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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"
There goes my experience with making good coffee... Now instead of being careful and buying good coffee, grinding it themselves, brewing it properly, everyone will buy folgers and percolate it and sprinkle some pixie dust stuff into it and it will taste good. Assholes...
/usr/games/fortune
Hopefully they'll be able to use these compounds in medicines and other neccesary, but distasteful products...
Or they'll release it in paste form and it'll become a sex toy. Ah, America!
We don't need some mad scientist in jersey to cook up funky chemicals that make bitter into sweet, mother nature already did it a long time ago with the miracle berry.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
is made from people!
We'll call it soylet green!
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According to the article, the alterations in perception are very temporary. So while you're drinking that black, bitter coffee it probably tastes great, but in about five minutes you'll get that aftertaste and want to brush your teeth.
then I could...
;)
Sorry, thats just wrong.
- gtaluvit (prnc. GOT-tuh-LUV-it)
Some of us already LIKE black coffee...don't go messing it up for us you insensitive clod! I like my coffee like I like my women...bitter.
How is this different from Starbucks?
The ______ Agenda
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?
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...
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
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...
Shooting heroin turns any unpleasant experience into a pleasant one not just tasting crappy coffee into tasting smooth coffee.
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!
- 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
You did read your EULA, didn't you?
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
Turns out that this company already sells to the fast food chains:
Beef flavor for hamburgers: The beef is so processed by the time that the company is done with it, they need to 'add flavor back in'. Guess how?
Fries flavor: Yes, you have sale and sugar, but did you know that McD's also adds 'beef flavor' to the fries? There was a lawsuit about this a while back when they were using 'real beaf', unbeknowst to many Hindi customers. Gues what they use now?
There was a lot more 'stuff' and discussion about how this food is processed before it ends up in your burger bun. Though I haven't bought the book (yet), I haven't been back to a McDonalds since, either...
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.
I've always wondered if it would be possible to make some sort of mint or pill, etc, that would highten senses in the taste buds to make kissing better... ...not that I have a girlfreind or anything.
WHAT THE HELL is the POINT of a decaf skim-milk latte?
Some comic said he went to Baskin-Robbins and had a non-fat, sugar-free frozen yogurt and thought, "I just bought a bowl of Cold."
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.
a reduced fat oil
Is that anything like "low moisture water"?
Will I retire or break 10K?
The best thing that could happen would be to mask tingling in the tongue. Tongues can tell bitterness, sweetness, etc. apart, and the texture of the food, but that's all.
(OT, but BTW: I remember reading some time back that those popular "taste" regions on a tongue aren't really accurate since your whole tongue can taste the difference between bitterness, sweetness, etc.)
SMELL is the key to taste.
slash. posts suggest that spoiled milk could 'taste' delicious, but your tongue is useless at taste unless it is genetically super-calibrated. The way you can 'TASTE' something is with the SMELL before and while the food is in your mouth. If you close your nose and drink spoiled milk with the texture and flow of normal milk, you won't know you did until you get stomach poisoning.
Yes, although bitterness is associated with toxicity (stuff-you-shouldn'-put-in-your-mouth) and it does apply to most everything,, smell is what really tells you if something is bad or not. You won't be able to tell the taste mandarine and an orange, and maybe even an apple and orange (except for texture obviously) if your nose and eyes are closed.
You might have learned this on Bill Nye the Science Guy or by reading a book, or the internet. Or some of us participated in all three.
Follow this lab:
Here's a link to a 4th grade lab assignment on this.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
I can already see a small bottle of this being sold in a package along with a 12-pack of viagra.
You should read the amazing "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser. One of the chapters talks about the "taste" industry ('flavorists') and all these companies setup along the NJ turnpike. They make a liquid chemical agent that smells exactly like a flame-broiled burger. The reason: the food is so shitty that the taste disappears when it is processed. It has to be added 'back'...
Same idea coming to a Starbucks near you? Great world we live in!
there's no place like ~
a lot of european coffee is cafe crema, not percolated or automatic drip like here in the US.
the difference is that the hot water is forced through the grounds under high pressure which helps
to get the crema foam and tasty organic compounds without getting the last part of the bitter dregs.
the resulting coffee is strong but smooth and not bitter, dark with a lighter colored foam on top even
before you add cream or milk
www.capresso.com is one web site that sells machines that make cafe crema.
The automatic machines would be great in a office if people can clean up after themselves
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!
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
... 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...
Guy: Mrmff. Mrffmfsf. (lifts head) I know, but I thought I'd give it a try because I love you and stuff.
Girl: You're the best, I'm going to treat you to a steak dinner tonight. (moans, titls head back, closes eyes)
Guy: (Sprinkles more powder).
They fool their customer into thinking that their milky double latte is coffee.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
No. Do NOT boil coffee. The ideal temperature for brewing coffee is just short of boiling, like 98C or so. If you could keep it at exactly that temperature, that would be best. But, if you do not posess the means to keep water at exactly 98C, simply boil the water, let it sit for like 15-30 seconds, and mix in the grounds.
If you are going to add the grounds directly to the water, it is best to grind them fairly coarse, so you will be able to filter them well, and control the brewing better. The finer the grind, the more sensitive it is to the time it is brewed for. Espresso can be finely ground because it is only being brewed for a few seconds. If you underbrew the coffee, by grinding TOO coarse, water too cold, or not brewing long enough, the coffee will be weak and watery. If you overbrew the coffee, by grinding too fine, water too hot, or brewing too long, it will be bitter. You have to experiment to find the ideal time. Also, if the water is too hot, it will cook the coffee, and ruin the flavour.
BTW, auto drip isn't that bad if you know what you are doing. Percolation is BY FAR the worst method. Auto drip is qute consistent, and easy. If you do it right you can get great coffee. Its not the best method, but it is OK. Auto drip makers with a hot plate should be avoided. If the coffee remains on the hot plate, it will get bitter very quickly. The best ones have a thermal carafe, which keeps the coffee hot by insulation. They work quite well.
BY FAR the best thing you can do for coffee is to buy good beans, and grind them yourself. Get a burr grinder, which has two thingies that look like the balls from those IBM ball typewriter thingies, rather than one that has the little spinning blade. It will grind the coffee much more evenly, and not heat it up as much.
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Yeah, fresh rosted beans are VERY important, and never get ground. Grind it yourself, preferably in a burr type grinder (which has little thingies in it like the balls in the old IBM type-ball typewriters) rather than one that has a little blade that spins.
Since roasted beans give off a lot of carbon dioxide, you want to wait 24 hours after they are roasted before grinding and brewing them. If you don't, the coffee will taste odd. However, make sure you use up all the coffee within a week. After a week it starts getting really stale.
Don't freeze coffee. A lot of people do, but there is no reason to. Coffee that has sat on a counter for two weeks is better than coffee that has been in the freezer for a day. When you take the coffee out, condensation forms, and it gets nasty. Don't freeze it, buy less of it.
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