Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Flavor Trip Your Way to Health
I've long thought that the key to being a good cook is the ability to make terrible tasting but healthy food palatable. I mean, anyone can make a bacon cheeseburger taste good, but it takes some real skill to make broccoli remotely enjoyable. But what if we could just trick our senses into finding traditionally unpleasant food tasty?
It turns out that several projects are aimed at doing just that. Take, for example, a Japanese research project known as the meta cookie, which uses augmented reality to trick an individual into experiencing different tastes from a plain cookie:
The Meta Cookie system takes advantage of a principle that any good chef knows: We taste with our eyes and nose before any food enters our mouth. By replicating the image of a cookie of a particular flavor through a virtual reality headset, and then reproducing the scent of that cookie using special perfume tubes aimed at the nose, the Meta Cookie can trick the user’s brain into thinking that a flavorless sugar cookie is actually a chocolate or almond cookie.
To transform the cookie, the Meta Cookie uses augmented reality technology. A lab technician brands each cookie with an L-shaped marker that a computer can track. Looking through the virtual reality screens, the user sees a picture of a flavored cookie laid over the sight of the marker on the neutral sugar cookie. At the same time, the machine begins pumping the appropriate scent directly into the user’s nose through some tubes.
I doubt the meta cookie will ever move much beyond art concept, since cookies are already delicious and the device seems pretty unwieldy. But another flavor shifting effort, namely harnessing the chemical properties of a West African fruit that turns sour things sweet, called, amusingly, Miracle Fruit, has a lot more promise. Tablets with a synthetic version of Miracle Fruit's main protein, miraculin, are actually for purchase. I tried taking one of the tablets the other day, and sure enough, it made biting into a lemon taste like drinking lemonade. The experience is often called flavor tripping, because eating sweet lemon pieces and so on just feels a bit surreal.
Beyond the novelty, though, is a more serious attempt to trick taste buds by engineering miraculin into fruits and vegetables. Thus far, two separate Japanese research groups have synthesized lettuce and tomatoes that have the same effect of turning sour foods sweet as the naturally occurring Miracle fruit.
A write-up in Science News points to the potential ways that miraculin could transform our relationship to healthy food:
Japanese dieters have begun to embrace miraculin as a weight-loss aid. They can now snack on low-calorie sour foods that won’t raise a pucker — at least as long as they first eat a few tropical berries to fool the palate....
[C]an you imagine 'sweetening' iced tea with lemons, guzzling down pomegranate or cranberry juice to which no sugar has been added, or making lemonade without adding a sweetener? I think I'm starting to see the appeal...
Of course, there are reasons to be skeptical--several different tastes, not just sweetness, make food taste good. Food fills all sorts of emotional needs and social roles beyond taste. And even our brains, it seems, are against us. Calories, independent of taste, activate the brain's reward systems.
In other words, taste modification is not a panacea. But I'd guess that in the next decade, food scientists will be exploring an increasingly wide array of strategies to, like a good home cook, hide the taste of healthy but unpleasant foods.