Slashdot Mirror
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"
Taste is very important in determining what is safe to consume. When milk turns sour, it has gone bad and generally is no longer safe to drink. The first bad-tasting drop results in the milk being spit out, and disaster prevented.
Imagine if that milk has been redesigned to taste fresh long after it has already gone bad...
Okay, so we're talking about AMP which although as the article says is a 'natural' chemical, is also one of the very basic molecules used by every cell in our bodies as part of the mechanism for determining their metabolic needs and monitoring what's going on within them. This gives me a case of the screaming heebie jeebies.
I somehow can't help thinking of Monosodium Glutamate here... Flavour enhancers don't have what you might call a *glowing* record of healthiness...
What this compound is doing is bitter-blocking, and I don't know about you, but there are bitter flavours I actually find rather enjoyable - strong black coffee being one of these... But an awful lot of foods contain bitterness to a greater or lesser degree, and it makes up one of the five tastes we're actually able to percieve - the effect of using this stuff widely would have to be tantamount to knocking out the blue channel in our eyes! It's going to do all kinds of really bizzare things to how things taste, not all of them good...
Besides which, the article mentions that the side effect is to induce a flavour of raw fish... I dunno, I'll take my coffee with a kick please, not with a side order of sushi...
- Gasoline that makes your dashboard always report that you have a full tank - even if you're about to run out of gas
- A helmet that convinces defendants to confess - even if they're innocent
- A panacea that stops children from ever crying - even if they've just been hit by a car
- An instrument that tells pilots they're flying at a safe altitude - even if they're about to hit the ground
Really, what's the point in celebrating creating something whose only purpose is to make our well-evolved biological sensors and filters fail.Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
... particularly for those with problems losing weight. If you haven't noticed, foods with sugars (carbohydrates) and fats taste better than those that don't, pretty much as a result of eons of natural selection*. Tricking the taste buds into thinking that indigestible/low-calorie food is more appetizing than it is would be a good thing for this application imho.
Imagine if you could trick your tongue/tastebuds into thinking celery tastes like chocolate.. Particularly helpful if you could introduce textured cellulose food products with vitamin enrichment that could be used in snack foods.
Now if someone can only make treadmill grinding (and repetitive exercise in general) LESS BORING..
*whenever a political vegetarian bugs me (at a party for example), my reply: "If we weren't supposed to eat animals, they wouldn't be so delicious!".. It works as both a smartass remark and a statement on the evolution of human nutrition biology...