Five dimensions of perception

It has been a while since the previous edition, however there is a perfectly good reason for that. I have been absorbed by reading parts of the Modernist cuisine. A comprehensive work about almost everything you have ever wanted to know about preparing food, and couldn't even think of asking! It is a five part compendium of techniques and analysis of ingredients and preparation methods in order out find out why the things work the way they do in the kitchen. Former physicist Alan Myhrvold took it upon himself to develop this cookbook and with thousands of pages of stunning pictures and recipes it is absolutely gorgeous. I don't want to discuss the book, but rather take things one step further. The formalisation of the the art of cooking. It seems a rather daunting enterprise to describe the science of cooking in such a way, and it may not even be possible. When Bertrand Russell tried to formalise logic in the beginning of the previous century he encountered severe problems that changed views on logic forever. Nevertheless the journey often enlightens. Myhrvold took a right step, but it's possible to take one step more. Let's make a roadmap and see where we end up.



Food has everything to do with our senses and our biochemistry. We make contact with the world around us through our primary senses: One electromagnetic, two chemical, two pressure sensitive. They all gather information and in an evolutionary sense prevent us from becoming extinct. Therefore the brain which processes the information has certain hardwired like and dislike of particular information. In the preparation and serving of food we can play with these five (and actually more including the secondary senses) variables in a five(+n) dimensional foodscape.

Sight

The sense that takes up most 'processing power' from our brain is sight. Our sense of vision is limited to detect only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. However the human eye can still disentangle ten million distinct colours. Despite the mainstream proliferation of the trichromatic theory it is not clear how the eye/brain system actually perceives colours. Colour has an important part to play in our appreciation of food, it could point to poison or spoilage. In the kitchen colourants have been used in food to throw people off their initial guard, and to reinforce the taste of food. Red foods for example are described by testers as sweeter. At least there is the assumption that red foods will be more sugary.

Sound

If ears could taste. The sound food makes when we chew on it is actually important for the experience of that food. The perceived freshness of products depends for example on the water content (for fresh vegetables) or the absence of water (in the case of fries of crisps). Tests have been done with subjects eating crisps with headphones and louder cracking sounds were described as fresher by test panels.

Taste

The five tastes we distinguish with our tongue; salty, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami are of obvious importance to food perception. The sense of taste is very direct and cannot be eliminated easily. This chemical sense combines with the sense of smell to what is flavour.

Smell

The second chemical sense we have, but much more elaborate than taste, is smell. It can distinguish thousands of different substances in tiny amounts. A deconstruction proposed by John Amoore (proponent of the shape theory of olfaction) labels smells in seven different basic notes; minty, floral, ethereal, musky, resinous, foul, and acrid. (There is even a sixteenfold partition: Green (Grassy), Fruity (Ester-like), Citrus, Minty (Camphoraceus), Floral (Sweet), Spicy (Herbaceous), Woody (Smoky), Roasted (Burnt), Caramel (Nutty), Bouillon (HVP), Meaty (Animal-like), Fatty (Rancid), Dairy (Buttery), Mushroom (Earthy), Celery (Soup-like), Sulfurous (Cabbage-like). I'll leave it up to the reader to decide if this is a better one.)

Feeling

A gathering of more senses is usually summarised by feeling. Things like pressure, firmness, shape, temperature, texture, spiciness, dryness, fattiness, stickiness are generally covered by this. The list is large but probably exhaustive. The mouth-feel contributes to a large part of our food experience.

This food experience can be analysed in the 5(+n) dimensional universe of sensory perception. The +n refers to all the senses that contribute to the compound sense of feeling. With a bit of tongue-in-cheek they are more or less like the curled up dimensions of string theory as they hide in the other senses. The attributes like smell, and colour and sound can be deconstructed into different bases. In such a way we can make a sort of 'Fourier analysis' or deconstructing it to its basic parts.

Where do we go from here? Can we dissect the food experience in these five dimensions? Is it possible to place each food item in this space in order to classify its "foodie abilities"? Can we even synthesise?

It looks purple, but it's not an aubergine (eggplant for
north americans). Frankenfood! No, it is a colour corrected melon.

An apple, for example, is red, crunchy, sweet and sour, has an apple smell (mostly pentyl pentanoate), and a hard, slightly grainy but juicy texture. This is what makes it an apple. Can we not deconstruct the apple and make something different? We can mash it, heat it, remove the sugar, but what was once an apple is no longer. However, when we end up with the separate constituents we can recombine them at our own will. This approach has more or less been made by a new generation of cooks in the so-called note-a-note approach. (Started by Hervé This, the same chef who invented 'molecular gastronomy'.) Some may claim that this takes away the art in cooking. It is clear that one needs many - no, a huge amount - of chemicals, all combined in very intricate structures. A piece of beef could be made in the laboratory, but even then must be grown. Synthesising an intricate structure is not possible (yet), and may well never be. Nevertheless, just like electronic music, it could have its own charm. And if at some point we can get the food samplers and synthesisers to work just as well as the real thing... why not? The science fiction of Star Trek precedes us.

The deconstruction in a 5 dimensional space could let us play a bit to obtain strange, funny and unexpected experiences. Imagine preparing a dish with the consistency of fish, but coloured green, smelling like apple, yet slightly salty and savoury. What would we make of this? There is an almost tangible feeling to it, you could almost imagine something like this existing. Would it be any good? Do some things fit together only because we are used to them? Do apples always have to be sweet or red to taste nice?

Our food experience is exactly that, experience! There are a lot of foods that are not intrinsically nice. Beer for example. Do you recall the first time you tasted it? Most probably too bitter to be nice. It comes from experience to appreciate the delicate flavours of a dish. Then there are smells, colours and tastes for which there is aversion which might be 'hard wired' and built in our genes. In this case our biochemistry will dictate what we find pleasant or foul to help us survive.

A lot of people will have an aversion to the synthesis of food. 'It's not natural!', they will claim. The term 'Frankenfood' has already been used even for 'mere' genetically modified foods. If we understand more of the science of food, we can create even better products. Not everything that is natural is good for you and not everything that is synthetic is bad. They are not linked in that way. It is our experience that has to be developed. Don't dismiss out of hand that an applepie cannot be made and presented in a totally different way. Maybe we should no longer call it apple pie, but the result can be just as enticing, fulfilling and wonderful as that pie.

Another objection is that it is too complicated (read: expensive) to produce these kinds of food. But a little experimentation in the kitchen is just what chefs do. Myhrvold for example has already shown that a kitchen equipped with laboratory equipment can produce many more kinds of food than previously thought to be possible in a culinary environment. Even for home cooking methods like extraction of flavours, making textures and so on, are possible to a very large extent. All you need is a bit of ingenuity and experimentation. Of course we don't need to decompose everything to its fundamental elements (whatever they would be for food, because a single molecule may have a flavour, the texture only comes after combining it in larger structures). And partial reconstruction is precisely what cooks have been doing for a long time.

Call note-a-note reductionist if you like, but even thinking about all the other 'dimensions' gives us a chance to explore new experiences. A new frontier lies ahead! This episode was a bit more theoretical, but in the future I will execute what I sermonise and use these principles to produce some new dishes. The map is here, now let the journey begin.