A =/= B -> Taste & Discernment

00:00:03 okay I'm edner sessan director of the center today's program is uh part of a series of five round tables this is the second one on taste the next one on April 13th would be on smell uh Jerry Hart the co- the associate director of the center will present the participants and then take it from there thank you welcome everyone I'm very pleased to be here on this rainy New York City day

00:00:34 I want to give a quick introduction uh to our P wonderful panel today and if you don't mind if you'd raise your hand when I mention your name Paul bresin is Professor of nutritional Sciences in the school of environmental and biological sciences at ruter the State University of New Jersey and is a member of the monell chemical census Center where he is co-director of the monell science apprenticeship program his research interest address multiple disciplines including sensation and perception

00:01:04 chemical senses psychophysics and genetics ingestive Behavior salt appetite regulatory physiology and molecular and evolutionary biology of taste and smell Dr bresin was trained as an experimental psychologist and behavioral neuroscientist he is currently serving as the president of the association for chemo reception sciences and has a strong interest in increasing diversity in The Sciences Gerald levenson is distinguished University

00:01:35 professor of philosophy of philosophy ameritus at the University of Maryland and past president of the American Society for Aesthetics he is the author of five collections of essays music art and metaphysics the pleasure of Aesthetics contemplating art music musical concerns and aesthetic Pursuits plus a monograph music in the moment levenson is also editor of Aesthetics and ethics the Journal of Cambridge um the

00:02:08 Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics and suffering art gladly as well as a co-editor of Aesthetics Concepts art and pornography and the Oxford Handbook of western music and philosophy he's been a visiting professor in universities all over and I I go to resist reading all of them but you I don't think you can name a European country where he's not been visiting Professor except perhaps lonstein which which as a bad pun would be more appropriate than the rest of the countries but for today's topic but um

00:02:39 that's Gerald levenson John McQuade is a journalist and author of tasty the Art and Science of what we eat on the biology history and culture of flavor he has written on science and the environment for for Publications including Smithsonian and Scientific American and won many national journalist is M Awards including sharing politer prizes for a share for a series on global Fisheries collapses and for coverage of Hurricane Katrina while at

00:03:10 New Orleans times pyun he is the co-author of path of Destruction to Devastation of New Orleans and the coming age of superstorms he was a a Wilson Center fellow reporting on artificial intelligence and surveillance in 2020 and 21 and is currently a PhD candidate at the UN University of Maryland Philip Merill College of Journalism studying the intersection of AI and news media Neils norin started his cooking

00:03:41 career in his native Sweden where he worked at many of the top restaurants and was an executive chef at KB restaurant where he received a star for GU from guide Michelin Neils moved to New York City to work alongside Marcus Samuelson at restaurant aquavit as Chef to Cuisine before being promoted to Executive Chef during his tenure at aquavit the restaurant received two three star reviews from The New York Times three half stars from New York post as well as being named the eighth

00:04:12 best restaurant in New York City by New York Magazine Neils left his post at Aqua in 2006 to accept the prestigious position as VP of culinary and pastry arts at International culinary Center host the French Culinary Institute and Italian culinary in Institute he successfully built the program the schools programs from 10 to over 80 as well as managed a 75% growth in Revenue while building its reputation to one of the best in the world Danielle Renee Reed is the chief

00:04:46 science officer of the monell chemical census Center a nonprofit research institution devoted to the study of taste and smell located in Philadelphia she received her PhD in Psychology from yel University and did her post-doctoral training training in genetics at the University of Pennsylvania she studies person-to-person differences in the sense of taste and smell is the past president of the association of chemo reception sciences and a founding member of the global Consortium for chemo sensory research and was recently

00:05:17 awarded a patent for smell screening test currently she is working on a collaborative Grant to understand the molecular basis of post viral taste and smell loss be on okay thank you I wish I could change hats as they say in some of the old TV programs in in our last episode on

00:05:48 touch um I was struck by the fact that um well what came up during our conversation included the fact that touch is not located in anyone place place on our bodies it refers to our entire bodies and of course the word sensorium is brought up in that context the organ of skin is so diffuse here we have something that seems to go to the opposite pole um yes all of the other senses seem to be focused on parts

00:06:19 of our body the tongue the nose the ears the eyes but taste also is the only one of them as far as I know and maybe you'll all correct me here that um where the actual sensation is proximate the sensation we have is also near to us it's not diffuse as say sound might be or Vision which is diffus so um anyway I thought that was an interesting observation I wondered uh whether uh we

00:06:49 could get started with a little description of how the tongue and the mouth as an organ helps us to understand the the sense of taste so maybe Danielle could get a start on that yes so it's I could talk all day about how we transduce information that from the chemicals we put in our mouth till our brain lights up with the word taste but I did bring a little demonstration to make this be a little easier so maybe even our expert round tablers would like to do this but so those of you who got a

00:07:21 little box um if you want to open up your box and we're now G to talk about taste in the periphery so you'll be challenged to find the nose clips and you'll want to put these on don't think like this and uh I'm not going to say it's a selfie opportunity but if the mood strikes please feel free and then the most difficult thing I'm going to ask you to do is to open up the small bag that contains the jelly

00:07:52 beans so you're going to uh put your nose Clips on as I've done and we're going to do a little bit of a evaluative experiment so you're going to put the jelly beads in your in your P palm of your hand and without looking you're just going to pick one Jelly Bean that seems to come your way and what I want you to do uh to the extent that you feel comfortable is to close your eyes and to put the Jelly Bean in your mouth and I

00:08:24 want you to chew and I want you to reflect so as we're chewing and we're reflecting on what we experiencing to build on what Jerry said it's a very localized sensation I'm chewing and you may be experiencing something else but what I'm getting is sweetness and when you feel like you've come to the end of The Chew what I want you to do is to take your nose Clips

00:08:58 off so you had the O moment oh so what you've experienced is the difference between taste on the tongue that localized sense and the contribution of smell in the nose so when you've taken your nose Clips off all the molecules rush to the roof of your nose and you got that beautiful thing which is Flavor right and so as Jerry said we are often talking about our sense of taste um as a very localized sense and we often use

00:09:30 the word taste to mean the whole om or the whole Gestalt of a flavor experience and so I often judge the sophistication of journalists no disrespect to John here by whether they correctly talk about the sense of taste on the tongue that localized sense and flavor which is the the Gestalt scense and just to put in a word or two about what actually happened so as you were having your Jelly Bean choo choo choo and you got some sweet I hope um actually the sugar

00:10:00 molecules and what you were chewing touched a protein on a taste cell in your tongue taste on the tongue and that information is transmitted to various parts of the brain where we interpret that sensation and we are able to then say the word sweet so this is a discussion and so I've Had My Moments introducing the periphery and the difference between taste and smell

00:10:30 uh I mean it is interesting and I've been fortunate enough to do a lot of work uh or a bit of work with Harold mcke that's also kind of into this sense but I think also that taste and flavor is so much more right than just what happens here because it is the whole environment as well like if you have a different scent in a room where you eating something is inherently going to change how you perceive that if the room

00:11:01 is too cold it's going to change it if it's too loud and uncomfortable it's going to change how you perceive tast so I think there's so many different factors that goes into what someone would describe as taste when the so the psychologist in me wants to say the word context so how we experience taste and smell is very contextualized so uh eating a beautiful meal on the subway is going to be a completely different flavor experience

00:11:32 than in a beautiful Michelin star restaurant correct and but it's also I think it's also your mood right because I can I you know I'm not a scientist but I can say it from empirical experience that if someone comes into a restaurant and have a meal and or in a certain mood it doesn't matter how good you make the food they're just not going to enjoy the taste of it and have a good time and they're going to actually blame the food even though that was not

00:12:03 necessarily what made their experience less desirable but is that different for the aesthetic experiences we have with vision or hearing if you go to a concert after just as an example fight with a spouse you're going to have a different experience of the music so isn't context important for all of our senses oh for sure absolutely but so for me specifically it's very important M that that when you curate a restaurant like there's a lot more that goes into

00:12:34 it than just the taste even though people will mostly attribute it to taste when they when they leave after the meal I sometimes get uh asked the question why uh is airplane food so bad and there there are some I think chemos sensory explanations for that sometimes people expect me to I mean the expected answer is that it's an extremely low

00:13:04 humidity environment and your nose dries out and that affects flavor but what I like to do is talk about what what what you just said Nils which is Imagine setting up a restaurant that's set up exactly like the inside of uh an airplane so you pack people in together very very tightly and give them no Elbow Room play ambient sounds that are really really loud noise and have everyone in the

00:13:35 restaurant facing the exact same direction that restaurant would fail yeah it would fail but but the other thing that's that's a problem with everyine food and it's really surprised me that no one figured it out a lot of people are just trying to over complicate it when you sit in a plane there's no point of trying to serve a beef tendone because it's going to be overcooked every single time instead of Serv having like a really nice short rib with you know like Penta or something that inherently you can eat easily with

00:14:06 your elbows and it has a lot of more aromatics and it would it would be 10 times better meal but they still trying to do it too fancy and there it fails I think you just landed yourself a Consulting gig well there's a uh an element of priming also because if you go to one of your restaurants you're going to be primed for a good meal and there's a famous experiment where they tested uh the price of wine and how that affected how people's experience of it and if the

00:14:38 same wine was priced much higher people said it tasted better than you know a similar wine so uh there's all this landscape around us as we go through the day of kind of what our expectations are this is interacting with our physical uh experience because sometimes of the day you'll be hungry if you're hungry that influences how something tastes because obviously something will taste better if you're hungry if you try to eat something with a full stomach it'll

00:15:10 taste you know the Sensation will be quite similar but but you won't want to eat it so the The Experience kind of flips so it's a kind of complex unfolding experience there is something that tastes better on on a plane I was told and I've experienced tomato juice tastes better on a plane I'm not sure why something about the saltiness or not saltiness is enhanced so next time you're on a plane you have bad choice choose the tomato juice you might like it no but it's actually it is true

00:15:41 because the the most popular or one of the most popular drinks cocktails on airplane is a Bloody Mary and it's and it's not in the normal bar okay I think yeah well I think in a in a really smart way or good way this contradicts my original sort of effort to sort of isolate taste as being very local and not contributing broadly or diffusely to the what I was calling the sensorium but I think in many ways this is where the conversation's taken us where it's just the start it's it

00:16:12 seems to be an entry point to emotions and other sort of evaluative aspects of our life I I also couldn't resist when Danielle mentioned uh eating a a three star Michelin meal in a uh Subway I just had this immediate like Monte python sense of the waiter coming and you know you're trying to eat like this but anyway no I think it's so fascinating that the the the surround umelt the elvel you mentioned is so much a part of this very local

00:16:45 sensation something else getting to the the point that you you raised Jerry about uh whether whether it is uh something you can only sense when it's near you or far away because we have what we call proximal senses and distal senses so I can see and hear things that are far away from me and things that touch me have to be close to me presumably and we think of taste as being at least for us it has to be in

00:17:15 your mouth for you to taste it and smell oddly enough as both you can smell things far away and you can smell things in your mouth but it changes when you think about you know our our friends in in the in the animal kingdom King King kingdoms so if you're that's only true in air if you live in water you can taste things that are far away from you and if you're a fish you have taste buds taste receptors over your entire body so it's

00:17:48 no different than touch would be you taste with your entire body and if you're an invertebrate like uh like an insect you'll taste with your toes you'll taste with your legs you'll taste with your uh with your with your wings and in that sense taste also goes Way Beyond just being about food taste is a social sense because animals taste each other and so I I actually I I like teaching uh about the idea of uh or I

00:18:19 ask when I when I teach uh undergraduates or graduate students the question why do we kiss right so so I mean kissing in the sense of of like mouth to- mouth kissing there's many kinds of kissing but when when people kiss people don't usually think why are we doing this and I actually think that it's a it's a a chemosensory evaluative uh phenomenon because in almost all animals they evaluate each

00:18:51 other prior to mating in a chemosensory sense they're tasting each other they're smelling each other they're evaluating each other's Fitness to mate with and I think that in that sense maybe taste has a social dimension for humans in addition to being about food I'm and a Horticultural footnote this is a joke something about of Two Lips Are Better Than One have you heard that anyway most seriously I've been

00:19:22 thinking about objectivity of taste as a philosopher we are very concerned with what is objective and what is subjective so compared with length or weight well weight is also a little bit has to do with the you know gravity but let's say weight and length are very objective there can be convergent opinions about them but when you get to um colors it's not clear colors maybe a little less objective um

00:19:53 because you can vary whether people find I remember address old or green there something on the web for a while and then things which are almost completely subjective so there's a sort of spectrum of objectivity that is interesting I think to think about in relation to taste the tastes are not the most objective and not the most objective in the between you know that really brings us to an important point about people's

00:20:24 individualized experience and with the permission of our moderator I would I do have a demonstration of that can we do that of course so for those love the first one pardon I love the first one it's all downhill though I I soften you up with jelly beans and then I I go big just want to know was I allowed to eat the rest of them because I went for them that's the most common question I get from undergraduates so um you'll want to find a white box if you haven't done already and you'll want to um get a bottle

00:20:56 there's a bottle that has a very long name called pheno carbamide so it's a little squat white bottle and the word on it is fio carbide so I'll leave you to look at your uh bottles and on the top of it you'll notice it has three um thank you letters PTC and uh with your permission and certainly you know I realize that none of you are very familiar with me and I'm going to ask you to put something in

00:21:26 your mouth so no need to do it if it's not for you but if you'll join me in this demonstration that was brought up about the individual and subjective experience you'll probably want to have if you have a water bottle close by it would be a good time to get that a little closer and I'm going to go first as so as a as a demonstrator so so for me it tastes exactly like water so why don't you in have a taste and let me know what you think about it

00:22:08 right so how many of you also are Team Water yeah okay very good and how many of you find it bitter and how many of you are truly angry with me I thought oh just very slightly bitter very slightly bitter seriously a lie might have helped pardon alignment mother so you're really seeing in action here we've all had very different experiences and so in the early days

00:22:39 people thought it was because the composition of the saliva are different between people there are many different explanations but the truth of the matter is is that we have genes that code for receptors of taste receptors and for me both receptors are for this particular bidder are both broken right I can't taste it at all some people found it slightly bitter so they have one broken receptor one working and those of you who are mad and very bitter have both working receptors so when we're talking

00:23:11 about the subjectivity of in individual experience and this is very true in the as as a chef you know that when we often or can be very um disparaging of other people's point of view when it comes to taste like how can they not like that thing or how can they eat who was talking about hairing earlier you were talking about it and so there really concrete reasons that we have subjective objective differences in our

00:23:42 sense of taste I mean cilantro is the most common one right where whatever x% of of the population it's really disgusting right my brother is one of them they say say soapy people don't like exactly but it's also interesting because some people you can actually the more they're exposed to it the more they actually start liking it my wife is an example of that she used to hate cilantro she would never eat it it tasted disgusting now she actually

00:24:12 really enjoys it but it's being exposed to it and trying it and trying it then changed I she perceived it does she actually feel that it tastes differently or she learn has learned to like the or flavor I'm going to ask her you think it would be the second one or no that she learned to like it well there there are actually two things going on so um in the case where uh we are exposed over and over again we can

00:24:44 actually shape or our Taste of sense is plastic or our sense of smell is so there's many classic experiments where you have people sniff something every day and that they they can improve their ability to smell because they upregulate their receptors so it could be a lot of people find Cilantro obnoxious because it lacks a beautiful note that other people can smell so maybe through her experience she's up regulating that and smells better to her you'll have to ask both things are possible I had a question uh regarding

00:25:17 the bitter taste difference and I looked at this while writing my book and I I don't think I found a satisfactory answer it's like you think of uh natural selection as kind of op optimizing survival and so you think well it'll select for you know taste senses that are optimized survival and yet this is sort of a Divergent you know some people don't have this and other people do so why are both conditions optimized in other words does it help do both help

00:25:48 survival kind of we're fortunate to have a world expert right here I don't think I'm a world expert but uh so one of the things that I think that's that that people don't think about in in in this context is that we actually have very few genes we don't we don't have many and we reuse and repurpose the the the gene products again and again and again so the the the things that we call

00:26:21 bitter taste receptors that that class of compounds which is actually a fairly large family of genes and Gene products are expressed throughout the body and they're biologically very important so they're in your lungs and they help your lungs in immune defenses and to uh respond to uh objects and irritants that get in there quinine uh yeah and and and they they're they're uh they're in the the the thyroid and

00:26:53 apparently can have an impact on metabolism uh and there throughout the GI tract and can sense uh microbes and and infections and parasites in our intestines and launch immune uh reactions to those and so a lot of a lot of these taste or these the what we call bitter taste receptors that are expressed throughout our body and are repurposed and reused for different functions are also

00:27:24 expressed in our mouth and we have conscious access to them through the the the perception of bitterness so we don't know if the engine The evolutionary pressure that has driven this Divergence is about telling us what we should be eating or not eating or if it's about protecting our lungs or our our thyroid or detecting parasites in our intestines and that what we just experienced in our mouths is merely a byproduct of that or

00:27:54 maybe it's doing both at the same time we we don't know we have to think about about what are the evolutionary pressures that that drive us to have these individual differences uh and and what is what is the what is the target reason if evolution has reasons which it doesn't but uh so that that that complicates it but I actually love thinking about that are that that we don't fortunately have conscious access to The Taste receptors in our intestines um be thankful for

00:28:25 that um be interesed but I like thinking about the fact that that these receptors that help us evaluate what's outside of us and about to come into us and about to be ingested can also sense what's happening in the intestine and once it's absorbed into our blood uh be sensed in organs and Regulatory tissues in our body and our liver and our pancreas and in our brain and so I I think of it as being a

00:28:57 very uh comprehensive system that's sort of tracking what's going on outside our body in our mouth in the GI trct as it's absorbed into the blood we track these things with the same receptors all throughout the body throughout the whole process and what is tracking it and what it's doing with that information varies from place to place but it's actually the same receptor tracking the same molecules wherever you are so they're all these sort of

00:29:28 overlapping entangled systems of which taste is sort of the one that kind of penetrates into awareness so yeah if we had found these receptors in the liver first we wouldn't be calling them taste receptors we would be calling them liver receptors and then we'd be wondering why do we have liver receptors in our mouth um but especially because I hate liver no that's not true I actually like it but I I think it's interesting that

00:29:59 um this distinct these this difference that you just described I think was wonderful the way you described that uh these differences can arrive and we're not talking about Evolution here so to speak but maybe it's interesting that once they do arrive these differences that's a certain percentage of the population likes that taste a certain it has an impact on where we go what we do and what we eat right and the other thing I think that's worth talk thinking about is that the the um proportion of people that are

00:30:30 like for this simple demonstration the proportion of people that can't taste that compound is widely different throughout the world because genetics is different throughout the world so we're often challenged to uh to cook for everybody right and it the truth is is that we're all extremely different and there are a lot of geographic constraints on what people can and cannot perceive in their sense of taste so you wouldn't be able to say that the thing has that taste since there's so much so much variation in the way people

00:31:02 experience it but is this are some things that are immune to that effect like salt is salt ever tasted differently in certain populations than it is and the on that we are familiar with I think I would speculate no somehow there are individual differences in in in all tastes there's no there are no exceptions to that some some tend to be more variable than others like bitter taste is more variable than sweet taste is but there's variability I mean this

00:31:34 is what Danny studies for living but there's variability in everything even s Soul there's some culations that do not CH so that's salty yeah there are people who are very sensitive to salt and people who are not so sensitive to Salt they're probably not people who are completely uh unable to perceive salt at all whatsoever but there are differences in how salty that's but that's true for most the basic things the same with sugar right the same with acidity like it's

00:32:06 perceived different like I can't you know I don't have a problem with sugar but I can't consume too much it's just I don't feel good why a lot of people do but it's the same but go into that when you go to to to the Practical part of it of cooking so what I first of all you know as chefs tend to have too much ego right they tend to cook for themselves which I think is a big mistake because you should really cook for whoever is going to consume it so you always have to take into in in consideration like

00:32:38 what what's the average which is somewhat of a guess but you you know a little bit so you have to take in consideration what your average you know in this case a restaurant guest would like so you would have to you know adjust the acidity based on that adjust the saltiness based on that and all different kinds so I that brings us beautifully to our third and last demonstration if you will so you know the the point of chefs having to cook for the average when when

00:33:10 we're all different is I think highlighted with our last demonstration if you want to find there are two uh bottles that are called simple sweet A and B and getting to the point of like individual variation in salt and sugar versus cooking for the average rather than cooking for yourself so what I want you to do is to take out both bottles it'll say SSA and SSB and what you're going to do is just to open SSA and this is a taste and reflect so

00:33:42 we're going to I'll take go go first okay so I'm tasting and my only question to you is do you like it okay we have have a taker here so now we're going to um go with B here so simple sweet B so again same question what about cleansing the pallet you don't have to do that no this is not fine

00:34:14 dining so and my question to you which did you prefer a or b a can I have a slightly different uh answer I would prefer B if it was more diluted then it would be a together right so you you want to so the very weakest and the Very strongest was not satisfying to you at all you want you're you were somewhere in the

00:34:48 middle I I don't think that explain same which one did you say was more

00:35:18 expressive if if we would mix up together oh I say I and when you say covering your tongue do you mean literally like the feel of like where it is in your mouth so what you just tasted were a is a low concentration of what we call a sweetener um and B was a higher concentration of sweetener and what we find is is that some people are sweet lovers they really like that higher concentration and we got a few people

00:35:49 that were willing to to put themselves out there and then we had people that preferred a the lower concentration of sweet so getting back back to your point you know you're trying to cook for this room of people and so how sweet is this how sweet is the sauce yeah so you mix them together and you probably pretty that on no I mean it's probably true that's probably what I would do but I guess the average pleases no one right yeah no no I don't think that's true actually mhm uh because I

00:36:20 think the the average whatever you call average you know it's not scientific but I I do think if you cook for the I think smaller percentage and maybe I'm wrong but that really prefers that sweet you would have more people that wouldn't like it actually because it's just too sweet so I I do think there's actually somewhere where we have to go in the middle it depends on how you're consuming it also if it's in a drink for example a might be better because it's

00:36:51 you know very light and you can drink more of it whereas if it's you know 12 ounces of B it' be too much so very true can can I ask the audience a question well wait the end okay well it's we wait the audience to comment at the end well I want to take this conversation to to to a reflection which is ma major beverage manufacturers in the United States go for a certain level of

00:37:22 sweetness and you know I don't want to pick on people but I'll just say like you know not to this is just a a description but like Coke and Pepsi for example um go for a certain level of sweetness that's based on a certain amount of sugar in a soda which is quite high but they also play with having different levels of sugar in a soda so they have zero sugar sodas and even now we're making half sugared or 30% or 60%

00:37:52 sugared sodas but whenever they play with the level of sugar in a soda they backfill with sweetener to go back to the level of sweetness that that would be there if it were fully sugared so they maintain no matter how much sugar is there a constant level of sweetness and so my question to the audience is if they made beverages if they went for what we would call Market segmentation uh for people who maybe like something or want something less sweet if they made a a beverage that was

00:38:25 a soda that was half as Sweet let's say you could make one that had half the sugar and had half the sweetness would people drink that I would I would yeah yeah well my question is would you but the problem the ones that they supplement half and half is the thing they add brings a different taste for me at least is really unfortunate so it's either all sugar or

00:38:57 about it because wants false T but my question to you is really would you like someone to provide you with a beverage that has less Sweetness in it I think has sugar and and especially in soft drinks and it's hard to find ones that aren't artificial but when they manage it it's really quite good so you know Market segmentation you know the classic example is back you

00:39:28 know when I was a kid when you went to a grocery store you could buy salsa for chips and there was just one kind of salsa and it was sort of you know the sort of average medium level of heat in the salsa and someone uh actually I think the the the the the person who was the engine behind driving this was Howard moscowitz but they came upon the idea that there are some people that there who maybe

00:39:58 want less heat than what we're offering them and some people maybe want more heat and so they came up with this incredibly brilliant idea of providing mild medium and hot salsa and it turns out that they sold more salsa when they did that and had happier customers but that doesn't seem to be happening for Sweetness in beverages and I just I can't help but wonder why why not do that Coke and Pepsi do they have the same amount of sugar because I find

00:40:30 myself liking water more than they have extremely similar levels of sugar they're not identical but they differ also in other attributes they differ in their carbonation and in their uh acids and things like that but they're they're they are they do come across as being perceived as different in sweetness but they have very similar levels of sugar but the sweetness intensity of Diet Coke is similar to regular Coke basically yeah the objective is no matter how much Sugar's

00:41:01 there we want the level of sweetness to be relatively constant for everybody which is a hard thing to do and they do a pretty good job of it but my question is why is that the level of sweetness that everyone's offered I mean a part It's associated with the brand and so if you change that you kind of change people what which plays on expectations possibly but but if you label it differently then you wouldn't have it the same as the salsas even though you think with salsas in one way you'll be okay just making it mild

00:41:32 because most people have hot sauce in their in their fridge and you can always add it so I I I will put out there I'm sorry if I'm talking business here but I would put out there that uh based on the responses of the audience here that these corporations are leaving money on the table yeah that they could do this and the and the in the act of doing that if you made something that was half sugared and half half sweet there would be Public Health implications of that it would actually for people who drink multiple sodas a day seven days a week

00:42:04 for decades it would actually be better for them to have these products and keep in mind that for diet soda up until very recently it's only ever made up like 10% of the market share so the majority of people don't drink diet soda I mean it makes a lot of money mind you but still not many people drink it and so as a public health initiative I think if people want less sugar and less sweetness and you do that you're you're you're G you're you're catering to their personal preference to their discernment

00:42:36 if you will the theme of this this this round table um and you're probably going to make more money and you'll probably make people healthier it seems like a winwin win I have a suggestion about something that may count it may not but it's still a topic I'd like to hear you all take up and that is there's this idea that certain types of stimul sensory stimulations are they like hijack our dopamine system is the way it's put these days that they it sort of gives you a rush and you you

00:43:07 tend to get more addicted to that whereas there are other let's say taste experiences flavor experiences that are not like that I wonder what you think of that and whether that could play a role in this that sugar as opposed to salt or bitter has this quality of being a little bit more uh captivating in that way so you know these the studies on this topic are abundantly clear when you have people put sugar in the mouth the brain lights up like a Christmas tree right so it's very well understood that

00:43:38 that sugar is a special taste quality that has that sort of sense of drug-like excitement but I'd also offer you the perspective that although bitter doesn't make the brain happy and in the same way often bitter comes with the pharmacological payoff so we wouldn't NE necessarily want to have bitterness in our mouth that didn't come with the drug but we're very often eager for bitterness that's associated for instance with caffeine or alcohol to name those two those two so there is

00:44:10 definitely payoff to taste that in a pharmacological sense um I I would like to make a comment have questions at the end if that's okay yes please unless you consider F fast food restaurants completely Abomination you may have visited them cas and they have of course the way they operate the soft drink is that you can adjust the amount of sweetness you have so when I go which is very rare um I will you know push the thing to get a certain amount of coke and then add the

00:44:42 SS of reduce the level of sweetness to it so that's one of the virtues of a free country where you can have it sort of the way you want it in this trivial respect um one thing I'd observe is that we now globally have What's called the double burden of malnutrition which is that not only are people undernourished they're overnourished with junk food sometimes you know snacks and soft drinks and

00:45:14 sometimes these conditions coexist in the same places and so this creates kind of a major kind know policy uh conundrum for uh for countries and people around the world of how who suddenly addressed these problems that go in two directions and uh I guess from an evolutionary standpoint you know millions of years ago or tens of thousands of years ago or even less until just recently historically speaking sugar was relatively rare in the environment just

00:45:45 in the last few hundred years has it become a big thing and so right now we've been become oversaturated with it and these are very uh kind of fundamental forces within the body kind of basic drives for survival um that are being hijacked as they say and there isn't really a good uh way around that except through policy prescriptions I mean because it makes a lot of money in

00:46:16 in in the nutritional field we we think about the caloric density of a food and we think about the nutrient density of a food and they can very independently and so what you know the kind of person you're talking about who might be uh obese uh but eating a very poor quality food in terms of nutrient density we would describe them as being uh overnourished and malnourished um typical typical of

00:46:47 people who live in food deserts and have access to mostly uh Carby and fatty snack foods and uh a low calorie high density food would be like salad and vegetables and things of that of that sort or liver if you will yeah I mean but that that is the problem right that there's no what you would call it real nutritious good food available at the Fairly affordable price that becomes in this country yeah in this country in

00:47:18 other countries it's a different story exactly even though unfortunately a lot of other countries have mimicked what's happening here so it's kind of spreading in a sense I didn't McDonald's come up with like a MC salad a few years back or decade back that failed I think failed pretty badly but it's interesting though because if you go if you go to Europe actually especially in the Scandinavian countries McDonald's have a lot more healthy options on their menus than they have here completely different well thought experiment for for us so let's

00:47:49 say we went into a restaurant and you could order a beautiful salmon and vegetable beautiful healthy meal that was the same price as a McDonald's hamburger so is this going to cause salmon and asparagus to take off in the public Consciousness or is it is price what's driving these food choices is that with or without cheese very funny no but I think I mean if it if it was equal right pric yeah I think it

00:48:19 actually would the the reason why it's not is obviously pricing buying ground beef it's a t of the price of buying a good salmon but if they work I bet you it would obvious he says obvious yeah I agree with that I think it is obvious I think that that well it's about availability accessibility and price and those are correlated yeah but in in other countries so I I think what we're doing is we've inverted it we've made vegetables very very

00:48:50 expensive in this country and cookies and cakes very cheap in this country and in in you know in many places in Europe it's the opposite like vegetables are very very inexpensive and cakes are very expensive and we've I don't know you know don't ask me to explain why it's inverted here but but it is and one problem in the US is that we we grew up we grew up not liking fish fish is something so Oogie because it was so far from beef um but in Scandinavian

00:49:23 countries of course fish is the panan it's of course you're going to eat a lot of that so we're just not used to eating fish in this country um but we can be educated into seeing how good it can be and Justice tasty as a hamburger in fact more and more the fresh food chains are getting a good kind of fish sandwich even a sandwich sandwich not sandwi a salmon sandwich I think it's some of them so there's some hope for culinary Improvement even at that level so if

00:49:53 McDonald's comes up with the MC salmon they could come to you for that yes I willor another taste uh that's prevalent in or not a taste but it's a a discernment I guess uh by by in that sense of taste in the aesthetic sense uh that's prevalent in this country is that in most butcher shops on Earth outside of United States the whole animal is there in front of you so you will be able to buy kidneys and liver and

00:50:23 pancreas and lungs and like everything's there tongues and what have you and in a typical say Supermarket butcher shop in United States the only thing in the case is skeletal muscle it's various cuts of you know shoulder or rump or leg or something like that but you don't they don't have bins full of kidneys and livers and hearts and and we're almost unique on Earth and that our butcher shops look like that and of

00:50:53 course there are a lot of vitamins in red meat but the organ meats are especially nut nutrient dense and I think that's another issue with this country is that we don't go for these nutrient dense Meats for those of us who eat meat no but that's why in France right all of those are Delicacies you know it's sweet bread or whatever liver could be more precious than a tender because also it has you know if you use to it has more flavor

00:51:25 like it has character to it the beef tendine have very little fat so there's not a lot of flavor right because most of the flavor sits a lot of flavor sits within the fat or other things so I think it's yeah you never grew up on it here which probably it must have been at some point though where you used everything because there wasn't as much so you have to make use of everything right so I don't know when that changed there's also in the US there's a kind of ideological attachment to beef um yeah

00:51:56 so when uh uh government officials or others have suggested promoting plant-based beef substitutes uh they've been denounced by people on the right for you know wanting to take away people's beef basically uh which makes which is ridiculous but and in fact plant-based beef has become more popular but there's still kind of a red blue problem with it that is another Factor kind of complicating the situation

00:52:27 I have an anec I want to offer on a wavelength that was just touched on it concerns my first visit to France as a graduate student and I I I studied French and so I knew French sort of so I saw something on the menu said redivo I thought I like rice I like ve all that well actually redo turns out to be I think pancreas so when it arrived I realized oh my friend are not good enough and I'm not eating this so I learned my lesson but

00:52:58 um uh maybe you'll remember that too don't order R devote unless you like pancreas this raises the question about what what makes food complex right and I I have a story I wanted to tell and I wondered we and this relates to bitterness as well and forgive the the audience if I've told the story before because I like to tell it a lot I was 10 years old and I was sitting in the kitchen with my grandfather in Philadelphia and he was drinking his bottle of Schmidt's beer and uh he I was 10 I think or eight and

00:53:30 he said you know do you want to taste you know like adults would do to kids with a so he poured me a very small bit of beer and I drank it I was like ah how could anyone drink this for pleasure okay very bitter is the way I I felt years later when I learned to like beer I swear I get I go back to that time in the kitchen and I realize in some odd way I liked it and I disliked it at the same time now we were talking about

00:54:00 foods that some people in certain cultures find wonderful others find disgusting and I was wondering about that that aspect of complexity that you that a single flavor can both appeal and repel I wonder what you think about that but it's I mean it's interesting though uh so durian is a good example right most people or most westerners can't stand it right not even the smell of it tell them what that is I'm durian is a fruit uh most Le in Southeast Asia looks

00:54:31 like spikes big and when you open it it has very pungent smell actually the texture of it is is quite fantastic it's like a custard right it's like eating a Kimberly almost uh but but it is that uh sulfur right mostly that makes it uh unappealing to most westerners but actually I didn't an experiment like way because something happens when you use a pressure cooker right so if you pressure cook a durian actually the sulfur goes

00:55:03 away and you're left with just the sweet flavor of durian and when you do that and you don't tell people what it is most people actually really enjoy it it's the same with with onions which actually is the the other way around when you cook onions in a pressure cooker a lot of the onion flavor goes away because the sulfur is taken off because of the higher temperature so you actually either need to add the onion afterwards we need to add a lot more to get the same as it would do in the other I don't know if that really correlated to but I I guess just to dig

00:55:36 into this a little bit so you you have this experience as a child and I just wanted to offer their perspective of how children's tastes and adult cha tastes change so one of the things we think from a scientific perspective is that children react more uh against bitterness because they're trying to protect the developing brain against potential toxins and so what I'm hearing from your story is is that part there's a good a good one and a bad one on your shoulder the one on one's trying to

00:56:08 protect you and the other one is moving you toward the pharmacology which you may have enjoyed you know I'm not sure maybe I I took so little of it I actually think for years I thought I just found it disgusting and then later I found it disgusting and appealing and maybe it was because of the alcohol and I don't know but and and then the association of the alcohol to the bitterness which gave it a positive Association perhaps but I like this idea that it which we were

00:56:38 touching on towards the beginning I mentioned this idea again of sort of a diffuse sensorium I mentioned that interestingly you all were bringing me to this idea that taste isn't is an entree to no pun intended is an entree to this sort of sensorium in a way because it Taps into this context of how we're like you know evaluating the Aesthetics of a certain situation and I just think that when a when a certain flavor is complex it it's it creates a

00:57:09 very complicated state in us like how do we evaluate this and is it appealing is it slightly off-putting I think spicy food is another example of this right where it's bad and good at the same time yeah but I I think another thing that's interesting is like you know you can come up with the best Flor combinations right I can put let's say plate of five flavors that goes extremely well together but they all PES no one is actually going to enjoy it even though the flavor is amazing because it has no texture it's kind of it gets boring even

00:57:41 though the flavor combination might be fantastic I want to mention something about ESO as an example of how context really affects whether you enjoy food if you just put something in my mouth and and if it tasted like clams or Abalone or um what else is like the muscles I mean all those things are things I like and the eso presumably has some muchat similar taste but if I know it's ESO so

00:58:14 it's like a a slimy um you know slimy um what do you call those um slugs slugs yeah lias then I can't eat it you know so context is very important in that in that kind of case I if I didn't know what it was I would have said it's a kind of clim I like it but knowing to es go I did try it once and couldn't eat it and also had too much sand in it it wasn't clean that well I mean it really gets it an important issue which is that

00:58:46 eating is dangerous right so it's the one sense where we take something into our body that can kill us and so it really is discernment of do you do you swallow do you take this in and swallow and it really gets at the the the generation of that vehement disgust because you know is is it a slug which is disgusting is it something even worse that could kill you and that's why I think when we find something unexpected in our food it's very disgusting to us

00:59:18 you know if you suddenly are eating and you find as a chef you know that you should not be surprising people by putting lumps in their mashed potatoes right and that's I mean we talk about taste is an intimate sense but it's also because we're actually uh protecting ourselves from being killed by potential toxins that we're eating by the way you wouldn't have liked the first restaurant I worked in cuz the name was lar gold when I was a student first studying taste I went into the and a little bit inspired by Dr brin's work I went into

00:59:51 our garden and I just we were talking about how so many plants are poisonous plants are bitter so I went into my garden and I just started chewing different plants and spitting things out I just I'm not ridiculous and it really is shocking how many things in the in the plant world are very bitter and although it didn't kill me it actually did make me quite sick honestly but the point is is that our sense of taste is is protective in a way that we've really lost touch with as modern humans because we go into stores nobody thinks we're

01:00:22 going to be poisoned right when was the last time you used your sense of taste to avoid being poisoned by plant material in environment but our ancestors had to face that all the time they're out foraging food is scarce can I eat this plant I don't know and so our sense of taste is a little bit more protective than we often give it credit for so how does that relate to Bitter food like for example like take something like an endive can be very bitter right almost too bitter to me but a lot of people enjoy it when if you

01:00:53 would pick it up and taste it like that you would speed it out right you wouldn't the context is trust right they've gone to your beautiful restaurant they know that you have their best interest at heart it's safe to eat it but if you were a foraging animal who was starving and you tasted on di you might reject it for its bitterness right and they don't have credit cards usually you know um I want to I wanted to ask the panel about what you think the relationship is between taste in the narrow sense and taste in the sense of

01:01:25 discernment and then also sort of con connoisseurship like how does why is taste I think the thing Associated most with being a connoisseur I mean there are art connoisseurs of course as well but for some reason I think taste leads the way in that regard maybe I'm wrong but I wonder what you think I mean I think relating to the conversation we just had it's partly a a function of maturity so when my younger child was uh much younger they're now in their 20s

01:01:56 didn't like anything except like white foods like mashed potatoes and pasta and very Bland Foods um and only recently have they begun to kind of open up uh and taste more things and diversify uh the diet um and the same thing applies to your uh beer experience you know when you reach a certain age you have more life experience you've integrated a bunch of different uh flavor experiences you have a sense that uh if something

01:02:26 tastes a little bit bad it may be playing off other flavors uh and thus may be good if you're open to the experience um and it also has to do with you know your kind of the people around you that you're sharing these experiences with and are they open to it Etc so there's a social Dimension to it as well a little bit of like Risk taking almost littleit it overlaps with that I risk well the idea you're going to do something that's sort of a maybe bad or or dangerous I'm agreeing with you I was

01:02:57 thinking of this Japanese fish I forgotten the name of which is can be poisonous if it hasn't been prepared the right way yeah so go but people yeah they still go for that they're willing to risk dying just to have this unusual Gary experience quite delicious and it's part of being in a way it's part of being a connoisseur that sort of if you describe that circumstance that situation oh it's this sort of fish but if you repair it this sort of way it's appealing to people think oh that shows discernment

01:03:27 right at a higher level let's say I I I really like this question because we use uh our senses almost in in uh I mean allegory isn't the right word but uh we we we use them in in common language to mean different things so when we say that someone has good taste or bad taste we know what that means and your question is why are we using that word but you know we also can say that someone has vision in the same sense that we say someone has taste and it

01:03:57 means something completely different um and I don't know why that is but uh uh I I I I like the question I think it's really interesting to think about why does when we say someone has Vision versus someone has good taste why do those mean such radically different things and just picking up on the thread that you offered us this very tasteless picture as a way to entice us to come here I mean and really there's the sense of

01:04:28 where taste is really has dual meanings is this idea that when we taste something there's some truth in things that are um very highly valued so when we're tasting something from your restaurant there is a sense of like the beef is truly beef and the mushrooms are truly mushrooms and everything makes sense from an honest truthful point of view that the ingredients are reflected in an experience but when we artificially flavor things

01:04:58 we're trying to make an zat strawberry or I don't even know what this is supposed to be but there is this sort of falsity and we really have as a society really rejected this artificial flavor right it's not truthful we have um it's sort of like the the Britney Spears of of the music world right it's seen as less than when it is artificial and not truth not the truth of the flavor well I I think this has been

01:05:30 fabulous so far I wondered since the audience uh has has exhibited an appetite for conversation why don't we uh invite someone come up and ask some questions please come up to the microphone thiss just IDE theing sweetness of hot spiciness um and it just occurred to me right away that um isn't there an age issue in that that children don't normally like spicy anyway they want everything to be sweet

01:06:02 yes and everything pretty much want everything to be as sweet as it can be yes your observations are are well founded in the science so one of the things that's the most easy to demonstrate in the laboratory is that children prefer a higher concentration of sugar in water than do adults very reproducible and we find that this ttin this desire for the high sugar ttin Peak during periods of bone growth and so we think it's in a sense Mother Nature's Way of fueling the calories for growth

01:06:33 but it's just taken on a perversion because now sugar is so common in the environment but but relating to the business thing too that you were talking about um children buy soda more than anybody else so the high fructose or high sugar makes sense from a business point of view yes and you know one of the common experiences of the our friends in the food industri is when they make something that is lower in sugar as Dr Breslin indicated people don't buy it yeah but on the other hand

01:07:05 then you could argue that children buy it more just because it is sweet if it was less sweet more grown-ups would buy it and plent plent plenty of adults drink soda yeah yeah but but all children do yeah they're more adults than children though it's a numbers game is that true oh yeah yeah I mean if I guess that's true now you used to have families with 11 children and two adults uh I guess it's more true now but

01:07:37 the percentage of you know the of the 300 and however many there are 40 or 50 million of us in United States the percentage that's children is you know not the majority interesting okay good to me anyway okay then at the other end of the a spect you may not like spicy flu because it's harder to process harder to process whereas if when you're younger and you had a more robust digestive

01:08:07 system you could eat as you please I've spent a good chunk of time in Chicago where there's a large Mexican-American population and they uh in Chicago make a pickle that's made out of jalapenos that gets into equilibrium with little bits of uh carrot stick and cauliflower fluet and they make a jar that has all these different vegetables in it and the heat level is equal throughout the entire thing so that the jalapenos and the carrot sticks and the

01:08:39 cauliflower are all equally hot by the time they're done sitting this jar and it's very common for people to take out like a cauliflower fluet or one of these carrots and give it to a one-year-old or even a six-month-old and they just suck on them and they're really hot and the kids don't mind them at all the kids the kids love these things my other kid uh by the way liked very hot things from a very early age I was wondering like how could these kids be related because they

01:09:09 have such Divergent taste and then while I was reporting my book we went to visit the breeder of the world's hottest pepper the Carolina Reaper and so we had this evening and this guy's like popping these super hot peppers into his mouth and just like you know they're uh you know lollipops or something and uh we try like a tiny little sliver and it's like this gigantic explosion and uh my son was just like thrilled by this experience um and I I

01:09:43 don't know I wasn't so you know warm to it but uh but that's a whole other questions like why do which I haven't you know nobody really knows the answer why do people like this experience which is you know pretty unpleasant so I thought the end of that Spectrum was the ghost peppers that's not the hottest that's they keep coming up with a hotter one you have a someone behind you so I have a question talking about food uh the

01:10:14 relationship between the texture of food and you know taste I realize it's you know pretty complicated but seems to me that um with patients younger kids they could get used to to texture with enough repetition but if genetically you know your sensors you know you just don't like the taste of something uh what is the relationship between those two things can you overcome things that don't taste good if you're trying so one of the things that we did uh our

01:10:45 research taught us is if you remember when we did the little thing that was bitter to some and not to others when parents and children are in conflict with their genotypes so for instance the child is a is a two two copy taster and the mom is has much less genotype there's more conflict over food and so you know having answered questions about children and parents and conflict over food over the years what I really would where I've come personally is just that we need to have respect for the the differences in

01:11:17 the experience between children and parents and different genotypes and so that's sort of where I land which is kids experience food completely differently than adults do and we just need to have more respect for that which is not to say soda all the time but thank you I think it's easier to get kids to overcome uh like bitter tastes that they don't like than it is textures that they hate so like you know something that's uh very pulpy like an orange that a kid

01:11:47 like just doesn't like that that dislike can persist for a very long time in in kids as they age and uh you know I don't think anyone in this room liked bitter taste when they were a wee little one but you know I see many people drinking coffee and uh and and and you know the list goes on and on of things and it's also culturally uh determined as well so there are cultures that sort of Revel in bitterness there are cultures where they

01:12:18 drink espresso and dark chocolate and eat rikio and and curly Fescue and on undive and UND and and uh and Licorice and it's like so many incredibly bitter things you know I'm talking about Italians and uh and so I think you know the we haven't really talked much about culture here but obviously that's an incredibly important uh determinant of what you like and what your preferences are and

01:12:51 whether you have a certain relationship to bitterness or not but texture is phenomenally important in food and and uh and and a great driver of what we like and don't like yeah I think you're absolutely right I think the texture is so much harder to overcome than than a specific flavor or taste there's also this this aside from wanting to respect differences in tastes on your children is also I think we might all acknowledge in the United

01:13:21 States or maybe like an at times uh uh catering too much to Children's preferences and doesn't mean forcing them to eat their broccoli or whatever necessarily but there is this view In some cultures I believe which is much more experimental meaning oh you don't like that we're going to try this you know sort of there's like take a risk at something right and I think that's better than saying okay well I'm never going to give you anything like this anymore uh which I think May engender a littleit more anxiety in kids about food K kids pay a lot of attention to what

01:13:53 other kids do too so you know there there's uh Ruckers used to have a nutrition uh kid school and they sort of had two objectives one objective was to get them to be able to name 600 different vegetables which they were successful at doing but at snack time instead of offering cookies or or or Little Cakes and things like that they'd offer them cut up vegetables so they'd give them you know broccoli and cauliflower and tomatoes and celery and

01:14:23 cucumber and on and on and on and on and on and what gets kids to want to sample these things and try them and learn to like them was you know in a group of 20 kids one of them's going to come forward and try it we're just going to get some other kid to do it and they're going to see them going back for more and kids watching other kids do that results in all the kids ending up going for it and uh we don't have schools that do that here most typically but that's I think it's it's very cultural too because in China you would never find the kids menu

01:14:54 on any restaurant it say doesn't exist like there is no special food for kids they eat what everyone else eats and it doesn't seem to be much of a problem it's kind of question I social media you have to come over yeah social media no go go to because there someone else waiting um and we needed a microphone because it doesn't pick up your voice otherwise sorry about that hi um um I I just have a comment uh so last week I was just giving a lecture to

01:15:25 Barnard University uh it was a JZ of chemistry class and uh so I I worked at one of the multinational company I don't want to take names so I just did one teste testing similar to what you we did here you know and uh so it it was a a discriminating test where students were asked to identify whether you can pick the sample which is different or not it's a triangle test and uh none of them were able to pick

01:15:57 and uh it was a diet versus zero I'm not taking the name of the beverage so one beverage was a diet beverage another beverage was a zero sugar beverage none of them were able to pick up the difference and then uh I told them like you know the these were the two beverages which you tested and they were surprised and uh just want this as a comment now from that business perspective the question which you asked um I want wanted to uh like throw this like do you think naming

01:16:28 the beverage instead of changing the sugar concentration if if I give a different name will that affect uh the preference of a particular beverage like if I call a beverage as zero sugar will it attract more consumers as opposed to calling a beverage diet sugar because if you see the ingredient list more or less it is same it is just a different formulation so what is the op yeah I think that the the marketing and The Branding the labeling has an

01:17:01 enormous impact on on what people accept and how they understand it but I personally am am interested in trying to push our culture to go towards less sugar intake going for things that are less sweet yeah yeah and uh I actually think that these I mean I don't I don't want these companies to suffer I have nothing against companies making profit and I'm happy for them too but I think that they

01:17:31 can make profit giving the public products that are more healthful and I think that that we can have both at the same time and that's where I that's where I'm interested in like people's opinions and Market segmentation um and you know it that has everything to do with taste and flavor too right right uh but but yes you're you're 100% right how you Market something with what label you give it so Danny and I have a colleague who who I mean this is going to sound ridiculous to you but if you if if you offer can I

01:18:03 touch your water um if you if you offer people two bottles of water and one is labeled plain water and the other is labeled not poison um the not poison one is obviously not poison but which one do people select right it zero poison yeah and so like these labels matter enormously yeah yeah and the other thing um other comment I I also

01:18:34 wanted to know from all of you um like salt as opposed to Sugar it's also another big nutritional you know has got a lot of implication on the health side so I have been seeing lot of uh recipes or the food food product formulation that has been done by um combination of different spices but not actually using salt is that something a possibility uh for future uh you know

01:19:06 food development I mean yeah should probably answer this but it's a very complicated question yeah but I think it also be very you wouldn't be very popular if you didn't put any salt in your food I mean it's it's simple as that then yes of course everyone has a a different salt level that's why you know in the Practical experience I tend to put less because someone can always add but you can never take take it away right but then I think it's also interesting again

01:19:36 if you look at a lot of other cultures they so I'll take Chinese cooking as an example a lot of things like the rice has zero you never put salt in the rice but you use soy sauce in in other food so it kind of balance itself out but but also that's where it's a lot of misconception like when when a lot of Western Restaurants try to put something that's Asian they put like

01:20:07 a ton of soy sauce and stuff and it becomes completely unbalanced and not very good but it is salt is necessary I mean it's simple and and we need it as well to certain degree so Danny Reed Dr read and I have a a colleague named uh Gary beum Dr beum Who did a study uh getting at the idea that there's sort of two kinds of salt in food there's salt that's sort of embedded in The Matrix of the food which

01:20:39 we call Hidden salt because you end up eating it but you don't taste it and then there's the salt that you can taste so in a solid food that would be what you sort of put on the surface and in a in a liquid like a soup it's just in the solution itself and most most of the salt that we eat and we all almost everyone on Earth Eats more or less the same amount of salt there's no place you can go on Earth where people eat widely differ levels of salt it's it's very constant and it's uh we don't know why that is but but it it suggests that

01:21:12 there's maybe a sense of Regulation that we we want to eat this level of salt and the government says we should eat considerably less than that for health reasons and maybe they're right but uh what they did was they got rid of a lot of the Hidden salt so for for for the set level of salt that's in food the salt that's embedded in The Matrix of the food the hidden salt they reduced that enormously and then they gave people a salt shaker and said go nuts like do

01:21:42 whatever you want with the salt shaker like use it to your heart's content and the amount of salt that went was in the food they were eating from the salt shaker made the level of salt go way up but it never Rose to the level of what it would have been had they just given people a regular like cooked dish so one one suggestion there is that if we try to eliminate hidden salt from food and just give people salt that they can taste then they'll get the salt that they need to live and they'll get the

01:22:13 salt that makes them happy the the the problem with that though is that salt it does more than give food taste salt you know you I'm sure know infinitely more about this tonight but salt is functional in food it it does so much more than just make food salty and if you get rid of it like if you bake a zero salt loaf of bread it never Browns salt is necessary for Browning reactions and you know a loaf of bread that isn't browned is not you know a very tasty love of bread no it was it would be

01:22:44 terrible unless you dip it in something that is salty but but it doesn't it affects the texture and and all of those things as well so I mean salt you you can't cook without it simple but it also has a very is it's preservation right without salt you couldn't do early preservations like we do in Sweden like you cure you make a grax right it's the salt that preserves it it's shuder the salt that's preserves it you wouldn't be able to have any of those and it's I mean that's a function of

01:23:17 survival that's true but okay I want to return quickly to the Coca-Cola as ECT is I visited the World of Coca-Cola which is the at the coke headquarters in Atlanta a few months ago and as you go in they show you a video and this is kind of the what their expression of the brand is and so it shows all these people around America in different happy situations it's a veteran coming back from Afghanistan or something and a girl

01:23:48 in a diving competition and a couple you know someone's proposing to someone else and so and Coke is associated with all these happy moments so the idea is this sort of kind of coke is America Coke is about happiness and that's kind of woven into our perceptions on some level since we hear this stuff growing up yes another quick thing of salt like salt is so important to balance the the flavors in something that's why what people don't do as much is put salt in a

01:24:22 cocktail if you put salt in a cocktail and it's little like you need so little so you won't taste it but it completely changes how it taste so this is a little bit disjointed in our conversation now but this was about the complexities and the nuances of taste and what that means and one being a taste maker what does that mean in the world of interconnectedness virtually through social media and how is that having an impact on the evolution of taste through our

01:24:52 society oh man if only we had a doctor in philosophy to answer that question for us well this is like having followers I don't think anyone who respects his own mind and integrity wants to have followers so I don't know what I can say about that but um I say do it th said you know Listen to Your Own Drum but don't follow any external followers who especially ones who brand themselves as influencers and followers no but but I

01:25:23 mean that's iCal fact is you know when something goes viral yes people will will try it that wouldn't have tried it otherwise and it becomes a thing phenomena well is is similar to what you said before Paul about I think was it you were John who said that the children the child leads the way it's like hey look hey Mikey he likes it remember that was also a commercial which picked up on that if the other kids are interested I maybe I'll give it a try well I think it it it it pains to uh I mean all I think

01:25:58 that this can go all and this is highly relevant to everything we're talking about but it gets to the idea of decision making and and and and what do you choose what makes a little kid decide to pick up a vegetable it's watching other little kids so this is actually something that my wife Gretchen Chapman does for a living and uh she actually specializes in in uh Medical decision making and and has a sub specialty in in vaccinations and so she was very popular

01:26:31 during the pandemic because people wanted to know what leads someone to to get vaccinated or not get vaccinated and eggh heads like us have a tendency to I'm talking about the round table not you guys you guys aren't Eggheads but uh have a have a tendency to think that like facts information and logic will win the day so if you go to people and say Here's 100 articles and and and

01:27:03 trials in 10 million people that show that we can save your life if you get this shot and that just doesn't convince people that that that doesn't win the day it doesn't get it done in the end what convinces people to get uh uh a vaccine is if their brother got a vaccine or their mother got a vaccine their next door neighbor or their pastor says I I was just vaccinated and I think you should too it's the people you know and the people you like and the people

01:27:33 you trust when they go for something that influences you to want to go for it and of course this is a life and death decision right it's a major decision and as Dr Reed said you know putting things in your mouth is a life and death decision you know go going going back to that point there's a there's a part of the brain um in in frontal cortex right above our eyes that if you put people in a in a magnet where you can image the brain being activated when they do different things that that

01:28:04 it's clear that this part of the brain is involved in in in evaluating uh and and making decisions and and discernment so if you show people you know photographs of other human beings and say which one of these people do you think you'd most likely want to spend the rest of your life with if you were to make a decision decision to marry this part of the brain lights up if you say uh here's a series of houses that cost you know between 500 and2 million $500,000 $2 million which

01:28:35 one of these houses do you think you'd want to like spend 40 Years of salary on uh this part of the brain lights up and this exact same part of the brain lights up every time you put anything in your mouth anything your coffee the water cuz constantly asking are you about to die I I think what you just said really Bears on what Jonathan was asking about which is that social media may be so powerful because we get the pastor or

01:29:07 the person who's most relatable to you and it's a very intimate thing social media in the sense of like you see somebody who's like you broadcasting and so maybe that's one of the attractions of social media and why it's so influential it has that sort of intimacy but why sort of a widespread type of thing yeah but I think that's right because for example if it wasn't for that there wouldn't be a store dedicated to sell selling canned seafood products

01:29:37 in New York right if you would have asked five years ago do you think it's a store is going to open just to sell canned seafood in Time Square you would probably say never but the only reason why it does so and I think fairly successful is because social media and the product is colorful the C tints and all of that so it evokes something if you just say you're going to do it no one would come yeah I'm reminded of this well you you conjured an image in my mind Daniel

01:30:07 before when you talked about eating you know like hunter gatherers eating some U raw vegetation and taking the risk of being poisoned you know I actually made a joke okay well you go first we'll see whether it's poison or not right and of course no I think among the uh hunter gatherers you'd have to imagine someone would go and eat and that would be the tester and then you'd say oh there's a trend maker it's safe now I'm going to go ahead and do it right and I wonder whether that's what where taste making comes from in a way that we we look

01:30:39 toward our peers or our leaders to help lead the way right right take a risk taste leaders not thought leaders I think it's valuable just to have access to information you know to be able to go on YouTube or something and see a demonstration of some dish being made um that was not available 20 years ago and now you know you can do it so it's uh you know it's great on that level I think we're running out of time

01:31:10 here but um uh something brief um along the lines of connoisseurship and discernment and I assume we're all New Yorkers here I've been here for 30 years and and my thing was I did a lot of entertainment uh with clients so I had to figure out these wine lists in New York I didn't know anything I was 30 years old and I I knew what a great burgundy tasted like at that time that was about it it took me many many years to develop my pallet and now I've become a really not so great wine snob so my question is you know to to make that a

01:31:41 little more concise if you take a sample of I don't know 20 people or so just random samp 60 people whatever you like how many people could become a somaler that's a I I mean first of all you you you got to like to drink wine like as a basic thing right have alcohol and like a little bit of the effect of alcohol but I think actually you could probably train most people that's what to do it

01:32:13 it's yeah some people will get it faster some people will take longer but I pretty sure you can train anyone to go there and how how long will it take to train it's it's very hard to say but you know I we did have a wine program at the school that I was running and that program was I can't remember how many hours maybe 80 hours or something but within that you you can be pretty good but but the other thing that is that's

01:32:45 also an interesting question kind of on that for some people you know you can taste and you can describe in such but for someone that some people can pick out a flavor right away right they can say this is lemon or this is mint or whatever some people can't pick it out as as easily but it actually when it comes to cooking the person that can pick it out better does not necessarily

01:33:16 become a better cook because at the end of the day it becomes about how you can balance all those things not necessarily identify them so the same with wine so one so my point was one of the test is you got to pick be able to pick out with the wine so I don't think being able to do that necessarily makes you a better SAR I don't think I have the power to become a good SAR but I'm reminded of um

01:33:48 fellow maybe you R cross who's very interested in the difference between flavor and and taste and does Empirical resarch got Nam Barry Smith sure okay you know him okay anyway um um yeah so so I think he was once running an experiment on a bunch of us philosophers we had to taste these five white wines and little like little tasting things and say which one we thought was best or describe them some way so I tasted them and I don't

01:34:21 remember whether I liked not but I do remember this thinking you know one and four with the same wine and I was actually right M this is the only thing I'm very proud of my history of wine tasting that actually couldn't be fooled in a certain way but sense of power no I don't think I have that no but it goes back to I said before real quick like if you do blind tasting of wines you're going to pick one if you see the botles you're probably going to pick a different

01:34:51 one oh that's it well I want to thank all of all of you here today for a really spectacular little conversation and uh I hope you the audience will come back again and see us in I think it's three weeks the 13th of April where we're going to cover the sense of smell which I'm sure will overlap a lot with what we've talked about today anyway thank you again everyone thank [Applause]

01:35:22 you