so it's not.

No.

And you'll see it.

You'll see it react.

You know, you have to clean it and

even if you just touch silver and get your

sweaty hands all over it and then come back to it the next day, it'll start to tarnish where you touched it.

And that

layer will have a...

will create a certain taste.

That's fascinating.

Maybe that's why I never want to use the heirloom stuff that I have from my family.

Mom, you didn't hear that.

Nikki, I want to say to my mom that I do occasionally break it out on major holidays.

You know, my aunt was shocked that my husband and I didn't want silver cutlery as a wedding gift.

In fact, she's still talking about it more than a decade later.

But having heard from Bea and Zoe, I feel a lot better about choosing stainless steel.

I only wish I'd had the balls to go for gold.

So is this something, I mean, would you, or do you think, you know, doctors in the future, would you recommend certain spoons for certain types of food?

Or could you see a day when someone who's trying to cut down on either salt or sugar might use a certain type of cutlery?

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't want to make any medical recommendations here or now.

I just mean just like taste recommendations.

Well, and you'd want to do more work, but you could definitely see a scenario where you thought, oh, I want to reduce my sugar intake.

So I'll do that.

And I'll pair it with using copper spoons because then I won't notice that it's less sweet.

This kind of thing.

Okay, Cynthia, here's the plan.

We combine this with B's orthodontic cutlery, and we come out with a line of cutlery that fixes your teeth and helps you lose weight.

You know, just in case we don't make our fortunes in podcasting.

You joke, but Zoe actually is planning a box gift set of tasting spoons, all the different metals with pairing suggestions, and tasting notes.

It's going to be the next dinner party craze.

And now you know what I want for Christmas.

I'll keep that in mind.

So did you actually get to taste the spoons?

I did.

I asked her at the end if I could have a taste of her spoons.

She went to wash them off.

I should have brought yogurt or something with me.

I didn't even think about it, so I just tasted them plain.

And were they really that distinct?

Yeah, it was weird at first, sucking on spoons, but here, listen, here are a few of my tastes.

Having a little suck on this one, that's the stainless steel.

I mean, it does have a taste, but it sort of just tastes like what I think cutlery tastes like.

But it definitely

has a taste to it.

Now try this one.

Okay.

Oh, wow.

So I know that this is copper, and I know from talking to you that it's supposed to have a strong taste, but has a really strong metallic taste to it.

Yeah.

I would say rather unpleasant.

And do you get any bitterness from it?

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah.

Have a spoon of water.

Yeah, I'm cleaning my mouth out of the copper taste.

Yeah, that was more work.

Maybe you just want to end a little bit more gold.

Doesn't everybody want to end with a gold spoon?

That is pretty amazing.

Wow.

You know, before doing this interview, I have to admit, I spent a great deal of time thinking about what I've eaten or what I'm going to eat, but I've never thought about what I use to put it in my mouth.

Me either before I read Bea's book.

And now, I just want to go out and buy gold spoons.

I think you may need to do something other than podcasting.

Dear listeners, The Fund for Gold Spoons.

The Gold Spoon Fund.

I should say, after you got back from London and told me about the spoon taste test, it's not that I didn't believe you, but I needed to try for myself.

Fortunately, I had a trip planned to visit my friend Sarah.

I'm Sarah Rich.

I'm a writer living in Oakland, California, and I am the proprietor of a set of gold flatware.

Wait, why in the world does your friend Sarah have gold flatware?

My friend Sarah, she writes about design, and she saw some online and fell in love with how it looks.

It's not solid gold, obviously.

I mean, like I said, she's a writer.

It's just gold-plated.

Still.

Anyway, we hung out one afternoon and we sampled some Greek yogurt and some mango sorbet on her gold spoons.

To make it scientific, we also used a silver Tiffany spoon with a Winnie the Pooh that her baby was given when he was born, and a normal Target stainless steel spoon.

Wow, I've never, um, I've never done this before.

This is interesting.

I can't tell if it's all in my head.

I feel like I'm getting creamier off the silver and much sweeter from the gold.

That is ridiculous.

The gold is so much better.

It is like

because Greek yogurt, like fat-free fat-free Greek yogurt is kind of sour, a little.

Right, it lacks body, but then off the gold spoon, it's kind of better.

It's sweet and light and a little bit creamier.

Yeah, I totally agree.

I feel like I never would have thought about it, but...

I think I'm getting more pleasure out of my food now.

So there you have it.

I know.

We should all go out and buy gold cutlery.

No, I mean, there you have it.

Our first ever episode of Gastropod.

Oh, yes.

We actually did it.

We did, and we hope you've had as as much fun listening as we did putting it together.

These topics are fun and fascinating, and you are going to want to keep listening forever.

Speaking of forever, or at least the next episode, our next full podcast episode will come out next month.

It's a great interview we did together with chef and author Dan Barber.

This squash blows your mind.

I mean,

it's just in a whole nother universe.

I was so shocked at 898 squash.

I roasted it and served it without salt, without pepper, without butter.

I wanted people just to taste this.

It's like

you just stand there in silence.

You guys can't believe it.

And even before that, in two weeks, we'll put out a shorter podcast chatting about the latest news in food science and history.

You won't want to miss it.

I know I don't.

You can't.

I'm not doing this alone.

I'll be joining you from Boston.

If you want to make sure you never miss an episode, go to gastropod.com and sign up for our newsletter.

It'll just be a quick email to let you know when a new episode is available.

You can also go to iTunes and subscribe there.

And be in touch.

You can find us on Twitter at GastroPodcast and email us at contact at gastropod.com.

We'd love to hear what you think and what you want to hear about next.

In the meantime, thank you for listening.

And thank you to Bea Wilson, author of Consider the Fork, Zoe Laughlin at the Institute of Making, Sarah Rich, design writer and lucky owner of Gold Cutlery, and all the people who helped us get started.

Especially legendary naming guru Dan Polsby, who suggested we call ourselves Gastropod, and the finest real estate broker in the state of Oregon, Edwin F.

Sinclair, who actually gave us Gastropod.com to be our URL.

We also need to thank John Cors, who gave us an engineering assist.

Kathy Barr, Designer Extraordinaire, created our gorgeous branding.

Matt Glazer with Jump or Dive jumped in and coded our website and gave us vast amounts of useful advice.

And our spoon rhythms this episode were performed by Vash, a freelance folk percussionist in Oregon.

Thank you.

Till next time.

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