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Tampering with Taste Buds for Better Coffee?
An anonymous reader writes "A Globe and Mail article states that scientists are busy working on making everything taste great: " In a small office just west of the New Jersey Turnpike, researchers are taking the human taste bud into a brave new world.
Here, it is not cream or milk that the employees of Linguagen Corp. add to their morning java, but a dash of a biological compound that fools their brain into thinking that black, bitter coffee is as smooth as a milky double latte"
...a biological compound that fools their brain into thinking that black, bitter coffee is as smooth as a milky double latte
Can I really be the only human left on earth who belives coffee should be black and bitter? If you want a drink that tastes like warm milk, I'd suggest a nice cup of warm milk, or perhaps some hot chocolate. Coffee is meant to be alarmingly black and strong.
Sailing over the event horizon
Often listed on labels as "natural flavors", MSG is found in seaweeds, and it makes things taste much better. Unfortunately, too much MSG can backfire - it makes things taste great, but for many hours afterward, I get extreme heartburn :(
As many prepared foods use "natural flavors", it makes shopping more than a bit of a chore, in that I need to read *all* that tiny print of "ingredients", on everything I buy. Grrrr. And all this stems from a childhood spent eating cheap food flavored with Accent, which is mostly MSG.
Lemon curry?
A large part of the experience of having a cup of really good coffee, is the smell, the deducing aroma that fills you with an eager anticipation of the magnificent black gold that is about to wash down your throat (oh my god, someone gimme a coffee right NOW! :). Even coffee haters like the smell of good coffee. Serving icky bitter coffee that fools the brain into thinking it tastes good, won't change the sentiment of "something's wrong here".
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
From the article:
Mr. Jacobson said he recognized the obvious need to alter the flavour of drugs, "particularly life-saving drugs, where taste is an impediment to taking them." But he also raised concerns that these new compounds could allow food manufacturers to use "cheaper, crappy ingredients."
"I once asked a pasta sauce maker how come you sometimes see corn syrup on the list of ingredients in a tomato sauce and he told me it was to mask the taste of cheaper tomatoes," said Mr. Jacobson. "We could see more things like that."
I just went for a checkup with my doctor. One of the things we discussed was nutrition. He spoke of the nutritional value of foods being degraded, what with over farming, mass production of food, corporate farming, and the like. I know this is vulgar, but this is another way to make shit taste like ambrosia. Ever think there is a reason why things taste bad?
I probably sound alarmist or anti-technology. I'm not. At the same time, I'm not one to blindly say technology or so called progress is a good thing. This seems to me to be another way to increase profit and reduce costs. Good for business, not so good for consumers. But we're sheep. What do consumers know?
I guess I'm bitter. Maybe I can use some.
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
And much of what has been passed off in the past as a substitute for 'meat' has been pretty unpalatable. Even food that was not passed off that way sometimes isn't very great, tofu for instance.
But one good use for this taste altering method might be to make a veggie burger actually taste decent. Add that to getting the texture right, and some of these products might actually take off.
Tofu? Well, maybe never...It doesn't even look good!
The difference is that the examples you listed all have serious drawbacks. This stuff, on the other hand, is supposed to improve whatever it's added to without huge negatives.
Think of it more along the lines of perfume/cologne used to mask bodily odors, paint applied to things like cars and houses, or simply salt, pepper, and spices added to food. It already happens in a lot in the current world -- cheating our biological sensors and filters -- and there's not always THAT much harm in it.
I personally don't want anyone messing with my coffee's flavour. I like it black.
If others don't like the taste, why are they drinking it?? It can't be for the caffine content, since then they could drink tea or Coke, or hell, even take caffine pills.
People don't just crave tastes, whether they know it or not they want fats and carbohydrates and the various chemicals in their foods.
I don't believe that all the artificial sweetners and diet drinks have solved people wanting sugar. They may well help someone who is consciously applying will power, but it isn't just a matter of "I had something sweet so I'm satisfied".
When someone wants a bacon sandwich they'll doubtless associate that with the taste of the sandwich because that's one of the most obvious conscious effects of eating the sandwich. But if you produce a fat free substitute that taste identical I thikn they'll still feel empty, or missing something, and they'll still remedy that by going and getting some food that IS fatty, whether they rationalise that by taste or anything else.
...then it's been over-extracted. Learn how to brew coffee.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
The bitterness of coffee is what makes it attractive: many cultures have similarly bitter things to drink and chew, and the pleasure comes from the long-lasting sweet taste you get a few minutes afterwards.
If you're ever chewed kola nuts, you will know what I mean. Intensely bitter when you bite off a piece, but over minutes, you get a sweet reaction that is much smoother than a "real" sweet substance.
It seems to be part of the addictive process: think of bitter chocolate and those tiny espressos.
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I recall a scene from a (bad) movie called Brazil where diners in a restaraunt were served blocks of blue stuff with a picture of what it was suppose to be.
If the above could be made a reality, we could eat the exact same thing, day after day, and pick what we wated to taste, while eating foods that were perfectly designed for proper digestion, glucose controll (for diabetics) or any number of things. Imagine no more worry about gaining weight because of what you ate? 3 meals a day of Dutch Cholcolate Cake? No problem!
The only concern I have about this, is the following:
Frankly, I'd prefer to have children's medication NOT taste good enough for them to desire it. It's tempting enough for a child got get into sweets without throwing medications into the mix.
When VCR's are outlawed, only outlaws will have VCR's.
This brings to mind the Terry Pratchett book Good Omens, where Famine, one of the four riders of the Apocalypse (although there used to be five, I thought Kaos was awesome ;) creates fast food that tastes great, but is essentially dust. This could be very dangerous. People could feel they are eating something really good, when in fact, they are starving their bodies. Some people may think this a good thing, but what would happen if people didn't stop? IMO people should learn to just control themselves, and give up those temptations (ice cream, crap food etc.) and just learn. What kind of world will it be, where we don't know how to control our every impulse? I think it would be very sad. We would become like animals. I agree with many other posters. We should be concentrating on things that really matter, like cures for AIDS and ways to curb global pollution.
Won't this be a tad bit dangerous? As the article points out, bitterness helps us avoid noxious foods. Once this additive gets put everywhere, won't there be people getting sick because they happily ingested a whole gallon of spoiled milk or gulped down moldy pizza?
Taste buds keep us from eating poison! Why would you want to change your taste so that poison would taste good? Sounds like a bad idea to me. Rancid meat tastes bad to us because it is bad for us, but at least now we can make it taste great!
... EEEEEEeeeeekkkkk!!!! Don't be messing with my taste buds!!!! It's taken millions of years of evolution to make butter and ice cream and salt and pig meat and ..... to be perceived as Tasty. Don't take that away from us!
.nosig
Hate to call this Orwellian, but it seems so to me.
Winston and Julia had a hard time finding genuine food (except from the proles). I remember them drinking "Victory Coffee". The same applied to cigarettes and chocolate.
This isn't so absurd. While it's not so hard to find a GOOD cup of coffee (yet), most people don't care. They'll drink Tim Hortons (Canadian. Think Dunkin' Donuts) coffee and complain that "Gourmet Coffee" is overpriced. I had the hardest time convincing my mother that bigass cans of Maxwell House don't TASTE the same as fresh-ground Kenya AA (or AAA or Green Mountain blends, etc) -- UNTIL she tried it; now she grinds her own, and doesn't store it in the freezer.
The same is true of chocolate. Think about GOOD chocolate (high-quality). Now, think about any drug-store Easter chocolate. The latter is more like brown WAX with very little taste (and when it "melts" it turns into some sort of foamy paste).
And speaking of foam, the same comparison can be made to generic vs. "natural" ice cream. I regularly pay 2-3 times the price of "cheap" ice cream, for the good stuff. You know, the kind actually MADE from cream, and not milk plus a dozen gums to make it gellied enough to hold shape, then whipped full of air.
GOOD beer (premium, expensive, micro-brewed, FRESH) vs. Budweiser, or Coors, or Molson, or Labatt is another example.
Sorry, now I'm ranting. My point was: LEAVE MY COFFEE ALONE. I like the stuff the way it is. And if you MUST meddle with my favourite bean beverage, I can only hope that it doesn't further affect the price of high-quality coffee.
I sound elitist.. and, I guess, in this case, I am.
S
The sun ate away the night, soaking the sky red. I looked out the pinked window of my kitchen, through a veil of coffee vapor. It was my first cup of the day. I wasn't drinking it, yet. I was holding it, feeling the warmth, cuddling it, like a lover. ...
Caffeine is my addiction, my one true love, but she is a mean, rotten bitch. You love her, but she doesn't love you back. If you try to leave her she makes your head pound. If you indulge, too much, in her warm, black bitterness, she will tear your stomach and nerves apart. Once you've had her, though, you just can't imagine life without her. You may live for coffee, but remember-- Coffee. Doesn't. Care.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
Actually, if you do a little research on MSG on the net, you'll find a fairly hot debate going on as to the side-effects/dangers of MSG.
. ht m?site=http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/2455/ba k%2Dmsg.html
The official FDA stance on it is pretty well summed up here:
http://chinesefood.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite
Basically, they seem to say it's safe for the general public, but do acknowledge that there seem to be some individuals who are sensitive to it, and get such side-effects as headaches from it.
Personally, it doesn't really concern me. If you discover you're senstive to MSG and it upsets your stomach, gives you a headache, or whatnot - then obviously avoid it. I've never had any problem eating foods that contained it though - and to me, it's no worse than the hundreds of other modifications made to commercial foods. (Coloring and dyes to enhance the look of a food, for example.)
I frickin' LIKE black, plain, bitter-tasting coffee! Of course, I also do it for the caffeine, but I like the way coffee tastes. For me in the morning, the first taste of coffee is like the first taste of an ice-cold beer after working in the yard all day!
Always been pretty simple to me, if ya don't like the way shit tastes, don't drink it. I always get a laugh at the losers at Barnes and Noble drinking they're super-duper triple expresso with everything but the kitchen sink in it.
IMHO, plain old black coffee, strong as heck, frickin' rulez!
Spread the RC luvin'
Just FYI: MSG was discovered in Japan, and the Japanese use trace amounts of it to enhance the taste of certain dishes. In China, you won't find MSG at all; it's only used in Chinese restaurants outside of China in an attempt to maximize profits while minimizing cost of ingredients.
I've read that in North America, we consume insane quantities of food additives that are not consumed or are consumed in very conservative levels elsewhere.