Transcriber: Fierah Livingstone Reviewer: Radost Tsvetkova
Here's a piece of an orange.
I'm going to eat this.
And when I do,
I'm going to feel something,
I'm going to taste something.
A transfer of information is going to happen.
On the surface, it feels like something in that orange had taste.
And I sensed it, and that was it.
That's what that orange tasted like.
That's how I always thought it worked.
But what if I told you that the taste of that orange
was a tiny fraction of what was actually going on there,
and that there was a massive amount of additional information,
encoded in that experience.
Not just about the orange, but about me,
and my surroundings, and you,
and my past, present, and possibly my future.
What if I told you that eating that orange created a perfect snapshot
of exactly who I was at that moment.
Like, a more perfect picture than I could get from my own DNA.
Every day, we eat the ultimate personal status update.
Everything we are, and everything we have been,
is distilled and packaged into a single moment.
I want to know how we can access that information.
And what could we learn from it? And what could we do with it?
So let me tell you how I got into this.
Because my story starts in the late 70's in Austin, Texas,
when a short Iranian guy,
who kind of looked like a Persian John Lennon,
asked a tall daydreaming hippie out to dinner.
She was from a small town, and she was charmed
by his jumpy broken English.
And she decided that dinner would probably be exotic and delicious,
but at the very least it would be entertaining.
So over the next few years, my dad's English got way better,
and my mom mastered Farsi.
But regardless of what language
they were butchering, trying to talk to each other,
the conversation was always about food.
And that made me a confused, but well-fed baby.
(Laughter)
10 out of 12 of my first words were food words,
split between two languages.
And most of my memories from childhood revolve around food.
And now, it is my job to play with food all day.
And it's absolutely my parents' fault.
Because food and family, my family
shaped me from the very beginning.
But the defining moment in my life
was when my dad died a few years ago.
Now, this is not a sad story,
my dad was a wonderfully hilarious and ridiculous human being.
He was just not a sad story kind of guy.
But the morning after he died,
I woke up...
to this suffocating sense of dread,
that I would forget his hands or his voice, or his amazing ability
to mistranslate the punchline of a joke and still have you laugh,
usually at him.
And it's apparently a very common fear:
to worry about losing memories we cherish.
So I woke up that morning, and I walked downstairs to our kitchen,
and I found three of his brothers, my uncles, sitting around a table,
doing what they did best,
which was eating insane quantities of food.
So, I sat down and joined them,
and I remember having toasted bread with cheese, beets,
and leftover shish kebab,
which was kind of our usual thing.
And with one bite of that, memories of my dad hit me so hard,
that I remember taking my hands
and pressing them to my forehead just to get a grip.
Because all of a sudden, I was 10
and my dad was cooking for my friends and I at my birthday party.
And then I remembered being 16
and in a lot of trouble,
sitting at a very silent, awkward, and tense breakfast table
the morning after my parents found out
that I'd set a field on fire with illegal fireworks.
And then I remembered
the last time I ever had breakfast with my dad.
And it was wonderful.
All these memories came out of nowhere in perfect clarity
from a bite of leftovers.
So at the time, I had been studying biochemistry in college.
And I had fallen head-over-heels in love with the science of cooking.
So I was in this mindset where I thought,
maybe there's something about the science of eating,
some secrets there that would help me figure out what was going on.
And possibly help me strengthen this connection, that I felt to my dad.
So I started researching what we knew about it.
And the first thing I found was that in English
the word we use most often to describe food is "taste".
But taste is only the beginning.
It doesn't come close to capturing everything that happens when we eat.
And I found that scientists prefer another word,
a more powerful word, to encapsulate that entire experience.
And that word is "flavor".
Now my first reaction was,
"I thought taste and flavor were the same thing."
I used them interchangeably all the time.
And I definitely didn't think that flavor
was some profound philosophical concept that needed defining.
But flavor is profound.
We can't agree on exactly what it is yet.
But there's a general consensus
that it starts with all five of our senses.
So, the most obvious is taste.
It's the one that we switch in and out with flavor all the time.
But with just taste,
we wouldn't be able to tell or identify what foods are in our own mouths.
Because our tongues are stupid.
For real. You get sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami.
And that's it.
Smell is the sense,
that starts to layer on the characteristic identity of individual foods.
So: whether they're smoky, or floral, or fruity, or nutty.
And you can smell things two different ways,
both before,
and after you put food in your mouth.
And it's that second type of smelling,
that causes your brain to combine taste and smell
to tell what is going on.
What I mean by that is,
if I eat this piece of candy,
as it's on my tongue, I'm going to be tasting it.
And at the same time,
there're going to be aromas, traveling up the back of my throat to be smelled.
And the combination of the two
is how I figure out what this candy is.
So if I tried that same thing,
holding my nose,
it's almost impossible,
because I can taste it: sweet, sour - this is weird -
but that's it!
If I let go of my nose,
it's amazing, it's like, a spotlight turns on in my head,
and I can tell you, without a doubt, that it's lime.
So touch comes in, the third sense,
and it builds shades of contrast on the first two:
with temperature, texture, and burning,
and cooling, and numbing, and tingling.
All those sensations that we get from hot chili peppers,
and mint, and horse radish,
it's touch, not taste.
And at that point, you get hearing,
which accents the whole ensemble.
You get the percussive sounds of crunchy foods,
that echo through your jawbone.
And you get the soft hissing of anything bubbly.
And then, vision comes in and ties everything together.
Because visual cues set our expectations and our context for what we're eating.
Now, all these senses are not static.
They're constantly changing,
depending on your genetics and your current physical condition.
So I have a question, I have some questions:
How old are you?
Are you male or female?
What time is it?
Are you sick?
When was the last time you slept?
When was the last time you ate?
When was the last time you smoked?
All of this stuff affects how your sensory machinery works
at any given moment.
And that embeds another layer of information
in the data that they collect.
But at this point, that data is just raw, it's meaningless.
It's paint, not a painting.
Flavor is a painting.
And our brains are the painters.
And the process, by which the painting is created,
is where our knowledge just drops off.
And it's in this sort of gray area,
that I think this vast wealth of information lies,
waiting to be discovered.
And where I think I might find
my most profound connections to my dad.
So, what makes that painter paint?
We know a few things.
So, we know that the senses can talk to each other
through our brains.
So, when I see a strawberry,
if I see a more vibrantly red strawberry, it's going to smell more aromatic.
And if I'm eating potato chips,
if I hear a louder potato chip,
it's going to make it feel crispier in my mouth.
So there's this tug-of-war, that happens between the senses
in our brains
regarding data from the food.
But what about our surroundings?
What about information about my mood, and memories, and my focus, and attention?
What does that do for flavor?
Because we know it matters, we just don't know exactly how much.
And I think we might find some of those answers,
by looking at the concept of thresholds in our senses.
So, by thresholds I mean,
to perceive salt, there needs to be - I'm not going to eat this -
there needs to be enough salt in this piece of food
to set off sensors on my tongue.
And the same holds true for all of our other senses.
Whether something is aromatic enough to smell
or loud enough to hear.
So if we have thresholds for all of our senses,
do we have thresholds for the other half of flavor?
Like, is there a point, at which my memories, or my attention,
start to affect the flavor that I perceive when I eat?
So I think that, for instance,
eating seafood is way better when you're near the ocean.
What I want to know is,
exactly how far from the ocean do I have to be to affect flavor?
Or how vivid and grotesque do my memories of food poisoning have to be
to affect how I feel about milk?
Or how tired do I have to be to affect the flavor of coffee?
Or how in love do I have to be to affect the flavor of chocolate?
Now, with the senses we can actually lower our thresholds
and get more sensitive, better at detecting subtle signals.
So can we do that with the other stuff?
Are there ways where I can train myself to become more in tune with culture
or memory, and connect with those things better when I eat?
Now the craziest thing about our senses
is that even below the lowest threshold, our experiences are still affected.
Salt still affects your perception of flavor,
even when there's so little salt,
that you can't pick out the saltiness itself.
And there can be particles, tiny pieces of food in a sauce,
that are too small for your tongue to be able to read them and say,
"These are lumps."
And even though you cannot consciously pick them out,
they affect the way that fluid moves around in your mouth,
and they affect the texture.
So these things are in the background.
We're not even consciously aware of them,
and they're affecting our reality of this flavor perception.
And that leads me to the thing that I cannot get out of my head:
What if it all matters?
I'm serious! I'm talking about memories we've forgotten,
and emotions that have faded away,
and tiny details from our environment, that we don't even care about.
What if flavor forces us to take all five of our senses
and funnel it through the lens of who we are,
of everything that's happening and has happened in our lives?
What if flavor really is this ultimate personal status update?
It would contain a staggering amount of information.
So, all of our individual unique life experiences
would mean that no two people have ever experienced the same flavor.
It would mean that no one person
has ever experienced the same flavor twice.
And we could use that to find something like a fingerprint,
but even better and more specific,
because it would be talking about individual moments in a person's life.
And it could tell us how that person is doing, emotionally or physically.
And all of our interactions around food, and in the vicinity of food,
would mean that flavor could connect us
in some really wild ways.
So any time you eat in the vicinity of another human being,
you form part of that person's permanent flavor record -
flavor memory.
And we could use that to trace the dynamics between us.
Whether it's a relationship between two people
or a movement across entire cultures.
Reality check: This is going to be hard.
We're talking about the intersection
between our food, which is complex,
our bodies, which are complicated,
and our minds, which are usually crazy.
So to unearth flavor and use it
as a societal or personal litmus test or x-ray,
we're going to need to figure out a way to study all of this at once.
But luckily for us, it's possible now,
because this is the era of Big Data,
so computer people tell me.
I mean, we've figured out how to decode genomes
and map entire systems
that for a very long time we thought were impossibly complex.
So we may not be far from figuring out a platform, on which to study flavor.
But it doesn't even exist without people.
None of this matters without human beings, eating food.
There is no flavor, until that thing is inside of your mouth.
So if we're going to get anything from flavor,
even learn how to define what it is,
we need to get used to talking about it more.
So, I have a homework assignment:
The next time you eat anything,
experience what you're eating.
Check in with all five of your senses
and see what each of them is telling you
in contributing to your experience.
And then stop, and think about where you are
and how you feel.
And please, think about who you're with,
and what you remember.
Because the flavor that you experience
is going to be wrapped up in exactly who you are at that moment.
So take that moment,
to see what you might discover.
Thank you.
(Applause)