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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"
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!
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.
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...
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
- 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
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...
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.
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.
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...