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ah. hello welcome to sophie co visionaries. me sophie shepard. not said chris to lettuce and area to play in london, red orange. it will, it turns out that enjoying the food we eat is not only a matter of taste. how does labor find its way from the tongue to the brain and how can it be manipulated? well, i ask joseph hughes of experimental chef and founder and low tie, sensory calling or lab, called kitchen theory. joseph, use it experimental shaft, founder of kitchen theory, multi sensory, calling your lab. great to have you on our show today. welcome. thank you very much for having me. it's pleasure to be alright, so you're calling are experiments, lie in the field of what you call gaster physics, right? physics of taste. and we used to think that areas of the tongue detect different

tastes, but turns out it's not really the case. so, how does our perception of taste words? i mean, how do i know that the bare is in my mouth are sweet, and coffee's bitter. well flavors core is a complex construct. so we tend to think of flavors being made up of 2 main elements. one is our section of taste as you mentioned. so everything on our tongue so salty, better our sweet, even something called mommy. and i sense of smell. and when you put the 2 together that you, you get the flavor. but actually from our research, we found the flavor as much more of a multi sensory and cross modal perception. so what that means is more about how all of your different senses come together. so not only how you, how things smell and how they tasted. also how they look and feel of them and even the sound of all of these very rich smoky sensory elements as weigh, eating and enjoying foods. all coming together in our minds to construct the

expectations for jo management, the enjoyment the dislike of the fruits where you take and so flavors of much broader topic than just looking at tafe essentially. so with pace like we have sweet, sour salted, bitter right. when i, let's say strawberry ice cream, if it were completely up to me, i'd only taste sweetness. yet i take a lot more than that. where does this more come from in my brain? well, the more will come from. number one, the aroma will pay a large role at night, so we all know if you have, if you're not feeling well or if you have a cold, maybe a sense of cell doesn't work so well. and when your sense of smell isn't working with eating foods, we can say the 3 doesn't have much flavor in the taste of much. you can keep adding sugar to your coffee or salt to your state can get sweeter or sophia,

but improve the flavor. and anyway, so a sense of cement is vital for when you're eating something like you said, strawberry ice cream strawberry is made up with much more than just sweetness. there's a lot of other molecules and compounds contributing towards flavor and extinguish, let's say strawberry. ready from raspberry or. ready from blackberries and that sort of vital element of us being able to kind of really make a distinction between. ready what strawberry ice cream and what's a raspberry ice cream if you didn't have your sense of smell, or if you pick your nose as you were eating them both, they probably both taste pretty much the same. they kind of sweet and maybe a bit sour in some way, but essentially we very difficult to tell the difference that was something like ice cream. the other element is. ready obviously the mouth fee and then the texture, and the creaminess, and all of these elements, what are coming together in your brain to give you and the temperature, let's say of the ice cream as well. so all of these things that your brain is

taking into consideration when it's trying the ice cream and that it's making judgments based upon. so if you have an ice cream and it's very fee or has kind of crunchy, it's kind of texture where the, it's kind of very frozen that might not be as pleasant as when the ice cream is nice and soft and smooth in your mouth and melts. really well, so it's not just about the sweetness of the soundness of the business. it's also about all the other factors that are going on make ice cream, so enjoyable. or if i got your idea right, food labor is the brain cost track rather than a sensory perception in our mouth through. are you saying basically that if i convinced myself somehow that lemons are sweet, they will taste sweet? no, because does the important thing with flavor, you've got an, a 2 elements working, one, your chemical senses. so your sense of smell and taste and bees are reacting to the chemicals in the food. it's giving you certain perception. then you have the other elements, as i said, like things like texture or sound or the visual of it. so if you were eating the

story ice cream, but it was blue color, while your brain isn't going to register it as being strawberry initially. so maybe when you try it, you will disconnect. maybe if you, if you see the screen, the blue, you might, let's say, for example, think it's blue break. and then when you go it, it turns out that it tastes of strawberry. well then your brain would be very confused by that. and so what would be better in a situation like that is if we want you to register it as being short re ice cream is that we make it as red as we can are as close to strong re color as return for your brain to be able to really kind of confirm its expectations, but no, it's not enough. you can change certain attributes in one sentence. another can confuse the other senses ok, maybe direct them towards making a point me different judgment. then you can convince your brain, but eating strawberry ice cream is a different flavor because there's too many physical parts of it that when it comes

to chemical sensors that can be fooled in such a simplistic way. i still wonder, like, how far can we manipulate our brain? let's say maybe i can't come in my cell, but can other people convince me eve, they know in detail how flavor building works. i mean can senses which produce the experience of labor in our minds, the manipulated and create a can link convincing illusion of labor. now, yes, so there are certain things you can do with food that will in some way or men. so as i said, maybe changing the color of the food can change your. ready ready affection, we know them other people using something like a green jelly, if you present them with something that's coming off the jelly and it's a green color. a lot of the time build, shoot that the flavors either something like line or and even if you flavor with something different, a lot of the time people find it difficult, difficult to kind of english or identify what it is because the sensory choose are

quite right and you can in some ways. ready even through things like sounds make foods taste crunchy, or pressure than they are. and when it comes to texture, you can also meant flavors so that you can kind of trick the brain slightly. but at the same time, it is very difficult to convince your product that you're eating one flavor. but is there a little kind of sensory things you can do? kind of what we do with the research is looking at how you can make these little sensory changes within the food that encourage people towards making maybe more sustainable or nutritious or healthier food choices. and this is specifically looking at with kids or hospitals or care homes, and looking at how we can design food experiences to encourage people to make better choices. quote, culinary iris, chef life chefs like you, right. they approach eating not just food consumption, but it's like

a multi sensory experience. and you mentioned smell. let's talk about that. when there is a big ball a soup. obviously the smell feels room. but when i eat, let's say, i don't know a potato chris, right? i maybe only smell it for a 2nd before eating it. how do i smell food that is already inside my mouth? past my nostrils, and shouldn't i lose the flavor? the minute are consumed? good. now you have 2 senses of flay to sensitive smell. one is called also nasal, which is as you said, the polar soup, when it's in the room and everything that you can kind of smell around you in the environment. and as you're lifting the soon up to, you know, as you can smell, that kind of aroma of the, all of that is what you would call ortho, nasal. and then once you put the soup into your mouth or whatever the food is, then you have something called retro nasal, which is all the, every time you swallow the middle of the go up through the back of your old factory system, which is your, what makes up your sense of smell, and that gives you

a 2nd perception of aroma. so this is why as well, you can smell something like quite a smelly cheese that maybe doesn't fell so great. that's quite pungent. if you think about and of unripe french bree or something like that, that's quite pungent smell. once you put it in your mouth, tastes delicious. and the flavor is great, and it doesn't smell the same inside as it does on the outside. and that's because you're chewing it, it's mixing with your saliva, and it's undergoing and processing as well. that is changing that aroma to construct in some ways. so what's important to understand is that you choose a smell very distinct in different ways, but essentially, even when you put the food in your mouth, you are still smelling it only with a. ready different, not necessarily directly through the notes. you know, i think it was like a decade ago, cadbury apt aide, their dairy milk, chocolate bars. and that was like a modest opera that ensued and people were claiming that it has become sweeter and

then food experts chuckle. a tear is still like way again. and then turn out that the recipe hadn't changed a bit. and they just made the edges a bit more around, which somehow made people sure that the taste had changed as well. so your, our sense of flavor is informed by the shape of the sweet, i'm eating, by my sense of vision. yeah, i mean there's all sorts of interesting associations that we. ready have the quotations in judgment for the fet, through our eyes, i mean as external psychology, this notion of visual dominance. so what we see with our eyes, that's judgements and expectations and a very kind of simple. ready example i could show you of that would be if i was to show you these 2 shapes. and if i was to ask you which of these you would call goober and which you would call kiki so. and kiki, if i say this one would be that will be key, can the other one will be blue bow. yeah. and about $0.98. well,

population will go with that kind of correlation. there's no right or wrong answer for it, but what's interesting is that we found that even if you talk about food and flavors are sweet creamy funky to, we saw comfort food flavors. most people will associate those with food and future tar acidic christy. crunchy sour kind of flavors will spicy favors most people associated with something like this shape or behavior. and what's interesting about that is, although there isn't a right or wrong answer, the majority of people who have that kind of association. so when we see foods that are maybe read or are enjoy yellow, maybe we assume that they going to be on the sweet side of things i received. is that a rounder and soft and looking maybe we assume again that they're going to be sweeter in some way versus if we see periods and other kind of colors or shapes. so there's all sorts of things that you can grease example that you just gave for the chocolate. that could be 2 reasons behind why people felt it was sweeter. number

one, the shape was round of the boss and maybe that means it melts differently on the tongue. maybe that's more surface area. maybe that's why people got a bit more sweet. and then the 2nd reason is maybe just because it looked around people assume from the visual presentation of the chocolate, that in some way it was sweet. joseph will then take a short break right now when we're back. we'll continue talking to joseph, use the experimental chef founder of kitchen theory and multi sensory. calling your lab talking about how to taste, find its way to our brain day with ah, in the 1920s infinity of several 100 african americans moved to the soviet union. and many of their descendants still lived in russia. law numbers

to be transfer. nice things back home. black americans suffer from racism and a complete lack of prospects. the not month will not be losing. shall one, buy also provide you with the food. so they decided to leave everything behind and start a new life in a country about which they knew almost nothing at all. some of the african americans who went to soldiers union in 1830 found great success, monet blown to me. and now almost a 100 years later, history is repeating itself. my great grandfather george times, went to russia on probably the worst time to go anywhere. why not mean? what if i come here?

i the the ah and we're back with jose, a few says experimental chef founder of kitchen theory, multi sensory call and they were laugh joseph. and then there is correlation of color and taste. i need talk about that quite a bit as well. we generally associate white with salty, black brown with bitter greenwood likes our red, sweet. where do these associations come from?

i mean, why, for example, we associate white with salt. if sugar is also white. yeah, no i, i completely agree and there is no you know, the research, if anything has identified that we have these associations that hasn't really specified why we have these 2 stations. and one of the reason being is that, you know, distant change from even region to region within the majority of people around the welcome. research will say, sorry about $0.75 was population will say, why is salty? black is green is sour, red, sweet. but then when you go into different parts of the world, so when we went to sweden, for example, most people felt like was salty because they were associated with sophie licorice. when we went to asia, they said in some parts they said like was salty because they were associating with things like social pistols. so there will be regional and kind of cultural differences that play into this in some way. but what's interesting is that the majority of people. ready and put into that kind of course choice of making

association between the color and the taste will kind of agree on what that is. and that could be maybe out of that choice. ready salt his white, so we go. it's kind of white being salty, blackish brown. you think maybe it's things like tea and coffee? maybe it's chart 3. we have a kind of fight. this is susan green being said, well may because it's our candy or lines. there's even a hypothesis that it could be more in a part of our brain, the thinks of unripe fruits being kind of green and sour. right? fruits being sweet and, and juicy and ready to eat. so we don't know exactly why there are these correlations exist, but what we do know is that they exist. and that's very interesting because then if you come to the design of food on the sign of food experiences, understanding those kind of relations can maybe help you with designing foods or. ready food experiences that encourage people to make better food choices, you know, will love food that also look more weird then paste like oysters,

some thinking harm or durian. i mean that asian fruit that it smells like hell, but when you taste it's really good. so for a certain fluids do is switch out certain sensors like visual sensor or sense of smell when it comes to enjoying them. or does it always come into package? know all the senses are constantly working away like apps and your phone in the background when you're using your sense of hearing doesn't tend to shut down. everything is constantly always taking away in the background. so it's maybe if you become more aware of it, and this is a big part of what we do with the dining experiences that our chefs table is encourage people to be more mindful of those sentences as a things are, in the case of something like dorian which you mentioned, you're right, it does smell pretty bad when you will kind of, you know, when you 1st approve open a new smelling it is reset off uneasily from the outside. but once you buy into it,

we'll then the retro nasal side of things kicks in. and all of sudden it becomes something that we enjoy in some way, but you know, it's important on send that the senses. if your sensors are functioning normally constantly working in the background and feeding your brain with this very kind of rich information. and if you don't like the, if you don't like to look them, chances are going to be very hard unless you change the way the way you've manipulated way even by trying doing something by just by changing the visual aspect of the presentation of it. even that may be enough to encourage someone to eat or enjoy it, but generally, all the sensors are constantly working. and what's most important, are they working together for people to have a really enjoyable, multi sensory food experience? being mindful, it's probably one of the most important parts of it because i think, you know, as we always say to people, you can eat a sandwich, sitting on a, on

a train between meetings, kind of rushing from one place to the other. and it's not going to taste as good as well as the same sand ridge, if you it says on a nice bench on a sunny day, like the night on the day that you have behind you. that enjoying is a nature and kind of taking in the texture and the flavor and the specifics of the sandwich. so i says, constantly working, but we don't always focus on what we're doing and a big part of what we do. a kitchen theory with most sensory dining is making sure that people really aware and focus on mindful of each of their senses. enjoying that meal. can there be a taste experience that is pure not enhanced by music, lights, shape, colors, etc. would that taste experience be more true to others? will i know how. busy she can really taste to fight without, let's say, looking at it at all. it may do, but then again, you know,

if you're doing that kind of like dining in the dark, where you don't get to see your food. most people find that quite helpful and interesting, but in the long time we don't really necessarily enjoy not being able to see our foods. i think we take you have to you only have to take a look at instagram, see how much people enjoy. cohen re, voyer is looking at food and the whole idea of pornography and all the content that's uploaded around to we enjoy human beings looking at food and it kind of opens our at the time to make us one, to engage with it, or not ones are engage with it and as for the other sensitive you district back and you have if you think about it in i guess the late eighty's early. ready ninety's, a lot of restaurants were going for much more of a kind of almost gallery style, white walls, white tablecloths, very stripped, right, very simplistic. and it was all. ready about the food that was on the plate and i think now it's something once more,

more people like seeing the open kitchen. people like the showmanship, they like the music to be hunger and fishing with the atmosphere and moved there. and they liked the, you know, the picture of the chairs and the tables and all of these things are important to our trees where the re registering the mindfully on is thing. but this is all information that's kind of being fed back to us. and i think for us to really be able to enjoy sitting in a blank room with a blank table with a piece of chicken in front of us. it's not going to be. ready anywhere near as enjoyable as enjoying that same piece of chicken and the company of good friends and the nice environment. and that's the kind of elements that really come together to give us, you know, dining is also very social thing. and it's a very sensory and social activity that we enjoy taking part in as part of the community as part of a group. so i don't think dining an isolation really gives you

a purer version of eating. this is why we do a lot of tests in the lab, but we also do a lot of we try and take these ideas from out of the lab and put them into the dining room because people taking truth in a lab and very stero conditions isn't necessarily how we taste things in the real world. and so that there's a big difference between the 2. i know that like your mission in general is using your knowledge about food and as a multi sensory experience. and then by that, inspire people to eat better, to eat healthier. so i understand, for instance, that the color of a plate can make chicken breast and broccoli on it look more appealing. what are the tricks that you could use to make people less sugar or salt? well, maybe or venting. so then we talked a little bit about kind of like shape and texture. so if i was designing,

let's say, a children's deserve some kind, maybe want to make sure that the packaging that it comes in is really red. because we said red is the color of sweetness. so read some paints and oranges and colors like that, that really scream sweetness. maybe you want to make sure the color of the, the color of the product, the yoga for ice cream itself, let's say, is deep tone of red. that kind of tells the brain, but there's that sweetness there that way. crating. then there's the shape of the packaging. maybe you'd want to go from the case of sweetness. you want to make it rounder in some way and more soft and kind of maybe the text or even the material to the packaging is made of. we know that people are holding something like a little bit or silk or something smooth and they'll find food sweeter and creamy, and smoother than if they're holding something rushed in hand like from paper or piece of ross piece of elk grove. so thinking even about the sign of the packaging

thing, the ice cream you'll get itself in terms of its texture and it's creaminess and smoothness. now that's not to say that you can take out all the sugar from this food, all the set and simply replace it with these other sensory elements. however, what we're saying is, even if you can make small reductions in the amount of sugar that you put, i was mentioning the color by changing the shape or the texture, or even what people are listening to is using it. all of these elements can combine together towards allowing us to make small reductions in things like salt and sugar across the board and see the small reductions can kind of over time and build up to something called yeah, it's funny. i noticed that as i'm move through life natural becomes tastier to me. you know, like teenagers can drink gallons of coca cola, but adult people around me, 6 sparkling water or flat water with lemon. and it's not just

a question of cellulite or, or, you know, chemicals in the coke. it just like it tastes better because it tastes simpler. does love, poor, chemical, enhanced food, weather with age, and in what other ways age fact, perception of taste. it so, so, so much like chemicals. as much as is what you just mentioned there, which is age. so when you are a baby, obviously you crave completely different nutritionally. you crave different things . and when you're a teenager, when you're, when your elderly, you know, getting older in life and even things like picture of food will change when you're a baby you use simply won't solid foods. and on the opposite end of the spectrum. and then when you're a teenager, let's say you love crunchy crispy correctly even into adulthood, but then as you get older, maybe again, softer foods become more comfortable and more enjoyable again. so there's, there's both that kind of physical requirements of food that will change as we kind of grow in an age. and then they'll be the nutritional requirements that we have.

we can see this and you know, people who are say women who are pregnant have different extra tional requirements or people who live in different parts of the world. different jobs, they'll have different nutritional requirements. so it'll change very much from one individual to another. but what's for sure, is that our pallets and our what safety a class and what we enjoy definitely changes over time. and one of the reasons would be because something like soda, when you mentioned there, as well as we get all that maybe we become more aware of the ramifications or the, the cost of drinking so much sugary, sweet carbonated stuff. my point is, is that as we. ready get older and start to maybe change our priorities. so when teenager do i really care as much about, you know, my body shape and way, well maybe that's where i'm starting to become more aware of it and maybe into i don't when i start realize that well, actually to the taste of coke as good as it is appealed to me quite as much because i have different priorities and what i find tasty now,

or how i classify good flavor or tasty foods. thank you so much for this wonderful insight into the world of food taste pallets of our taste. it's been really quite honestly talking to thank you so much. once again, you emphasize that this is a whole new science and it's not just food. i wish you all the best of luck and i hope we can do this in person one. most definitely i look forward to it. thank you so much. take care. thank you. have a great day on the

western civilization and culture have been infected by a minor good prizes. ideology over competent virtue over reason and democracy is only a good idea if and when it can lead to interest. then there's the issue of competence, competence used to be rewarded. now incompetent is overlooked with serving ideology hey, you know we've moved on from just printing lots of money and incurring lots of dad for dom reasons, to printing loss of money and incurring lots of debt for extraordinarily dom reason . the western civilization and culture have been infected by a mindset, surprises, ideology, over confident virtue over reason. and democracy is only

a good idea if and when it's sort of a lead interest. then there's the issue of competent competence used to be rewarded . now incompetent is overlooked with serving ideology the top headlines for this, our live on our t from doesn't come souls and empathy celebration in washington in protest against the new us security pipe with a u. k. and australia resulted in the loss of a lucrative submarine deal for powers on the program. we get reaction on the streets of the french capital. this is not the 1st time that the united states has taken contracts from us. they are very good at that. we do not respect anyone apart from themselves, they act like masters of the world. they shouldn't have done that because i think it front to on the same they would have complain giving the game away.