The Chemistry of Food & Taste

00:00:00.400 | Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.840 | for everyday life.

00:00:09.480 | I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford

00:00:14.320 | School of Medicine.

00:00:15.760 | My guest today is Dr. Harold McGee.

00:00:17.920 | Dr. Harold McGee is a professor at Stanford University and world-renowned author on the

00:00:22.740 | topic of science and the chemistry of food and cooking.

00:00:26.080 | He has spent more than four decades researching and writing about this topic.

00:00:29.980 | His work is unique because it at once teaches us about why foods taste the way they do,

00:00:34.900 | as well as how to make essentially any food or drink taste better.

00:00:38.320 | I, like presumably most of you, absolutely love to eat, and for me, that's an understatement.

00:00:43.540 | I love food and eating.

00:00:46.000 | Today Harold teaches us about everything from how certain types of cookware, the bowls, the

00:00:50.320 | pans you use, even the utensils you use, can change the taste of those foods, as well as

00:00:55.780 | simple things like adding a pinch of salt to anything bitter tasting, including coffee and

00:00:59.960 | coffee, yes, coffee, changes its chemistry and flavor for the better.

00:01:04.880 | We discuss why.

00:01:05.720 | We discuss the preparation of meat and this thing that we call savoriness, or the umami

00:01:10.800 | taste, and how it's brought about by heating proteins in very specific ways, and how you

00:01:14.840 | can bring out more of those flavors, and how to get more of the healthy compounds, such as

00:01:19.320 | polyphenols found in chocolate and cacao.

00:01:21.800 | And we cover the much debated issue of whether more expensive wines are truly better than less

00:01:26.720 | expensive ones in terms of their taste, or whether it's all a function of marketing.

00:01:30.800 | So, if you're a seasoned cook, or perhaps you only know how to make a few basic dishes,

00:01:34.720 | or if your version of cooking is basically a protein shake and some oatmeal, this discussion

00:01:38.720 | with Harold McGee will let you understand the essential chemistry of food and cooking, and

00:01:42.680 | how to prepare food that is far more enjoyable.

00:01:45.180 | As I said before, I love to eat, and this discussion taught me how to make the foods I love so much,

00:01:49.720 | meat, cheese, vegetables, fruit, starches, et cetera, all taste far better.

00:01:54.640 | And since eating is a big part of life, not just a way to support our health, I'm certain

00:01:58.680 | that everyone will glean useful knowledge and practical tools from Dr. McGee.

00:02:02.600 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research

00:02:06.760 | roles at Stanford.

00:02:07.640 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about

00:02:11.960 | science and science-related tools to the general public.

00:02:14.760 | In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.

00:02:18.440 | And now for my discussion with Dr. Harold McGee.

00:02:21.480 | Dr. Harold McGee, welcome.

00:02:23.520 | Thank you, Dr. Huberman.

00:02:25.040 | I, like most people, love to eat.

00:02:29.000 | I also love food.

00:02:30.040 | I love the look of it.

00:02:31.040 | I love the smell of it.

00:02:32.120 | I love the anticipation of eating.

00:02:34.280 | And you've had a truly unique career.

00:02:38.840 | We'll talk a little bit more about your background later, but you've had such a unique career focusing

00:02:44.520 | on the chemistry of food, food interactions.

00:02:48.360 | And I must say, even just knowing a little bit about your work, you've changed the way

00:02:52.440 | that I think about even like the sorts of metals that I might use to prepare my food, because

00:02:57.240 | it turns out these things are all impacting one another in not just small ways, but really profound

00:03:03.240 | ways that impact our experience of food and taste.

00:03:06.120 | Dr. Harold McGee: So just to kick things off, is there any one wild food interaction,

00:03:14.840 | chemistry fact that you just particularly find interesting?

00:03:19.240 | Dr. Harold McGee: When I started writing my book about the chemistry of cooking,

00:03:24.360 | I didn't know that much about cooking or about chemistry.

00:03:29.400 | Dr. Harold McGee: I was kind of learning on the fly, which was part of the fun.

00:03:32.680 | And I read when I was writing about eggs that if you're going to make a foam of egg whites to

00:03:40.680 | make a meringue or a souffle, so you put the egg whites in a bowl and you whisk them until they

00:03:48.120 | essentially form a solid from that liquid, a solid consisting of air bubbles trapped in the liquid.

00:03:59.400 | And that makes it act like a solid. Amazing kind of transformation. And when I was looking at

00:04:07.720 | what cooks had said about this process, they said you should use a copper bowl to do that whipping.

00:04:15.320 | Dr. Harold McGee: And so I looked in the chemistry of eggs literature, of which there was a fair

00:04:21.640 | amount actually, for some kind of explanation as to why that might be the case and couldn't find one.

00:04:28.760 | And so I decided, well, it's probably an old cook's tale, somebody who had a copper bowl and used that

00:04:34.760 | and thought that was better. And so I didn't think anything more about it until I was preparing my book

00:04:40.440 | for publication looking for cheap illustrations because I couldn't afford good ones. And I found

00:04:47.640 | an old engraving of an 18th century French kitchen. And there was a boy acting as though he was whipping

00:04:57.240 | something in a bowl. And the bowl kind of looked like our modern copper bowls with a little ring to hang

00:05:06.040 | the bowl on the wall. And there was a key that came along with the illustrations. And the key

00:05:12.520 | actually said, whipping eggs in a copper bowl to make taste trees. So I thought, if the French have

00:05:21.000 | been doing it for hundreds of years, maybe there's something to this. Maybe I should actually test it,

00:05:27.000 | which was a really important lesson for me, test everything. I gulped and bought a copper bowl

00:05:34.760 | because they're expensive and did a side by side. And the difference was tremendous, different color,

00:05:42.760 | different texture, different consistency in the mouth, totally different experience. And so it was that

00:05:52.840 | that realization that a cook's, what I thought might be an old cook's tale could actually have a kernel of

00:06:05.560 | scientific chemical truth to it. That to me was a mind blowing and career changing experience because

00:06:13.640 | from then on, I didn't take anything for granted. I always had to give it a try.

00:06:18.280 | I love it. I recently started drinking water out of a copper reusable bottle mostly because I needed a

00:06:28.520 | water bottle and there was one for sale where I happened to be and it was copper. And I rather like

00:06:33.240 | the taste. There are all sorts of theories about copper being better for us health wise, et cetera.

00:06:38.440 | I haven't explored those to see if they're actually true or if it's nonsense, but

00:06:45.160 | I do like the look of it. Is copper used for the preparation of any other foods specifically in

00:06:52.600 | order to extract the best flavor from those foods or liquids?

00:06:55.720 | Copper is actually used in jam making, jelly and jam making. And the reason for that is that if you use

00:07:05.960 | any other material you end up messing with actually almost everything in there because the temperatures

00:07:15.640 | are pretty high, they're above the boiling point, but in particular the sugars. And if you break sucrose

00:07:22.840 | down to glucose and fructose then, you know, the behavior of the material changes a lot, not necessarily for

00:07:30.600 | the better. And it turns out that copper actually inhibits the breakdown of glucose, of sucrose into

00:07:38.040 | glucose and fructose. And so again, for generations, cooks, French cooks in particular, have used copper bowls

00:07:48.040 | to make their preserves. Wow. Copper is used for a variety of things, it sounds like. And people have

00:07:55.480 | arrived to this through what sounds like kind of an unconscious genius combined with experimentation.

00:08:03.480 | When scientists got interested in cooking, they sometimes made claims and suggested changes that

00:08:13.320 | in fact were terrible ideas. The traditional way of doing things was actually much better.

00:08:19.960 | They had come up with a partial understanding of what was going on. And on the basis of that partial

00:08:27.160 | understanding decided that they needed to correct cooks who, of course, weren't as smart as they were

00:08:33.960 | and get them to change. And so you can see in the middle of the 19th century, some cookbooks published

00:08:40.920 | in England and the US having a subtitle, you know, the back in the day long subtitles were enjoyed. And so

00:08:50.120 | the subtitle would be "In which the theories of Dr. Liebig have been as much as possible applied in the

00:08:58.440 | recipes." And Liebig was, he was a genius biochemist, but on cooking, he kind of took his genius for

00:09:07.880 | granted and was wrong. The cooks knew better. Yeah. I love this notion of unconscious genius that a field of

00:09:15.960 | people who are experimenting without any formal rigorous coursework in a given area like chemistry

00:09:21.960 | can, can arrive at, at truths without understanding the, the mechanistic basis of those truths. You know,

00:09:28.200 | actually, I think a lot of what we face nowadays in the, the sphere of health and nutrition is about that

00:09:33.560 | conflict. You know, there are papers identifying mechanisms, but then they don't play out in clinical

00:09:38.440 | trials, which is the, you know, and then there are people in the real world who are doing things for which

00:09:42.760 | there's really no peer reviewed research, but you get the sense that maybe they're onto something,

00:09:47.480 | you know, so it's a very interesting intersection of, um, uh, expertise and, uh, and real world results.

00:09:54.520 | Yes. Yeah. Or sometimes collision of the, of the two.

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00:13:32.840 | As I mentioned before, I love to eat and we could talk about any of the different major food groups

00:13:40.440 | as an exploration of the chemistry of food. But I think one of the more interesting ones is the

00:13:46.680 | combination of heat and food, right? And very often people will ask me, you know, like,

00:13:53.560 | is microwaving safe and things like that. And I didn't ask me anything recently where I said,

00:13:58.520 | yes, indeed, microwaves are safe. You probably don't want to stand right in front of it in case

00:14:02.120 | the mesh protector isn't as effective as it might be. But yeah, it's heating things up from the inside.

00:14:06.920 | But we have all these different ways to heat up food. And we have ways to heat food and then cool

00:14:13.800 | food as a way to enhance the flavor of food. When it comes to the use of heat in food, what do we know

00:14:20.680 | about the history of the use of - I imagine it was fire first? But this is a vast, you know, topic,

00:14:28.600 | but what are some of the interesting ways in which heat interacts with food at the chemical level to

00:14:34.280 | allow us to enjoy that food more? Yeah, so in the anthropological literature, of course, the focus is on

00:14:45.000 | increasing caloric intake and being able to consume materials that we wouldn't otherwise be able to

00:14:52.520 | consume as efficiently. So that's the sort of practical side. But my feeling is that the use of

00:15:01.880 | fire wouldn't have caught on if it didn't make foods delicious, more delicious than they'd been in the first

00:15:08.200 | place at the same time. And in fact, probably people early on learned to associate particular sensory

00:15:19.720 | experiences with the nutritional value of what it was they were eating and maybe even the safety.

00:15:26.360 | Because, you know, if you kill a mammoth, you've got a lot of leftovers. And what do you do with them

00:15:34.120 | so that they don't spoil and make you sick later on? So the terrific thing about the application of heat to

00:15:43.320 | foods in general is that they - heat kind of takes the materials of which the food is made

00:15:51.880 | and rearranges them, and in many cases breaks molecules down into smaller molecules that we can actually

00:16:03.800 | detect with our senses of taste and smell. So proteins, carbohydrates, fats, that's what we think of as

00:16:15.160 | constituting food. But they're all macromolecules. They're way too big for us to experience directly.

00:16:24.440 | And so one of the things about cooking that's most important is that cooking will take those macromolecules

00:16:33.160 | and break down enough of them to produce small molecules that we can detect with our senses of taste and smell

00:16:42.680 | and enjoy simply for that reason. You know, we have - my feeling is that we have our senses for them to be

00:16:54.360 | stimulated. And so in many cases, even if the stimulation is borderline pleasurable or maybe

00:17:05.640 | even slightly unpleasurable, we still enjoy the fact that we're being stimulated, that something is going

00:17:12.360 | on with our senses of taste and smell. And cooking does that in spades. It takes these molecules with no taste

00:17:21.560 | or smell and turns them into bouquets of various kinds depending on the original material.

00:17:27.960 | Yeah, when I think about a piece of steak and if I were to take a bite of it raw,

00:17:35.480 | it would taste very different cold versus room temperature. And then

00:17:42.200 | raw steak, which to me is not appetizing, cooked even just a bit, especially if it were seared on the outside,

00:17:50.520 | now becomes pretty darn good. Cooked it a little bit more like medium rare with a really nice sear

00:17:58.920 | on the outside. I think they call it Pittsburgh char. Anyone that likes the outside of the steak really

00:18:03.880 | nice, nice and charred and the inside rare, it's Pittsburgh char, if the chef knows what they're doing,

00:18:09.720 | is absolutely delicious. So what's happening there? You said that heat changes the molecular structure,

00:18:19.160 | but what about those changes allow us to taste it more, not just differently? Because as you said,

00:18:27.320 | raw steak is pretty bland. I mean, most of us probably think of that as kind of gross, but it's also kind of

00:18:33.640 | bland compared to when it's cooked. What's happening? What's being released into the steak?

00:18:41.400 | Yeah. So what happens is that the materials of the tissue, and in the case of meat, it's mostly protein

00:18:50.440 | and fat. Those macromolecules, large molecules that are too big for our senses to register, get broken apart.

00:19:02.120 | And that's because heat is energy. Energy agitates things. It agitates molecules at the surface of the

00:19:13.000 | food enough to break them apart into much, much smaller pieces. And it's those pieces that we're

00:19:20.120 | experiencing when we take a bite. The pieces are not only much smaller, but they're also reactive so that

00:19:30.440 | they can react with each other. They can react with oxygen in the air surrounding the food.

00:19:35.640 | And so we end up with, you know, if you did an analysis of the aroma coming off of

00:19:44.360 | some steak tartare and coming off of a Pittsburgh char, you're going to have very, very little

00:19:55.320 | noticeable, even with instrumentation. But off of the steak, a tremendous amount of volatile molecules,

00:20:05.560 | which are the ones that our noses detect. And then also molecules that are small enough to stimulate our

00:20:14.200 | taste receptors. So we have a handful and they, we think of them as responding to sweet, sour, salt, bitter,

00:20:23.480 | umami tastes. We, we encounter those tastes and all kinds of things in everyday life. But when you

00:20:32.760 | cook a piece of meat to a high temperature and do a good amount of damage to that outer

00:20:42.200 | molecular surface, uh, molecular surface, you generate molecules that can stimulate those receptors,

00:20:47.560 | even though they themselves are not sugars or salts or, or whatever. What I like to think of is just the

00:20:55.560 | alchemy of, uh, of heat. You know, you, you take this material, you add energy and you transform it in

00:21:04.280 | ways that are delightful to us. So if I understand correctly, even though, um, the molecules in meat,

00:21:12.600 | uh, typically wouldn't stimulate the sweet receptor. When you cook steak, it starts to stimulate the sweet

00:21:20.520 | receptors because of the change in those molecules. You, you, you've reduced their size and you've changed

00:21:25.400 | their, their configuration depending on which recipe you use. Yes. And, and you're also generating, uh,

00:21:32.840 | where once you might have had, um, you know, uh, uh, well, these days our enumeration of molecules

00:21:41.480 | has gotten so good that who knows exactly how many are in that raw piece of meat. But, uh, whatever that number

00:21:48.840 | is it's multiplied many fold by the application of heat simply because it's taking those materials,

00:21:55.000 | breaking them apart and getting them to react with each other. Um, and, uh, the result is, uh, just, uh,

00:22:03.320 | an explosion of sensory, um, uh, information that simply wasn't there before. We have to talk about umami.

00:22:12.440 | I mean, and not just because the name is fun to say, but, um, this, uh, receptor that seems to, uh,

00:22:20.120 | bind molecules, um, that give us the sensation, at least in part of savoriness. Uh, I mean, to me,

00:22:28.440 | few things are as delicious as the, um, braise that comes off of meat in a cast iron pan

00:22:39.080 | that I would literally scrape that stuff up onto the spatula and eat it if, uh, no one's looking.

00:22:45.800 | Um, and anyone that thinks that that sounds gross, I mean, it is absolutely delicious. I mean, it is

00:22:53.000 | like the, the, the pinnacle of like why we eat protein. That's why it feels so darn delicious to me.

00:23:02.520 | Um, and the, the intensity of flavor per unit of, uh, whatever that stuff is, um, is so high.

00:23:08.920 | But then here's the thing. If you were to wait two hours and come back and pick up one of those little

00:23:15.000 | black, you know, um, crumbs of braise and put it in your mouth, it kind of like punch you in the mouth.

00:23:22.360 | And it tastes like kind of awful. Like you were licking the, um, the grill of a barbecue from two

00:23:26.920 | days before. Not good. So what's going on with, with braise and with umami? And we can talk about

00:23:33.720 | a lot of non-meat, um, uh, ways to stimulate umami, but such a, an interesting aspect of food and taste.

00:23:40.440 | Yeah. Yeah, it is. And something that when I started writing about cooking in the seventies,

00:23:47.800 | no one believed it existed except for the Japanese scientists who were living in the country where it

00:23:55.240 | was discovered in the first place. That's right. They were the first to molecularly clone the umami

00:23:59.880 | receptor as far as I know. And they were also the first to claim that there was a, uh, sensation,

00:24:06.120 | taste sensation that was not sweet, sour, salt, or bitter, uh, which is why they were disbelieved in

00:24:13.640 | the West for, for decades and decades. And when I, uh, as I say, when I started writing,

00:24:19.160 | that was the standard view. Japanese have this weird idea of something, uh, a basic taste, um,

00:24:26.600 | that's just simply not correct. Um, and I, I went to a couple of meetings in Boston and remembered this

00:24:32.680 | being debated among, uh, uh, uh, chemists. First, I'll just say that, uh, I know exactly what you mean

00:24:39.640 | about the, that flavor, uh, of something that you apparently feel guilty about enjoying because

00:24:46.440 | you said you would, uh, uh, scrape it up when no one was looking. When I was growing up, there were,

00:24:52.280 | we have a family of four children. Um, my mother would occasionally make a, uh, an oven baked chicken,

00:25:01.560 | cut up into pieces and, um, the drippings would drip down to the pan and brown. And after the meal,

00:25:08.760 | my siblings and I would line up for a spoonful of the scrapings. Delicious. I can, I, I can smell it

00:25:17.800 | and taste it just a bit. Yeah. Anyone that's cringing at that, you have not tasted proper braise from meat.

00:25:24.840 | Uh, it's, uh, assuming you is consume animal, uh, proteins. It is, um, absolutely delicious.

00:25:32.920 | Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can, I can, it just takes me back. It's Proustian to go back to that.

00:25:39.480 | Uh, so, uh, to make a long story short, the Japanese were shown to be correct, uh, by Western standards.

00:25:49.080 | They always knew they were correct, but, uh, by Western standards, they were proved to be correct

00:25:53.560 | when a, uh, receptor for, uh, glutamate was discovered, uh, in the 2000s. Yeah. Early 2000s.

00:26:03.400 | Uh, so finally, Western scientists were on board. Um, meanwhile, cooks, uh, had been on board for a long

00:26:12.360 | time, uh, because they're always looking for ways to make their food more delicious. And they'd heard about

00:26:18.040 | this. Some went to Japan. They came back. And, um, so, uh, umami is, um, a sensation that's a little

00:26:29.480 | bit difficult to, uh, to describe compared to sweet, sour, salt, and bitter. Um, savory, I think, is the

00:26:38.760 | word you use. And that's the, sort of the, the, the usual nomenclature. Um, when you try to characterize it

00:26:45.400 | further, it's, it's, uh, a feeling of fullness and length. So the, the flavor, there's just a lot of

00:26:54.440 | it there and it sticks with you for, for a while. That's what we mean by length. Yeah. Got it.

00:27:00.840 | I feel like also it, um, it doesn't occur just in my mouth, you know, and I'm not, um,

00:27:09.720 | like very nuanced about food. I mean, I love food, but, um, I'm not somebody who can really,

00:27:15.160 | I don't consider myself a food connoisseur. I just know what I like and what I don't like, but I feel

00:27:20.760 | like the, the taste of something with a lot of umami flavor actually spreads throughout the body.

00:27:26.680 | It's like a, a whole head experience maybe, maybe down to the chest. It's not restricted to like a

00:27:32.680 | location in, on the tongue or something like that. Later, we'll talk about this myth about restricted

00:27:38.280 | receptors on the tongue. But, um, yeah, one has to wonder if, if, um, because the umami, um,

00:27:48.040 | receptor stimulation is so closely tied to savoriness and protein and because protein was

00:27:53.160 | presumably scarce in evolutionary history, whether or not there's some reward pathways that are like,

00:27:58.200 | oh, this is, this is good to, because people had to work really hard under dangerous conditions often

00:28:04.440 | to get umami stimulation. Yes. Yes. Yeah, that's right. And, um, uh, I, I would also say that, uh,

00:28:14.440 | from at least my reading of the, the literature, we only know a tiny, tiny bit about what's going on

00:28:22.120 | when we smell things and taste things. So we know the, the initial step, there's a receptor on our tongue,

00:28:28.280 | that responds to glutamate, which, which is associated with this sensation. What happens

00:28:34.040 | after that? Who knows? Um, and, and there's also the fact that glutamate is an important, uh, molecule

00:28:42.040 | in the body for signaling. So who knows what kind of, you know, crosstalk there might be between the,

00:28:49.080 | the receptor on the tongue and the rest of the body. Um, and people have also in the last,

00:28:55.800 | what, 10 years or so discovered, uh, taste receptors for all the tastes in our GI tract.

00:29:02.600 | Yeah. That is so interesting. I, and so important too, because, um, well, maybe that's the sensation

00:29:08.440 | that, um, things are, uh, that the umami taste is, is much deeper. Yeah. Is that, that they're in the

00:29:15.240 | esophagus and presumably maybe even into the stomach? Yeah. Yeah. Um, wild. I heard, um, that tigers

00:29:23.960 | have something like 10,000 fold more umami receptors than humans, but they have no sweet receptors. I don't

00:29:32.120 | know if that's true. Usually when you hear something like that, it's likely to be not completely true, but

00:29:37.960 | who knows, we look it up and, and someone will tell us in the comments, um, which upon hearing made me

00:29:44.680 | immediately want to try being a tiger for one day. Like, I can't even imagine how good, um, meat tastes

00:29:51.240 | to, to carnivores that have that density of umami receptors. Yeah. But it raises another question too,

00:29:57.160 | which is assuming that's true with the absence of the sweet receptor, perhaps make meat taste completely

00:30:04.360 | different. You know, in other words, is there crosstalk between these receptors so that when you eat

00:30:09.080 | something that's like this spoonful of, of braise drippings off the, the, the roasted chicken, um, presumably

00:30:17.960 | there's a, some stimulation of the sweet receptors. If you only had umami receptors, maybe it wouldn't taste good

00:30:24.440 | at all. Is the chemistry of food occurring in the mouth, not just, um, in the food itself? Wonderful

00:30:30.120 | questions. I don't know where to begin exactly, except to say that when you, um, brown a piece of meat or,

00:30:37.480 | just cook it to a high temperature so that the outside of the meat changes color, uh, that, that color change

00:30:47.240 | is an indication of some, uh, uh, uh, a group of reactions called the Maillard reactions, after the

00:30:55.560 | guy who, uh, actually didn't quite address this, but he got, he got his name associated with it. Anyway, um,

00:31:03.960 | the Maillard reactions are essentially reactions between fragments of proteins and fragments of carbohydrates

00:31:11.240 | and fats. And, uh, uh, the, uh, reaction pathways are really complicated. They still haven't been worked

00:31:19.960 | out completely, but they generate, uh, a bunch of different classes of products. And among those

00:31:27.320 | products are sugars. So you don't start out necessarily with sugars, but if you've got proteins

00:31:34.360 | and fats, you can make sugars simply with the alchemy of, uh, applying heat. So that's part of

00:31:42.280 | what's going on. And I would say that, um, yeah, tigers are missing out because there's an interesting

00:31:49.320 | dimension of flavor to, to meat, uh, that, that has been cooked. There's the chemistry of cooking and then

00:31:56.840 | there's the chemistry of enjoying, of tasting, uh, consuming. And it turns out, uh, that that's

00:32:04.760 | complicated in, in its own right, because first of all, we're presenting our sensory apparatus with,

00:32:11.320 | um, the most complex materials that they're going to encounter. Nature does not, uh, generate this kind

00:32:19.240 | of complexity. Uh, we're, we're doing it for ourselves. And that's part, I think, of the, of the

00:32:25.800 | great pleasure that we take from it. Um, but it also turns out that in the mouth changes can take place.

00:32:34.600 | And this is actually, it was actually first, uh, noticed by, uh, experts in wine because they found

00:32:44.600 | that when they, um, put a raw grape in their mouth to taste, you know, what, what, what's the

00:32:52.760 | characteristics of the, of this particular grape and how does that carry over into the wine?

00:32:58.120 | What they noticed was that initially there's just the taste of the grape, but then as they sit there,

00:33:03.960 | other flavors begin to, uh, come. And because they were experts in wine tasting, they were able to,

00:33:13.000 | uh, figure out which ones they were. And they, they were some of them molecules that you find in the

00:33:19.960 | finished wine and it's just in your mouth. You just chewed it. So it turns out that there are in, um,

00:33:28.120 | all kinds of foods, um, molecules that are, uh, called conjugates, you know, they're, uh, uh, kind of

00:33:37.000 | business end of the molecule and then usually attached to a sugar of some kind. And, um, when we

00:33:44.440 | put something in our mouth and we have enzymes in our mouth, uh, those enzymes can go to work on things

00:33:51.480 | like conjugates and free up, um, um, the sugar from the, uh, rest of the molecule and the rest of the

00:34:01.240 | molecule can be aromatic. And, uh, it's known now that the Maillard reactions generate not only sugars,

00:34:10.360 | but conjugates. And so, uh, there's, there's just a lot going on and it's, it's, uh, uh, I think one of

00:34:19.080 | the best arguments for, uh, enjoying your food slowly because you never know what's going to kind of

00:34:29.000 | show up in your mouth, uh, after, you know, 20 or 30 seconds in slow down, enjoy every bite and,

00:34:37.240 | and notice what's happening, uh, because it's, uh, it's often a really dynamic, uh, experience.

00:34:43.480 | We're going to have a hard time convincing many people to slow down their rate of eating. However,

00:34:49.000 | promise them that a richer experience of the food and not just that they're trying to eat less or

00:34:54.520 | something, which is the usual reason that people hear they should chew their food,

00:34:58.120 | maybe improve digestion as well. Um, they might be incentivized to do it. I should point out of all

00:35:03.560 | the senses, um, it seems taste and its relationship to food. We have, um, more control over that

00:35:11.400 | experience. Like let me state this differently. If I were to do a podcast on, you know, that simply by

00:35:18.440 | looking around the world differently, you could start to actually get new visual perceptual abilities.

00:35:23.640 | That'd be pretty exciting, but I'm sorry, but that's not true. It doesn't work. I mean,

00:35:27.720 | you could enhance your, you know, some discrimination of certain things if you were trained to look for

00:35:32.200 | them, but that can change your visual perceptual abilities. But with taste, it sounds like we,

00:35:36.200 | we have the ability. So when you say slow down, do you mean, um, slow down the chewing, take pauses after,

00:35:43.320 | um, bites, um, all of the above?

00:35:47.320 | Yeah, all of the above, because even after you swallow, there are residues in your mouth and at

00:35:53.000 | the back of your mouth. And that's what the wine experts noticed was the change in those residues.

00:35:58.680 | So it's not that they chewed on a grape and then kept it in their mouth for a minute. Uh, it was just

00:36:04.200 | what was leftover. So the leftovers can be as delicious as the main course.

00:36:08.600 | All right. I'm going to start taking pauses between at least food types. Um, I've sometimes had the

00:36:16.040 | experience of eating something particularly delicious. Um, for instance, uh, meat, um, or fruit or

00:36:24.920 | vegetables. I love all the, the, I'm an omnivore. So I love all these things, but I'm so satisfied with

00:36:32.120 | what I just ate that I don't want something sweet right away because of the collision that occurs

00:36:38.920 | between foods. Am I alone in not liking dessert, but liking dessert foods on their own at a separate

00:36:46.920 | time? Am I, or am I just like on a desert island of experience here? No, I'm actually, uh, completely the

00:36:54.200 | same. Um, I, uh, I, uh, I would prefer to have another half glass of wine than dessert, uh, just

00:37:02.840 | simply to prolong the experience of the, the, the main part of the meal. Um, and desserts, sweet things I

00:37:10.920 | enjoy, but not after, um, a big meal of, of other things, savory things. Um, my wife, uh, who's Japanese,

00:37:21.640 | says she has, uh, a separate mouth and a separate stomach for desserts and she can go right into it

00:37:28.520 | after, um, after the, the main course. But yeah, I, I prefer not to. I feel like many people eat dinner

00:37:37.000 | just to get to dessert. Let's actually talk about food order in the meal. Um, many years ago, uh, I had

00:37:45.800 | a girlfriend who was from the south of France, from the Perigord. So she grew up in what is arguably

00:37:51.560 | one of the food capitals of the, of the planet. You know, people think French food Paris, but actually

00:37:59.480 | people in the south of France are so serious about food that her family would spend most of the day

00:38:07.720 | and the night and the meal talking about the next meal or a previous meal. Um, they would search for

00:38:14.600 | mushrooms with binoculars. If they spotted one in the neighbor's yard, they were like perplexed as to how to,

00:38:21.480 | negotiate for that mushroom. You couldn't actually go get the, steal the mushroom. That would be a,

00:38:25.720 | like a cardinal sin. I mean, they are so serious about food, every aspect of it, as you know.

00:38:32.360 | And we used to get into these intense arguments about the order in which one is supposed to eat

00:38:37.960 | food. And, you know, in her mind, it was soup first because it actually prepares the gut

00:38:43.960 | and then always salad last. This whole notion of eating, uh, salad at the beginning of the meal was

00:38:52.600 | like heresy to, uh, to, uh, I mean, to everything that she had known and, and conceptualized about food.

00:38:59.400 | So I have to believe that whether one likes French food or not, that they, they're onto something that

00:39:09.480 | when it comes to digestion, when it comes to being able to really taste the full array of flavors in

00:39:16.680 | a food that we probably should be doing soup first, then an appetizer, then an entree, and then salad

00:39:23.240 | last. And if we're not consuming an entire, you know, meal of that sort, that salad shouldn't be eaten

00:39:29.240 | at the beginning of a meal. Are they right? I'm pretty sure that she was right.

00:39:33.720 | She was right about most things.

00:39:35.720 | Very good question. And I guess my answer would depend on the audience.

00:39:40.920 | So, and I say that because of course, if you go to a banquet in China, everything is served

00:39:48.520 | simultaneously. Really? They just slide it all out in front of you? Yeah.

00:39:51.960 | And do people eat everything and kind of mishmash? Or there may be, um, phases,

00:39:57.640 | but you're presented with many, many different dishes at each phase.

00:40:02.040 | Oh, I would be so overwhelmed.

00:40:03.480 | And it is overwhelming. I, I, and you know, it's partly, uh, well, I, I don't want to, uh, generalize.

00:40:12.600 | Maybe it has to do with, um, perhaps, uh, emphasizing the, the, uh, abundance and, and generosity

00:40:23.960 | of the meal rather than focusing on the pleasure that you can get from each stage in it. Maybe it's,

00:40:30.360 | um, maybe the French are more focused on the, the sensory experience, but there are many,

00:40:36.040 | many different ways to, um, to sequence dishes in a meal. And, um, I, I think it does, the, the, the French

00:40:45.880 | way of doing it, uh, does make a lot of sense. Uh, my family and I lived in, uh, the countryside

00:40:52.440 | near Toulouse for a year and, um, ate around with the neighbors and so on. And, and my daughter and son

00:41:00.680 | went to school where they were given a full hour for lunch. And it was a coursed lunch with all those

00:41:08.520 | different components. Uh, so it, it, it does make sense, I think, because, um, having the soup, uh,

00:41:19.320 | come early helps, um, among other things, partly fill your stomach so that when you then go to the main

00:41:29.720 | course, um, you don't have to eat as much in order to be satisfied. And then the salad, you, you know,

00:41:38.680 | the salad is coming and it kind of refreshes you because the main course is usually, um, on the heavy

00:41:47.400 | and rich side. Almost always. Yeah. Yeah. Goose breast with foie gras was not uncommon in her

00:41:54.120 | household. Yes. And they were a middle-class home, I should mention. So it wasn't that people there were

00:41:58.840 | eating goose breast with foie gras because they were among the like elite. It was, that was the, uh,

00:42:05.800 | ham and cheese sandwich of the, of the town. Yeah. Those are, those are the local products. And,

00:42:12.600 | uh, the, the geese were probably being raised down the road. So, yeah. Um, so I think, uh, the,

00:42:21.080 | the salad kind of closes out the, the main part of the meal and refreshes you a little bit. And then

00:42:28.520 | if you're going to have dessert, you're ready for it rather than being overwhelmed by yet another rich,

00:42:33.880 | um, uh, another rich course. So I think it does make a lot of sense for the, for that, uh, structure

00:42:42.360 | of a meal where you have those different courses. Yeah. This notion of, um, cleansing the palate

00:42:48.440 | is kind of an interesting one. Um, but it's been a long time since I've been to a meal where they served

00:42:53.640 | a palate cleanser in between dishes. I mean, that that's something that I think in the 80s and 90s

00:42:58.680 | became a little bit popular in the United States and my family wasn't serving or attending those

00:43:04.200 | sorts of meals, but I've, I've been to a few. It's kind of an interesting idea, but, um, molecularly,

00:43:09.800 | chemically speaking, is that a real thing that you're going to wash out the flavor of what you just ate

00:43:14.600 | so that you can prepare for the next, uh, next item on the menu, or is it more, um, for, for show?

00:43:20.680 | Well, I, I think it's both. Um, I, I, I do think that, you know, if you're, uh, and again,

00:43:27.240 | depending on the details, but palate cleansers are usually cold and, um, you know, not, uh,

00:43:35.960 | not too strong in any direction, uh, a little bit tart often. Um, so something cold and tart to break

00:43:45.080 | up a meal where you've gone from one kind of rich course and you're, you're about to have another

00:43:50.120 | rich course because it's a fancy restaurant. Uh, I think that probably does make sense.

00:43:55.320 | Yeah. My next question is a bit more of a human physiology question, but I think we're all familiar

00:44:03.240 | with the kind of, um, um, taste intensity drift. I can't think of a better phrase where, you know,

00:44:10.920 | if you are used to drinking your coffee black and you start putting a little bit of cream in it,

00:44:16.920 | maybe a little bit of cream and a little bit of sugar, going back to black coffee feels like a step

00:44:23.320 | in the really bitter direction. Um, and then if you start adding more sugar or eating sweeter foods,

00:44:29.640 | it seems like we reset our threshold for what we consider too sweet. And there are all sorts of

00:44:35.560 | health implications, negative health implications around this, but, um, is that a real thing?

00:44:43.000 | Are, are we actually changing our threshold for what we consider bitter or sweet?

00:44:47.160 | I asked this because recently I've developed a, um, I won't call it an addiction, but, um, a love for,

00:44:53.240 | um, cacao beans. And the first time I bit into one of those, I thought, oh, like those are bitter.

00:45:00.920 | And now it's one of my favorite parts of my morning where I'm like pop five or six of those

00:45:05.400 | in my mouth and munch on them and they, they taste bitter, but they taste so good and they're kind of

00:45:09.400 | barky. They have kind of like a bark taste to them. And I, I swear I can taste the polyphenols,

00:45:14.920 | although that's all, all cognitive, right? So what I just described is not uncommon, uh, for me.

00:45:22.680 | What is this whole thing about thresholds for, for bitterness and sweet and do they interact?

00:45:28.520 | Yeah. Yeah. So taste is, uh, hugely malleable as far as we can tell. And, um, I think this is best

00:45:38.520 | documented in the literature, trying to find ways to reduce the sodium content of, of, um, packaged goods.

00:45:47.720 | So, um, manufacturers have been saying, um, long after, um, but biomedical people were saying we should

00:45:57.240 | cut back on our sodium intake. Uh, we would be happy to do that in our products, but our consumers don't

00:46:04.920 | like our products without the level of salt that we have in them. So people at the Monell Chemical

00:46:12.200 | Census Center in Philadelphia did some, uh, pretty systematic studies of this. And what they found was

00:46:20.280 | that you can over time adjust, uh, thresholds and preferences for the basic tastes. They were focusing

00:46:31.160 | on salt because that was the, the issue at hand. Uh, but there's no reason to think that that's not,

00:46:36.840 | not the case for everything that if you, uh, become, uh, used to a particular level of stimulation,

00:46:46.280 | then that becomes your, your new normal. And anything below or above that is going to stand out

00:46:53.400 | for being, uh, not quite enough or too much. So I think the, the, we're perfectly capable of training

00:47:02.200 | ourselves to, uh, adjust our preferences. Um, uh, it does take time. So the Monell study,

00:47:11.000 | I think lasted maybe a couple of months. It takes time, but, but it's certainly doable.

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00:50:06.600 | I stopped eating quote-unquote junk food a long time ago, and I've totally lost interest.

00:50:12.280 | In parallel to that, I enjoy strawberries and vegetables and meat and fish and eggs and rice

00:50:22.440 | and oatmeal so much more with each successive year. And I think it's in part because of this reshaping of

00:50:30.360 | of what one considers flavorful. But I also feel like my experience of food is getting richer and richer,

00:50:37.320 | as opposed to worse and worse. So it's kind of interesting and kind of counterintuitive. Do we have

00:50:41.640 | any evidence that if you eat foods closer to their, let's just say in their unadulterated form,

00:50:49.320 | that you get more out of the taste experience than if you are combining lots and lots of flavors, which

00:50:56.120 | is essentially what processed foods are?

00:50:59.320 | Yeah. I can't point to chapter and verse in the literature on this, but I think it just makes

00:51:07.800 | common sense that if you're going to start with strawberries and then add a bunch of other things,

00:51:18.840 | vanilla extract and sugars and who knows what else in order to

00:51:25.640 | essentially, as processed foods try to do, just kind of wow your mouth with an overwhelming sensation

00:51:38.760 | that you then want to repeat, rather than slowing down and enjoying the nuances.

00:51:44.520 | Because the natural world gives us these amazing ingredients like strawberries and blueberries and

00:51:53.480 | oats and so on. And then to take those amazing ingredients, which you can kind of savor for,

00:52:03.880 | you know, a minute at a time and really enjoy, to take those ingredients and make them

00:52:12.200 | ingredients rather than things in themselves and combine them with lots of other things

00:52:20.040 | for the purpose of stimulation, rather than the purpose of appreciating and enjoying those individual

00:52:30.680 | components, then you're kind of giving up, I would say, most of the pleasure of eating. You're just

00:52:37.160 | fueling yourself with stuff that is going to give you an immediate hit of flavor and then be gone.

00:52:50.680 | what was in that food is opaque, you know, it may have been strawberries once upon a time, but it's now

00:52:59.160 | been masked by all these other things. And meanwhile, one of the miracles of living on this planet is

00:53:06.360 | strawberries and the just vast range of materials that plants have gone to the trouble of preparing

00:53:16.600 | you for the sake of pleasing us. And so to hand that responsibility or that activity over to

00:53:27.400 | manufacturers who are just looking to make things as cheaply and quickly as possible, I think is a mistake.

00:53:36.120 | Do you drink coffee?

00:53:38.600 | I do.

00:53:39.000 | How do you prepare your coffee?

00:53:41.080 | I grind the beans and...

00:53:44.040 | Fresh every time?

00:53:45.480 | Yeah.

00:53:45.480 | Is that important to the taste?

00:53:47.560 | It can be. I mean, it depends on where you get your beans from, but...

00:53:52.760 | And how long they last. But I think so, yeah.

00:53:59.400 | So you'll mill the beans each time?

00:54:01.320 | Yeah.

00:54:01.880 | And then you use a drip filter, a machine, a French press?

00:54:07.160 | A drip filter. Yeah, yeah.

00:54:09.640 | We have this colleague of ours at Stanford, Adler, who built the AeroPress, which I've used for years,

00:54:16.360 | long before they were involved with the podcast. I remember seeing him throwing the Aerobee Frisbee,

00:54:23.240 | so he's an inventor, right?

00:54:24.680 | And I think that the AeroPress is an interesting idea because it sort of combines French press and

00:54:30.680 | filter drip, right? It's kind of a... But yeah, there is actually really interesting data that

00:54:36.600 | coffee has some, perhaps it seems, some powerful health-promoting effects, but it depends on how

00:54:46.360 | you brew it. So how are you brewing it? Not that I'm going to get you to change the way you do anything

00:54:50.920 | with food or drink. So I go back and forth between a metal filter and a paper filter. And yeah, I lived

00:55:02.840 | near the park where Alan Adler would fly his Aerobees, and so I visited with him and chatted about the

00:55:12.280 | AeroPress. And I like the idea a lot. And it seems to me you can control the flavor with it much more than

00:55:21.640 | you can with a drip system, simply because when it drips, it drips, but you can hold it into the,

00:55:27.720 | hold it in the AeroPress as long as you want. The temperature of water is so critical with coffee. Do you

00:55:35.960 | take it to a boil or no? I know people might think, gosh, they're really getting down into the weeds, but

00:55:40.520 | the flavor of coffee is completely different if you take the water to a boil versus just get it

00:55:45.400 | near boil or cut off the heat a moment after it starts to boil. Completely different beverage,

00:55:53.240 | in my opinion. Yeah. And I actually prefer coffee, drip coffee with water right off the boil. So I've

00:56:03.960 | tried all the different stages and that's just my preference. The important thing though is to know

00:56:11.880 | that the temperature does make a difference and the pleasure you get from it is going to vary depending on

00:56:18.600 | the temperature you, of the water that you use. So it's worth knowing that and then playing around and

00:56:25.160 | seeing what you like best. So that's the experience side of it, chemically and what's happening. I mean,

00:56:31.480 | when you, when you brew coffee, what are some of the interesting coffee chemistry factoids?

00:56:37.480 | I'm obsessed with this stuff as you can tell. Yes. Well, uh, so first of all, there's the,

00:56:44.360 | the grind size makes a huge difference. Um, because what you're essentially doing is extracting,

00:56:50.760 | uh, extractable materials from the solids. Um, and, uh, a typical cup of coffee, you're extracting maybe 20%

00:57:01.080 | of the weight of the, the original weight of the coffee. So it's not that much, uh, except that it's all the

00:57:08.600 | good stuff. And in fact, the, the longer you extract, the more you extract, the larger the molecules you're able to

00:57:16.120 | remove. And those larger molecules are the ones that tend to be

00:57:21.560 | tannic and astringent and really bitter. Yes. The longer you, um, let the beans or the ground beans,

00:57:29.880 | um, uh, be exposed to the hot water, the more large molecules you pull off. The large molecules are the

00:57:36.840 | ones that give it that kind of punch you back in the mouth. Yeah. Um, feeling the tannic. Yeah.

00:57:42.360 | It's interesting. And, and bitter. In fact, it's kind of a fun experiment. If you,

00:57:46.920 | if you love coffee and you're interested in this kind of thing, what you can do is, um, uh, make a,

00:57:53.400 | a, um, uh, set up a filter with coffee in it and line up four or five different cups and then pour

00:58:00.760 | the water in and then every 30 seconds or so move it from cup to cup. And you can see what comes out early

00:58:09.160 | and middle and late and what comes out late are these larger molecules. And late is kind of, um,

00:58:16.840 | uh, synonymous, uh, or, or you can think of using hotter water as the temperature equivalent of brewing

00:58:27.000 | later and later that you're getting more stuff out. The word that comes to mind is stale coffee that's

00:58:32.840 | been on the coffee pot a long time. Uh-huh. Is that, that seems to be the flavor you're describing

00:58:37.160 | when you, you, uh, pull these large molecules out. Is that right? Well, actually I would say that, uh,

00:58:43.160 | so, so yeah, the, the old, unfortunately not so common anymore, the old coffee urn that you would

00:58:49.800 | have at conferences and things like that. Or the one where you pump the, yeah. Yeah. Some people

00:58:55.880 | will know what we're talking about. Yeah. And the coffee has been in there for a couple hours,

00:59:02.280 | probably. Uh, that to me is, uh, stale coffee and that's, that's, um, changes in, in the smaller

00:59:10.440 | aromatic molecules as well as the, the larger ones. But, uh, I think the, the take home lesson is that

00:59:18.680 | these little details make a difference. And, um, if you're a stickler for coffee just the way you want it,

00:59:25.320 | then doing some of these experiments to see, you know, what's, what's on either side of the coffee

00:59:31.000 | that you brew, uh, usually is worth knowing about. You know, I think everyone could afford to slow

00:59:37.960 | down their experience of consuming food for a variety of reasons. Some of which, uh, you mentioning, uh,

00:59:43.560 | like just straight up better taste and taste experience. Um, and also with beverages, um,

00:59:52.120 | I, I consume a, uh, an ungodly amount of caffeine each day. I'm very caffeine tolerant. I actually can't

00:59:56.920 | drink coffee in the morning. Um, but in the afternoon, I absolutely love it. It tastes, it tastes

01:00:03.320 | aversive to me early in the day. I don't know why I drink yerba mate early in the day and throughout the

01:00:08.680 | morning. And then in the afternoon, I like a cup of coffee in the same cup of coffee. It tastes

01:00:14.120 | absolutely delightful in the afternoon. I don't know what it is. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's mysterious

01:00:22.360 | to me too. Yeah. Can't claim pregnancy either. So, um, you know, because, uh, that people who are

01:00:28.280 | pregnant, uh, report feeling kind of nauseous to certain tastes at one time a day versus another.

01:00:33.080 | Yeah. Um, is there anything else we can do with our coffee and tea? You know, so I, the,

01:00:38.440 | the tannic flavor or the, the experience of a tea being too tannic is awful. It tastes metallic. Um,

01:00:46.600 | but when tea's done right, it's very smooth. What is this tannic smooth thing in the context of tea?

01:00:52.440 | Is it the same thing, large molecule, small molecules? Yeah. It's basically the same thing. It,

01:00:56.680 | it also depends on, you know, what's left in the tea leaf. So some teas are, uh, just by definition,

01:01:03.000 | going to be more tannic than others because they have been treated differently in order to make

01:01:09.160 | the dried tea. Um, I have, uh, three or four tea bushes in my backyard. And so I make tea every year.

01:01:17.640 | Um, whenever the new growth comes out, that's what you make tea with. What kind of tea do you make?

01:01:23.480 | Uh, that's the fun thing about having the bushes. I make all kinds and I play around with them and,

01:01:29.640 | you know, see what happens if I just, you know, pluck a leaf and brew that or pluck a leaf, let it

01:01:36.040 | wither in the sun and then brew that or do the various processing techniques. They give you oolong,

01:01:43.640 | which is kind of medium, um, uh, manipulated. And then black tea is very heavily manipulated,

01:01:51.320 | but it's a whole spectrum and it's a lot of fun to play with. And you're just putting

01:01:55.160 | these directly into hot water. You put it in like a metal tea strainer. For most of them,

01:01:59.560 | what you have to do first is dry them. Uh, but then when I make tea, um, yeah,

01:02:05.560 | it's just leaves into a pot and then, uh, pouring the tea out. I, I make small pots so, so that I can

01:02:13.960 | try lots of different things. How do you dry them? Uh, that's another variable. So you can let them air dry.

01:02:21.000 | You can just out on the counter. Yeah. Yeah. And it takes, takes, um, I live in San Francisco,

01:02:27.320 | so it's not very warm. So it takes a while for them to dry on the counter, but you can also,

01:02:32.280 | I put them in the, uh, toaster oven. I'll dry them. A lot of Chinese green teas even are dried in, uh,

01:02:41.160 | in a wok. So I will do that. You heat them up in the wok. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, toaster oven. Um, yeah.

01:02:48.680 | Somebody who's obsessed with yerba mate, since I was a kid, I've been drinking yerba mate. I love,

01:02:54.040 | love, love it. As you, as people know, um, fascinated by this. So, um, how much space does one of these

01:03:00.600 | plants take up? Well, uh, so it, it totally depends. The, uh, uh, I bought mine originally

01:03:07.240 | as, um, quarter meter tall, um, not exactly seedling because they are bushes and so they,

01:03:15.160 | they get, uh, lignified pretty quickly. They're, they're more. What's lignified? Sorry. Um, like,

01:03:20.920 | like a tree. So. Okay. Yeah. Solid, a solid base. Oh, like ligand. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um,

01:03:27.160 | so, uh, and one of the cool things about being alive these days is that, um, it used to be really hard

01:03:37.080 | to get your hands on these plants, but now it's very easy. You go, go online, you can find many,

01:03:42.200 | many different sources at many different, uh, maturities. But the, the thing about making tea

01:03:48.200 | from tea plants is that what you're doing is plucking off the new growth.

01:03:52.920 | That's what you make tea from. It's not the older leaves. It's the, the very newest ones,

01:03:59.240 | which are the most metabolically active and have the most interesting stuff in them.

01:04:03.800 | Interesting for us when we play with them. So, uh, you actually don't want to make tea from

01:04:10.840 | small plants. You want to let them grow bigger and you can control the, the size from, from then

01:04:18.440 | on, on up. Um, they're, they're often grown in the shade, uh, for flavor purposes. And so growing them

01:04:26.920 | in the shade is actually fine. You don't have to have a sunny spot on your, uh, windowsill,

01:04:32.600 | although it'll grow faster in the sun, but, but shade grown tea is, uh, is actually preferred.

01:04:40.760 | Um, and then they're, they're a species of camellia. So they're, you know, not that demanding. They, they

01:04:48.120 | need acidic soil, but apart from that, very easy to grow. I've had mine now for almost 20 years and,

01:04:55.800 | uh, um, making tea from them is actually a great way to keep them in check. You know,

01:05:01.560 | otherwise they would take over the yard. Amazing. Um, and then what's, is it called

01:05:07.400 | tessiography? Do you do that too? The reading of tea leaves? I'm just joking.

01:05:13.960 | Um, tea leaf reading is a, probably never going to make it onto this podcast and I'll probably upset

01:05:19.880 | some people, um, by saying that I'm not convinced that reading tea leaves is, is, uh, indicative of

01:05:25.560 | much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm glad we're in agreement about that. As long as we're, uh, you know,

01:05:30.120 | exploring whether, um, longstanding lore within kitchens is, uh, reflective of some real chemistry,

01:05:38.200 | uh, as was the case with umami or the, the French with eating, uh, salads last, there's this idea

01:05:46.040 | that you shouldn't have tea at the end of a meal. Is that true? Um, or is it, is it like, uh, that it

01:05:54.520 | somehow hardens the food in your stomach, or is this just complete, like, uh, is this complete

01:05:59.720 | nonsense? Sounds to me in the direction of complete nonsense. Great. Cause I like tea at the end of a

01:06:05.240 | meal. I like chamomile tea after a meal. Well, and herbal teas, especially because I mean, I could,

01:06:11.320 | I could make a, a just so story about the, the phenolic compounds in tea cross-linking things in

01:06:18.600 | your stomach or something like that because polyphenols do that, but I can't imagine that it

01:06:25.160 | makes a difference. So polyphenols cross-link proteins? Yeah.

01:06:29.320 | Yeah. Yeah. I, for those that aren't familiar, cross-linking proteins is a way of changing their

01:06:33.240 | configuration and making, generally makes them more rigid when we, in laboratories, when we use fixative,

01:06:39.240 | like formaldehyde or paraformaldehyde, um, you're taking a tissue, usually a slice of brain tissue,

01:06:44.840 | which is very floppy and you need to be less floppy so you can work with it. And so you put it into

01:06:49.720 | paraformaldehyde or formaldehyde or glutaraldehyde. All these things create what are called shift bases.

01:06:54.440 | Do I have that right? Yeah. Okay. My, I'm remembering my chemistry and they cross-link the

01:06:58.360 | proteins so that then you can pick that thing up like a, well, it's a very thin slab. I would not

01:07:04.280 | want to do that to the food in my gut. Right. But nowadays we hear that polyphenols are like the

01:07:09.880 | greatest thing. So what's the deal with polyphenols? Um, should we consume them separately from proteins?

01:07:16.360 | Yeah. No, I, I don't think so because the, the thing about polyphenols, the reason that they

01:07:21.080 | do this cross-linking, uh, is the fact that they're reactive. And what that means is you,

01:07:28.600 | you put them in with almost anything else and they're going to get bound. And then you're going to

01:07:35.160 | swallow them, uh, and they're going to, you know, make it down to your lower GI tract. And then

01:07:41.240 | there they may be, you know, freed up because the, whatever they're bound to gets to be digested and

01:07:47.560 | so on. But there, it's not a bad thing necessarily. And in fact, it's, it's probably a good thing.

01:07:52.920 | So, but the, the thing about polyphenols early on in the process, if you think about what would happen

01:07:59.320 | if, for example, you take milk and add some, uh, wine to it and let it sit, it'll curdle. And that's

01:08:07.160 | because the polyphenols are cross-linking the, uh, the milk proteins. And so that's basically the kind

01:08:14.040 | of thing that's happening inside us. Years ago, there was a semi-popular diet. This was in the early

01:08:19.880 | nineties, um, that argued that you shouldn't combine carbohydrates and proteins, that you should actually

01:08:26.920 | eat them separately. And I've also heard it said that you want to eat fruit before a meal or away from a

01:08:35.400 | meal, but not after a meal because it can give you digestive issues.

01:08:39.160 | I'm sure people differ tremendously in terms of what they can consume. I I'm actually one of these

01:08:44.600 | people. I, if I have a stomach ache, it means something is seriously wrong. Yeah. I mean,

01:08:48.360 | I can eat everything except metal shavings and my stomach doesn't hurt. I don't get headaches or

01:08:52.440 | stomach aches. I get other things, but I don't get those. Some people are very sensitive to food

01:08:56.760 | combinations. They get stomach aches really easily. So, um, regardless of one sensitivity to different

01:09:03.320 | foods, are there certain foods that it would make sense to keep them separate if you have digestive

01:09:09.240 | issues, you know, um, you know, bloating or, um, just like gurgling stomach, this kind of thing or

01:09:16.120 | worse? Yeah. So, um, my understanding is, well, first of all, I know for a fact that, uh, we have cycled

01:09:24.360 | through every possible permutation of these theories over the course of the last 150 years,

01:09:31.240 | um, with no one of them actually being touted now as that the answer. So to me, what that says is there

01:09:41.160 | is no the answer for this kind of question and that it really does depend on individual physiology

01:09:48.280 | and what, what people can tolerate, um, for their own particular reasons. I don't think there are any,

01:09:54.600 | um, principles by which you can choose to, uh, combine or not combine foods, um, that would make

01:10:03.240 | a difference to your health. Also, it's, um, you know, we're, we're eating so many different things

01:10:09.400 | so many times a day that, uh, it, I think would be really hard to kind of tease out

01:10:15.800 | any particular relationships like this. And even if they do exist, they probably exist only for

01:10:23.400 | subpopulations and not for the world at large. So translated, what I'm hearing is

01:10:30.040 | you have to figure out what works for you. Doesn't sound like you believe in one particular, um,

01:10:36.840 | nutrition plan or diet according to any particular science, but it does sound like you leaning toward

01:10:45.320 | the idea that certain diets for lack of a better word will work better for different people.

01:10:51.400 | Yeah, I guess I would, I would certainly say that it would depend on the, the individual and I'm,

01:10:57.640 | I'm not sure that I would buy in necessarily to the idea of an optimal diet in the first place because,

01:11:03.480 | um, I, unless optimal included, uh, tremendously varied, which is kind of, you know, uh, in a way,

01:11:15.400 | the opposite of optimal, you know, it's, it's making sure to try, uh, a lot of different things all the

01:11:22.520 | time rather than hewing to one particular, um, approach. So, um, yeah, I, I think we just don't

01:11:31.480 | know enough to, to say anything definitive. We talk about the, uh, ever problematic onions and garlic.

01:11:37.880 | Uh, there's a lot of chemistry around onions and garlic, uh, most notably the crying caused by,

01:11:45.240 | uh, onions. What is the basis of the crying caused by onions and how do we mitigate it?

01:11:50.680 | Uh, so, uh, plants in that family, the allium family, uh, so onions and garlic are close relatives.

01:11:58.920 | Um, they, the way that they defend themselves from animals that might want to eat them,

01:12:06.040 | and they're not fruits. They're actually roots or, um, root-like structures that are meant to give rise

01:12:13.000 | to the next generation. So, to the plant, they're very important. They're defended with these sulfur

01:12:19.080 | molecules that in the intact root are, uh, inactive. But then the moment the tissues are disrupted,

01:12:27.720 | enzymes get to work and generate from those, uh, uh, precursors, kind of, um, uh, chemical warfare

01:12:36.520 | cylinders, the, the cylinders are opened and, uh, we end up with these, um, uh, molecules that can fly

01:12:45.480 | through the air. They're volatile. We don't have to actually touch the, the onion. They, they come to us,

01:12:51.480 | uh, these molecules, uh, and they're meant to do exactly what they do, which is make us, uh, miserable.

01:12:57.640 | So, the fact that they're, uh, volatile means that you can, uh, protect yourself by doing a couple of

01:13:06.920 | different things. You can wear goggles, which present, prevents volatile molecules from getting to your eyes.

01:13:14.440 | You can do the, uh, the cutting, uh, interspersed with just a rinse and water,

01:13:20.920 | because that'll, uh, the, the, um, molecules are being generated at the surface that you're

01:13:26.120 | generating by doing the cutting. So, if occasionally you just rinse those surfaces, then, um, the volatiles

01:13:34.440 | go away and they don't bother you as much. You can also get, um, um, non-pungent varieties of onions,

01:13:43.000 | which, which exist. Uh, Maui onions are the, the best known of those, and they just don't make those

01:13:50.200 | sulfur molecules so that they don't, uh, they don't, uh, irritate us.

01:13:54.440 | I'm reminded that our colleague at Stanford, um, Dr. Sean Mackey, who runs the pain division,

01:14:02.760 | when he was on this podcast, he said that despite many years of traditional, uh, training in medicine

01:14:09.160 | and thinking that a lot of people's reported, uh, gut issues were perhaps psychosomatic and all this stuff,

01:14:16.680 | he, that he himself had the experience of, um, I think a lot of gut pain at one point in his life,

01:14:22.680 | just, and not knowing what the origin was. And it seemed like it was after certain meals and not others.

01:14:27.960 | And he did all the necessary self-experimentation to pinpoint that it was onions that were causing this

01:14:36.040 | very, that would sound like pretty severe, um, gastric issues and pain. Um, and it was the histamines

01:14:42.280 | caused by ingesting onions, right? These little packets of molecules that cause inflammation.

01:14:48.200 | And so, uh, that in part converted into this idea that, you know, when people talk about their, their negative

01:14:54.120 | experiences with certain foods, that, um, they're not making this stuff up, that it's very likely that

01:15:00.200 | they have some sort of food sensitivity. And I think now the, the landscape of quote unquote,

01:15:04.760 | traditional medicine is starting to become more open to this. But, um, and hearing what you just described,

01:15:09.160 | like these warfare molecules coming out of onions, um, stimulating a negative re they're designed to

01:15:15.640 | create a, an aversive reaction in animals that would eat them. And here we are eating these things.

01:15:19.480 | And then the idea that it would be bad for certain people at first seemed like shocking to the standard,

01:15:27.640 | uh, medical community, but now one of the, you know, leading experts in the, in the world of pain

01:15:33.160 | medicine is like, Hey, listen, histamines from onions are a problem for people with gut issues.

01:15:38.120 | Sometimes not always. So I think, um, there's an interesting kind of intersection of, of food

01:15:43.560 | chemistry, individual experience and where medicine and is headed. It's not crazy. These are chemicals

01:15:51.560 | coming out of food. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah, exactly. And maybe the, the most prominent example of an

01:15:57.080 | aversive chemical being generated in foods that we love is capsaicin in peppers. So hot peppers, the,

01:16:07.080 | the, the, the, uh, the ones that are spicy are spicy because they contain a particular molecule

01:16:14.040 | that is designed to be aversive to animals so that animals won't, um, chew up those fruits before the

01:16:21.480 | seeds can be dispersed. And interestingly, the, the animals that the plant depends on for dispersal

01:16:29.640 | are birds. And birds don't, uh, uh, respond to capsaicin. They don't have them. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

01:16:36.360 | So this is a, a molecule that's designed specifically for mammals like us to get us to leave those,

01:16:45.080 | those, uh, fruits alone. And, um, some people can handle tremendously noxious,

01:16:52.920 | shall we say, uh, levels of capsaicin and other people are very, very sensitive and, and, um, can't,

01:17:00.840 | can't handle hardly any. So yeah, it's all part of this, um, this larger picture of the world giving us

01:17:10.360 | these materials to feed ourselves and are working out our, um, negotiations with those materials

01:17:17.880 | so that we can enjoy them and be nourished by them.

01:17:20.520 | I want to explore spiciness a bit more in a moment, but are there any data that there are genetic

01:17:26.520 | differences, uh, among people in terms of the density of, um, I think the capsaicin receptor

01:17:32.520 | is a substance P receptor, uh, or something like that, or sweet receptors or umami receptors that would

01:17:38.920 | perhaps not predict, but partially explain why some people are really averse to spice. Other people

01:17:45.000 | pursue spice, um, and why some foods perhaps just like don't taste good to certain people or even give

01:17:51.000 | them a gut issues or, uh, this sort of thing. So the, the best studied, uh, aspect of this is taste rather

01:17:59.640 | than smell. Smell is difficult because there are so many different receptors and thousands and thousands

01:18:05.400 | of, uh, uh, smells, but taste is relatively, uh, confined subject. And there are, um, what are called

01:18:14.280 | super tasters. And this has to do eventually, I'm sure with genetics, but the way this category of

01:18:23.640 | people was first defined was by simply counting taste buds on the tongue. So they, they had a particular

01:18:31.720 | area in which they could look and they stained the, the taste buds and then simply counted them,

01:18:37.560 | enumerated them on, uh, thousands of different people. And what they found was, as you might expect,

01:18:44.360 | uh, there are some people with very, very few in a given area and others where they're so crowded

01:18:50.760 | together, you can barely count them. Wow. So high pixel density, low pixel density. Some people have the

01:18:56.760 | iPhone one, some people have the iPhone, whatever we're on now of, uh, 16 or something or 13, uh,

01:19:02.920 | density. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So clearly that's going to affect the way you experience whatever you put

01:19:09.720 | in your mouth. And, um, uh, they, the investigators gave the name super taster to the people who had the

01:19:19.720 | highest density of, um, um, of receptors. It's unfortunate because, you know, the, the term does

01:19:27.560 | have, um, connotations that are, that really don't belong. It's just some people have lots of taste

01:19:35.080 | receptors and other people don't have very many. Well, I guess the question is, do the people who

01:19:39.720 | have higher density of taste receptors have better taste discrimination? Can they tell two, uh, foods apart or

01:19:46.200 | beverages apart on a dimension of say sweetness that somebody with lower, uh, density receptors can't?

01:19:52.440 | So that's a really good question. And, um, my, uh, I, I don't know exactly the answer to that,

01:20:00.600 | but what I do know is that, um, you would think that super tasters sounds great. That's what I want

01:20:06.680 | is to be able to taste more. In fact, super tasters are, uh, especially sensitive to bitterness and to

01:20:15.240 | acidity to the point that, uh, foods that other people enjoy just fine, they find aversive simply

01:20:22.520 | because the, the sensation is overwhelming. So I used to teach a course at the French Culinary Institute,

01:20:29.160 | no longer with us, uh, in New York. And we would often have chefs in the, uh, course along with just

01:20:37.880 | ordinary people. And we would do a, a taste test to, a proxy for counting the number of taste buds. You can

01:20:46.680 | give people, uh, a very bitter substance at a, at a known level on a little piece of filter paper and then

01:20:54.680 | ask people to rate, does this taste extremely bitter, kind of bitter or what, what bitter. Um,

01:21:03.560 | and, uh, the chefs would always be, uh, upset if they did not score as super tasters because super means,

01:21:14.840 | you know, you're, you're a really good taster, but, um, talk to them and you find out that, um,

01:21:22.360 | it's often difficult for chefs, uh, to kind of match the flavor preferences of their customers.

01:21:31.560 | And one of the reasons for that can be that if you're a super taster as a chef, you're going to dial

01:21:37.720 | down all kinds of things that, uh, to an ordinary taster may leave the food tasting bland.

01:21:45.320 | So, um, it's something that, uh, there, there is no right thing to be, but if you're a professional

01:21:51.320 | in the food world, you need to know what you are and how to compensate for it if you, if you need to.

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01:23:44.920 | Function. Do you salt your fruit? A few years ago, there was this like a trend of salting fruit. Remember

01:23:51.800 | that? I tried it. I love fruit. I love salt. I wasn't such a fan of salting fruit, but I don't want to dismiss

01:24:01.080 | it right off the bat. Does it do anything interesting to fruit in a way that should have me return to that?

01:24:05.720 | Yeah. No, I think it's a completely individual thing. My grandmother would salt her grapefruit.

01:24:12.840 | Oh yeah. Oh no, we would put sugar on our grapefruit when we were kids. Sucrose.

01:24:17.640 | So she would salt her grapefruit. She would salt her grapefruit and it turns out, we know now, that in fact,

01:24:24.920 | salt and bitter are kind of opposing sensations and you can actually diminish the sensation of bitterness

01:24:34.520 | by upping the salt. So she was making it less bitter without adding sugar, which to her was important.

01:24:44.040 | she used the artificial sweetener of the day in her tea in the morning. That's interesting. I know people

01:24:54.200 | who put a tiny, tiny bit of salt in their coffee to, according to them, take the edge off, meaning to

01:25:01.880 | take the bitterness out. It makes sense. Yeah. Based on the chemistry, this push-pull of bitter and salty,

01:25:08.760 | salty tastes. Yeah. Pretty much everything in the nervous system is push-pull.

01:25:12.760 | Yeah. And that, that goes, by the way, for things like beer. Uh, some people will add a pinch of, uh,

01:25:20.200 | salt to their beer. The only place in the world where I enjoy beer is, um, in Munich where they serve

01:25:29.000 | beer. Well, maybe it's the schnitzel that they're, it's, you know, I love that stuff. Um, but they'll come

01:25:35.480 | around with a heater and they'll heat your beer so that it's room temperature.

01:25:43.640 | And it completely changes the taste. The bubbles are small in those beers. Uh, they taste to me just a

01:25:50.120 | little bit sweeter. And, um, I asked them about this and, and the idea that you would drink a cold beer

01:25:57.400 | to them was like, what are you talking about? I mean, you might as well tell an American that they should,

01:26:02.200 | um, have their apple pie with, um, with, uh, spaghetti on top or something. It's crazy.

01:26:09.640 | Let's talk about alcohol, even though I'm not a drinker. Uh, I know people enjoy a little bit of

01:26:14.840 | wine or spirits or, or beer. And I'm, I'm supposed as long as people aren't alcoholics and they're of

01:26:20.520 | age, like, you know, uh, small amounts of consumption are, are, are, uh, probably okay. Um, zero is better.

01:26:29.080 | But, um, so let's talk about wine and beer. What's the, the brief history on, on this? When do people

01:26:36.040 | start fermenting fruit and hops and, um, and, and this whole business of creating poison to ingest,

01:26:44.600 | um, because it tastes good and gets them, uh, a little bit inebriated? What, what, what is this?

01:26:49.960 | So, um, this is actually an, an area where we're learning more every year because people are,

01:26:59.240 | especially archeological sites are pushing dates back and so on and finding evidence for this kind of

01:27:05.000 | thing that the, the, the ability to detect, uh, residues in pots as, uh, as just amazing these

01:27:13.000 | days. But, um, my guess is, and it's been argued that, um, we have been enjoying alcohol since before we

01:27:23.400 | were homo sapiens. Really? Yes. That primates, in fact, uh, when you observe them will go after, uh,

01:27:33.960 | fermenting fruit and enjoy it and, you know, seek out and pick those fruits and not, not others.

01:27:41.160 | And I bet, uh, I, it's not a literature I keep up with, but I bet that there are some behavioral studies

01:27:48.680 | as well to, to suggest whether or not the, uh, ingestion of the fruit is actually having an effect

01:27:56.680 | on their coordination for example. I, I bet there are studies like that. Um, so we've been enjoying,

01:28:03.960 | um, alcohol before we were homo sapiens. And in the archeological record, uh, the dates have been pushed

01:28:13.720 | back now to the, the very beginnings of agriculture. And in many different places. So China, uh, the

01:28:23.000 | Middle East, um, it's just, um, an attractive, uh, possibility, uh, which probably did simply start with,

01:28:33.880 | um, you know, collecting a bunch of fruit, not getting around to eating it right away. And, you know,

01:28:39.720 | it's beginning to smell interesting and you try it and it does things. Humans daring other humans to try

01:28:47.320 | things. Which I think is also, by the way, uh, how chocolate was discovered, uh, or the, the possibilities

01:28:55.960 | for chocolate. So cacao beans are the seeds in a fruit. And the current thinking is that, um,

01:29:04.040 | the fruits were gathered for the fruit and the seeds, which are large, were simply thrown in a pile

01:29:12.040 | near the, near the fire. And, uh, there, there were enough residues of the fruit on the seeds for

01:29:19.240 | those residues to ferment. And that's the first step in making chocolate.

01:29:23.480 | So with respect to alcohol, um, I mean, alcohol is, as you mentioned, a long history. Um, I've heard

01:29:32.920 | it said that despite so much fascination and money spent on different wines, depending on, uh, the make

01:29:41.000 | and the label and the year in particular and how the grapes were that year, depending on how the

01:29:46.920 | weather was that year and the soil. And, you know, so much goes into this and a huge industry. Um, but

01:29:52.760 | every once in a while, there'll be a study published where they'll do a blind taste test and some of the

01:29:59.320 | the most experienced, um, AKA expert, uh, wine drinkers won't be able to discern, uh, the finest

01:30:08.440 | wine or near finest wine from a far more trivial, inexpensive wine. And that always seems to send

01:30:14.600 | everyone into disarray for a couple of weeks. And then everyone goes right back to, um, distributing

01:30:19.880 | their wine consumption according to their income and what they perceive to be the better wine.

01:30:27.640 | It's kind of a wild, um, foray into human psychology. Like if this is true that these

01:30:35.400 | expert wine drinkers can't discern like a $20 bottle of wine from a $2,000 bottle of wine,

01:30:40.360 | and yet they insist on returning to the, the practice of preferentially buying and consuming

01:30:46.840 | more expensive wines if they have the means. I mean, that says all sorts of things about humans and the

01:30:52.440 | way we place value on things. But I want to know, are the more expensive wines actually truly better

01:31:00.200 | from the perspective of taste? And, um, through the lens of, uh, let's just say a, uh, a novice and an

01:31:07.640 | expert wine drinker, what's the deal? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so this I think is, uh, really complicated in all kinds of

01:31:18.200 | interesting ways. Um, and I think to begin with, uh, it's true that people have, uh, done things like,

01:31:26.520 | um, serve red wines, expensive red wines alongside white wines that had been dyed red and asked people,

01:31:36.840 | asked, asked experts to, uh, to judge them and comment on them and the experts being fooled by the,

01:31:44.760 | by the food coloring. So I think it's, it's in large part to begin with a matter of what we're expecting

01:31:55.240 | to happen when we taste something. Uh, and, uh, if we have expectations, then those expectations are going to

01:32:04.760 | influence our perception. Uh, and there are a couple of wonderful books by, uh, uh, a neurobiologist named

01:32:12.760 | Gordon Shepard on exactly this, uh, these subjects. Um, so it's, it's a, it's a, uh, um, a complicated loop.

01:32:23.320 | We, we have expectations, we taste something, the expectations play into what we think we experience,

01:32:30.920 | uh, and our conclusions from that experience, uh, which is no knock on the wines. It's just

01:32:38.760 | the, the fact of, and, uh, our, our imperfect nature as sensory beings. Uh, then when it comes to

01:32:47.000 | the wines themselves and the kind of variation that you find, uh, from, uh, from different kinds of wine,

01:32:56.920 | of wine makers, locations, uh, weather, treatment during the winemaking process, all, all those

01:33:04.920 | different things. Um, if you work at it, you can train yourself to notice minute differences,

01:33:12.840 | just as you can train yourself to notice minute differences in all kinds of other things that,

01:33:19.320 | that we care about, uh, art connoisseurship, for example, you know, is, uh, knowing something about

01:33:26.440 | the history of art and, uh, and about the materials and that kind of thing, they all play into our judgment.

01:33:34.040 | And what we're talking about when we're talking about the, the, uh, whether a wine is better than

01:33:41.560 | another, it's a judgment. And, uh, uh, I think the more you know about, uh, if you, if you care to know,

01:33:48.840 | the more you know about, uh, a particular, uh, material, the better you're able to either appreciate

01:33:56.920 | it or depreciate it, uh, depending. And wine is just fascinating material. I mean, it's, uh, it's,

01:34:05.160 | it's, um, made every year from all kinds of different grapes in all kinds of different parts

01:34:11.880 | of the world, uh, by all kinds of different people. And, uh, they all taste kind of different,

01:34:19.000 | um, depending on all those different factors. And if you're interested in those kinds of, um, uh,

01:34:26.360 | distinctions, and if you get pleasure from taking a sip and saying, ah, yeah, it was a, that was a warm

01:34:32.040 | year in that, in that vineyard and tastes a little riper than the other bottle that I

01:34:36.920 | have in my cellar, that's, that's great. That means you're, you know, using your human capacities

01:34:43.400 | to the utmost. Um, if you're just drinking to drink, not so much. Um, so I think it depends on the,

01:34:51.880 | not only the, the product, but the, but the consumer.

01:34:56.120 | Mm-hmm. Like so many domains of life, it sounds like, uh, curiosity, uh, lends itself to a deeper

01:35:03.720 | and better relationship with something. A guest on this podcast who himself was a comedian, um,

01:35:09.960 | said exactly what you said. He said, um, which is only to say that you agree, uh,

01:35:15.960 | that the more you learn about something, the way a movie was made or visual art or a song,

01:35:23.320 | the more you come to appreciate it. It, with one exception, comedy. You either think something's

01:35:29.080 | funny or not. You could learn, you could learn about the process that comedian went through,

01:35:33.560 | you could learn about the context, and if it's not funny to you, it's not going to become funny.

01:35:37.880 | So it seems to be like one exception in the universe of experiences. But, uh, even though we

01:35:43.080 | weren't talking about food, I think he would totally agree with you, um, on this point.

01:35:48.840 | Which is a perfect segue for my next question, which is about cheese. When you walk into a cheese shop

01:35:55.960 | in, say, Denmark or in Northern Europe, do you like it or do you feel overwhelmed? Because

01:36:04.280 | for those who have, they know it's intense. Yeah. That's one of my favorite things, actually. Um,

01:36:13.240 | something that I learned to like, uh, when our family lived in France for a year,

01:36:19.400 | and I decided, uh, you know, the French make a lot of cheese, I should learn something about that.

01:36:25.480 | And I, I went to, uh, a little trailer at one of the farmer mark, farmers markets in the little

01:36:33.400 | village we were living in. And in my broken French said, I was, I would like to learn about cheese.

01:36:40.280 | I got like a 10 minute lecture on how Americans could never appreciate cheese properly. But then,

01:36:47.000 | okay, I'll, I'll tutor you. And so, and I had a wonderful year long, uh, uh, uh,

01:36:54.280 | uh, just every, every week, uh, a session with this cheese maker who was bringing, she herself did not

01:37:04.920 | make, uh, most of the cheeses she sold, but she would sell what was proper seasonally for that, um,

01:37:12.600 | for that place. Anyway, I learned a tremendous amount, fell in love with the, the diversity,

01:37:18.920 | uh, you know, starting with basically the same material, maybe two or three different animals,

01:37:24.280 | kinds of milks, but starting with the same bland material and ending up with this tremendous range of

01:37:30.680 | flavors is, uh, I think a tribute to human ingenuity to, to be able to come up with that kind of, uh,

01:37:37.960 | diversity. How long has cheese been, um, made and consumed by humans?

01:37:42.920 | Uh, since apparently very early in the domestication of animals, maybe even before animals were fully

01:37:52.040 | domesticated. So again, we're talking 7,000, 8,000 years ago in the, in the case of dairy products,

01:38:01.320 | that's pretty much in the, in the, um, Central Asian area. Can we talk about the chemistry of cheese

01:38:07.800 | and fermentation? Sure. Yeah. First, a question about a specific cheese. Uh, if one looks online,

01:38:15.400 | um, which is always a dangerous thing to do, uh, if you're in search of real information, you have to

01:38:20.280 | be very discerning. Um, there's this idea that certain cheeses, in particular Parmesan cheeses,

01:38:26.920 | are so rich with the amino acid tyrosine that they create, uh, because tyrosine is the amino acid

01:38:32.920 | precursor to dopamine that they create, um, a mild high of sorts. Um, now this of course could also

01:38:40.280 | be that people just really enjoy the taste or both. Yeah. But it makes sense at some level. What's known

01:38:46.280 | about the chemistry of cheeses and, um, the experience of cheeses? Yeah. Well, so the, the,

01:38:52.120 | the, the, the thing that makes cheese much more interesting than milk is the fact that, um, microbes

01:39:00.680 | have been living in it and on it for, um, weeks or months or years and slowly breaking down the proteins

01:39:11.320 | and the fats and generating these small molecules that we were talking about before that have flavor,

01:39:18.200 | that, uh, that give us the sensations of taste and smell. The longer that process goes on, for the most

01:39:25.960 | part, the more of those breakdown products there are and the richer and more, more varied the flavor is.

01:39:33.320 | Now you can sometimes get very strong flavored cheeses very quickly. Uh, Camembert is an example of, uh,

01:39:41.240 | cheese like that where you, um, in the cheese making process essentially encourage the changes to happen

01:39:48.680 | very rapidly. But if you, um, dial back on the process and let it take longer, you end up with a much more

01:39:57.640 | more diverse, uh, array of, uh, array of molecules. And in the case of Parmesan and the, those crystals that

01:40:06.200 | you end up with in cheeses that are two, three years old, um, uh, which are crunchy and kind of, uh,

01:40:14.600 | they're the, the, the sign of authenticity, you know, that the, the, this cheese is actually that old

01:40:20.200 | and, uh, it's worth paying double the price that you would pay for a young version. Um, those are, uh,

01:40:28.520 | usually, uh, tyrosine or other amino acid, um, um, derivatives that are, uh, that have been broken

01:40:39.800 | off of the protein chains. And then because the cheese has slowly been dehydrating,

01:40:46.760 | uh, they've become insoluble and begin to crystallize out. And so that's why they're a

01:40:53.000 | sign of, um, uh, uh, of the process of aging and also the, the time of aging. Um, the thing about it

01:41:01.080 | though, and the, the, for me, the question mark is, uh, that tyrosine was there already in the proteins.

01:41:11.080 | And so is having it crystallize out somehow making it more immediately available to have

01:41:19.080 | an effect on us? Uh, you know, we don't have to digest the protein anymore now. It just, you know,

01:41:24.760 | pops right into us the moment we put it in our mouths. Maybe that has something to do with, uh,

01:41:31.640 | the effect that people are reporting. When smoke flavors are added to cheese, is it through actual

01:41:38.280 | smoking process? Yes. If it's authentic? Yeah. If it's authentic, yeah. The cheeses have been,

01:41:44.040 | um, kept in a room with, uh, something smoldering. And that was often in the, uh, old, old days and

01:41:53.000 | still to some extent these days, kind of like, um, curing hams. Uh, bugs are going to want to, uh, enjoy

01:42:01.400 | that really rich, nutritious material. And so you have to ward them off and smoke is a good way to do

01:42:06.760 | it. Ah, that makes sense. So to keep bugs away, you fill the room with smoke and then you end up with

01:42:11.880 | food that tastes smoky. Yeah. And then you tell people that it tastes good. I'm not a fan of smoke.

01:42:17.480 | I don't know why. Uh, yeah. Maybe it's because most smoky flavors seem to come from a kind of a,

01:42:23.320 | it tastes chemical to me. It doesn't taste like smoke. It tastes like, uh, it's like, um, smoke

01:42:28.920 | generated from, uh, um, drywall mixed with, uh, some styrofoam. It doesn't, it doesn't, it's not,

01:42:36.280 | it's not like a nice, uh, organic in the real sense of the word, um, natural flavor to me. It tastes

01:42:44.120 | chemical. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I know exactly what you mean. And I also think that most smoked foods are

01:42:50.200 | over smoked, you know, that, that ends up being the only flavor that the food has.

01:42:55.080 | And instead of being a kind of in the background, uh, flavor. So. And what about in bourbons and

01:43:01.720 | things like that, where people get really excited about a smoky bourbon, is that, um, why would you

01:43:06.760 | do that? Because I can't imagine that the bugs that we're going to get into, well, bugs like ferment,

01:43:12.200 | right? Is that right? Yeah. Actually, one great way to attract bugs to your picnic is to have vinegar

01:43:19.240 | there. They love. Yes. The smell of vinegar. Yeah. Yeah. So in the case of, um, uh, barrels for

01:43:28.920 | distilled beverages, that's, uh, uh, as far as I can tell, just a completely cultural thing, you know,

01:43:36.840 | that, um, in order to make barrels, you have to, uh, heat them in order to make the wood pliable.

01:43:44.760 | And probably someone in the process of making barrels discovered that if you, you know, if it

01:43:50.360 | burns out of control for a few seconds, that may be not such a bad thing 10 years down the line. So,

01:43:56.440 | um, um, it's certainly not essential to the flavor of, uh, uh, of alcohols. And a lot, uh, uh, for

01:44:03.080 | example, um, um, whiskies may, may be marketed as having been aged in used sherry casks. So you don't

01:44:14.200 | get the, the toasting that you get if you're making fresh barrels. So I, I think it's, it's a matter of

01:44:20.920 | taste and, and also just the, the skill which, with which that flavor has been incorporated into

01:44:27.480 | whatever the, the food or drink is. On the topic of fermentation, our colleague, I assume you've

01:44:34.520 | mentioned a lot of our colleagues, but we've got a lot of spectacular colleagues at Stanford at Justin

01:44:38.520 | Sonnenberg. And to be fair, his wife, Erica has also contributed critically to this work,

01:44:44.440 | have, uh, made discoveries essentially that consuming low sugar fermented foods on a daily

01:44:50.040 | basis can lower inflammation, uh, markers of inflammation, even more so than increasing

01:44:57.400 | one's fiber intake, which is itself interesting. What have you learned about fermentation chemistry,

01:45:02.600 | fermentation as a, as a human practice, um, for health benefits, sure for taste, but just as a thing,

01:45:09.960 | fermentation is a pretty, pretty wild thing that we would do this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I, uh,

01:45:16.600 | my sense is that it began, um, we were talking earlier about, uh, about alcohol began with just

01:45:23.960 | observation. You, um, have fruits that are overripe and they're sitting on the forest floor and they sit

01:45:31.240 | long enough and they begin to smell different and look different and fizz and all kinds of things. And that's,

01:45:37.960 | that's interesting. So, um, I, my sense is that fermentation has been discovered essentially

01:45:45.000 | by every population on the, uh, on the earth, including the, the Arctic where you think it might

01:45:52.760 | take a while for things to go on. But in fact, um, products that are translated into English as

01:46:00.600 | extinct fish are among the most prized of the, of the foods in the Inuit, um, regions of the, of the

01:46:09.960 | pole. How do they prepare this stink fish? Uh, essentially by, uh, letting it sit.

01:46:16.600 | So that's one of the appeals of fermentation is you don't have to do a whole lot. You just, uh, catch the

01:46:24.040 | food, whatever it is and, um, uh, put it in a container of some kind. Uh, some sting fish are

01:46:31.640 | made simply by digging a pit and burying it and covering it over. Um, and then there's, there's a

01:46:37.800 | connoisseurship of, of these foods. Um, it's a lot of fun actually to go back and read the accounts of

01:46:45.640 | explorers to these regions. And, uh, the locals are, you know, uh, trying to show the greatest

01:46:53.240 | hospitality by serving them foods that they can't bear even to get near, uh, uh, salmon eggs, another

01:47:01.560 | example, highly prized, uh, but after they'd been fermented, so. This is caviar. Yeah. Yeah.

01:47:09.160 | One of the most expensive foods on the planet. Exactly. Exactly. And not just for, um,

01:47:15.000 | kind of for show reasons. I mean, the, the omega-3 content of caviar is like off the charts and the,

01:47:22.920 | um, there are other micronutrients in, in caviar that make it, this is like the, these are the

01:47:29.400 | sturgeon eggs typically, right? Yes. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which, uh, production of

01:47:36.040 | which almost disappeared 20 years ago and now is booming because people are now farming these fish, uh, the, the

01:47:44.280 | fish were endangered. Uh, they're now farming them all over the place and trying, uh, caviar from

01:47:51.000 | different species that had never been tried before. So, um, uh, that's actually part of, um, what I would

01:48:00.120 | say about fermentation these days as well is that once, um, um, the, the formerly isolated populations

01:48:11.720 | on the earth began communicating with each other and sharing expertise and sharing knowledge of these

01:48:19.160 | materials, which has happened, of course, um, hugely in the last 20 years or so. Um, local, traditional ways of doing

01:48:29.480 | things have now not only spread to other parts of the world, but gotten people to ask the question,

01:48:36.200 | well, if you can do this kind of fermentation with this raw material, what about doing it with

01:48:43.080 | a different raw material? Um, so, uh, you know, miso was traditionally made with soybeans.

01:48:50.600 | Now it's being made with peas in, in, uh, northern Europe and just on and on and on. Um, uh, which I think is

01:49:00.360 | both tremendously difficult to keep up with, but also tremendously exciting because it means that

01:49:06.280 | we're now, um, seeing how traditional food materials can be transformed by the action of microbes that we've,

01:49:17.800 | we kind of know about, but only know about in very specific, uh, contexts. Uh, and so I, I think the

01:49:26.680 | next couple of decades are going to bring forth, uh, just all kinds of new foods that will be initially

01:49:34.280 | strange and maybe off-putting because they're new, but also they're going to be, you know, this,

01:49:41.320 | this era's, um, versions of miso and, uh, soy sauce and beer and wine and so on.

01:49:51.160 | So exciting times ahead. Yeah. We, we forget that we're still evolving,

01:49:56.040 | you know, especially when we hear about all the problems of the world, we forget that we're still

01:50:00.680 | evolving and that some of the technologies around food and drink are not just creating less healthy

01:50:05.960 | versions. But as you pointed out, are, are creating new, new hybrids of information,

01:50:11.240 | new hybrids of actual foods. It's not all about returning to ancient ways. You know,

01:50:16.280 | the conversations like this of slowing down and, and, uh, one's intake of food and chewing and

01:50:21.240 | appreciating and, um, thinking about preparation of food, not just eating out of packages. One hopes,

01:50:27.480 | um, people, I think if there's one thing that the vegans, the vegetarians, the omnivores and the

01:50:33.080 | carnivores all agree on is that eating fewer processed foods is better. That's the one thing

01:50:39.000 | they all seem to agree on. Yeah. Um, I have a question about you. Uh, actually I have several

01:50:43.880 | questions about you, which is what motivated this exploration into, into food and chemistry? I mean,

01:50:51.080 | you're taking a very different approach to all of this. Um, I should point out that your original

01:50:56.840 | training at Caltech was in astronomy. Then you shifted to another field and then you ended up in

01:51:02.440 | this field of, of food science slash chemistry. Um, you know, a lot about poetry. So, um,

01:51:10.200 | I don't think I've ever met anyone with that background. You are clearly an N of one, as we say,

01:51:17.400 | what, what got you into this whole thing? And, and, and more importantly, perhaps what motivates you?

01:51:23.880 | Like what's, what's, where's the, the, the texture of interest? Yeah. Is it like to taste as many

01:51:29.800 | things as possible or is it to link levels of analysis? What, what is it? That last question

01:51:35.000 | is a really good one. I'll have to, I'll think about that as I answered the first parts. So yeah,

01:51:39.800 | I started out, uh, in love with science and with astronomy in particular and, you know, built a telescope. And,

01:51:46.600 | uh, uh, uh, I still look up at Orion every time it's in the sky and the, and the skies are clear. Um,

01:51:55.640 | went to Caltech to do astronomy, decided after a couple of years there that the, um, the physics

01:52:06.040 | was just not enough of a motivator for me to keep going. The physics had, at that point had gotten

01:52:12.680 | pretty, um, hairy for me. And so I decided, you know, I'm, I, I still love to look at the stars,

01:52:20.040 | but maybe I'm not gonna do astronomy. I then looked around for other things and the people I, I had always

01:52:28.040 | loved the humanities, poetry and novels in particular. Uh, I was going to transfer to Stanford actually.

01:52:37.560 | And my, uh, literature professors at Caltech, and there were a few, um, convinced me to stay. And they

01:52:46.440 | said, what you can do is you can stay with us, cherry pick the science, because you don't have to take as

01:52:52.120 | much anymore. And we'll get you a desk at the Huntington Library and the research library and

01:52:58.520 | we'll, we'll give you tutorials and we'll take care of you. And that's exactly what happened. It was a

01:53:05.080 | fantastic, uh, uh, education that still included plenty of science, but it was on my terms and not the,

01:53:12.440 | not the discipline's terms. Uh, and then I went off to graduate school in literature, uh, having been,

01:53:21.240 | um, uh, inspired by my teachers at Caltech, did a degree there, uh, on the poetry of John Keats,

01:53:30.440 | uh, and then couldn't get a job teaching. And so my, um, my mentors back at Caltech and also

01:53:40.840 | at, in, uh, graduate school said, well, you know, you have the science in your background,

01:53:44.840 | you should do something with that. And, um, long story short, conversations with friends over

01:53:51.960 | the dinner table and drinking wine and so on. Um, a question came up, why is it that beans give you gas?

01:54:02.920 | And, uh, we all laughed. I laughed. And then I went to the library

01:54:07.640 | and I found out why. And I came back and told my friends and we had a good laugh. And then I thought,

01:54:14.680 | maybe, I mean, people are interested in food and this is kind of a fun fact about food that

01:54:21.000 | most people don't know. Maybe I can do this kind of thing. Uh, so I, I began to look a little more

01:54:28.840 | into it and then in the meantime, a scout for one of the publishing houses in New York had a girlfriend

01:54:37.080 | who was in the same group and she reported to him. He reported to the publisher. Publisher called up out

01:54:43.960 | of the blue and said, we hear you're writing a book about the science of food. And so from that moment on,

01:54:50.760 | I was writing a book about the science of food. I said, yes, I am. Yes. Uh, what, why do we get gas from

01:54:57.640 | beans and is it true that soaking them in water prior to cooking them can, uh, remove some of that,

01:55:03.240 | uh, untoward effect? So it turns out that the, the answer was discovered by scientists working for NASA.

01:55:12.840 | And if you think about NASA and their missions back in the seventies, you can understand why they would

01:55:19.960 | want to control something like this. So, uh, it turns out that beans contain, in addition to, uh, starch and

01:55:29.480 | sugars, uh, kind of intermediate sized, uh, carbohydrates that our bodies do not have the enzymes to break down

01:55:38.760 | into sugars. So we can take care of starch, but, but not these, uh, intermediate sized molecules. And so they

01:55:46.520 | pass into our gut unchanged and then we have plenty of microbes who are happy to see those and, and, uh,

01:55:53.640 | digest them. And in the process they produce CO2 and hydrogen gas and that's what we end up experiencing.

01:56:02.440 | So the way to deal with that is to, uh, soaking the beans will work, um, that, uh, leaches out some of these

01:56:12.200 | molecules, which are small and so soluble in water. Um, even more effective is to actually bring that

01:56:20.600 | water after it's been soaking to a boil and then pour that water off that, that will get rid of more.

01:56:27.400 | But the other point I would make about these, uh, so-called oligosaccharides is these days we value,

01:56:34.440 | uh, the life in our lower tract. And these are the creatures that those molecules are in fact feeding.

01:56:44.280 | So, and it has been shown that you can, you can, uh, or your system can kind of adapt. Uh, so yeah,

01:56:52.760 | the first few times you have, uh, uh, um, beans or light lentils or whatever it might be, um,

01:57:01.080 | you may have some discomfort, but the more frequently you eat it, the better you're able to

01:57:07.320 | tolerate it or your, your system is able to tolerate it without generating the, the discomfort.

01:57:14.040 | Yeah, that seems to be a repeating theme, which is that the more we eat certain foods, the more our

01:57:20.440 | gut microbiome adapts to those foods. I think that we're just at the beginning of understanding

01:57:26.360 | the gut microbiome, but it's such a key player. So what, um, do you make it a point to eat fermented

01:57:33.880 | foods? Um, given what you know about the microbiome, what are your favorite fermented foods or drinks?

01:57:39.720 | Yeah. Um, I, uh, have learned to like kimchi. So that was not initially, uh, a food that I sought out,

01:57:49.720 | but I, I've really come to like it. Um, and, um, uh, you know, that, that may really be the only,

01:57:58.360 | uh, unusual fermented food that I seek out. I mean, I, um, I love fruits and vegetables and, and legumes and

01:58:08.920 | eat lots of those and kind of figure that, you know, things will take care of themselves down

01:58:14.520 | there for the most part. But, uh, kimchi is something I've come to love.

01:58:17.880 | Yeah. I haven't quite gotten to the kimchi thing. I think it's because a few years ago,

01:58:23.400 | I brought it into my lab when I was in San Diego and my entire lab complained, except one person,

01:58:29.720 | my Korean student who absolutely loved it. So I think some of these things are, are acquired early in

01:58:36.680 | life. And that's a question I was going to ask earlier. Do you think that when young kids in

01:58:41.880 | particular, like don't want broccoli or they, um, don't want certain foods that it's reflecting an

01:58:48.440 | actual real aversion that's based on something important about their chemistry?

01:58:54.680 | Yeah. Yeah. So my, uh, again, the, I don't think the literature is clear, but my sense based on having

01:59:02.440 | had a couple of kids go through this and just thinking it through, uh, I, I think what's going

01:59:10.840 | on is that kids have a heightened sense of taste and smell. Um, and very early in development, they're,

01:59:19.080 | um, omnivorous though they're, they'll put anything in their mouths. Then at a certain point, they become

01:59:25.720 | much more conservative. And, um, and I think also much more sensitive to nuances, you know, the, the sulfurousness

01:59:34.760 | of broccoli and that kind of thing. So, um, but I think it's also, uh, both temporary and, uh, you can work

01:59:43.960 | with it. So in the case of our kids, uh, we just made our regular dinners every, every day. Um, and we would

01:59:53.400 | say to our kids, you're welcome to eat as much or as little, uh, what we have as you want, but this is

02:00:00.280 | what we have. And there was one food that neither my son or daughter could tolerate. And we ended up just

02:00:09.720 | deciding, okay, that's literally off the table. You don't have to worry about this one. And it was, um,

02:00:17.080 | amaranth leaves. Whoa. Uh, which I was growing in the garden. Cause you know, I'm trying to learn

02:00:23.080 | about everything and, uh, and they're interesting. Uh, but they have a very particular texture and it

02:00:29.160 | was the texture that they just, you know, it made them gag and I didn't want to put them through that.

02:00:34.680 | So fair. So it wasn't just saying, I don't like this. It was, they were trying. If nothing else,

02:00:41.320 | one can still thrive, uh, in life without having eaten amaranth leaves. Is it true that some people

02:00:47.480 | like, and some people loathe cilantro because they taste different things in the cilantro?

02:00:53.000 | Like the experience of cilantro is fundamentally different for some people than others. I like it.

02:00:57.400 | My father, he, he hates it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So cilantro is a really interesting case. And, um,

02:01:05.400 | the subject of, uh, series of, uh, studies at the Monell Chemical Census Center. Uh, they were,

02:01:13.400 | they, uh, in addition to all kinds of other things would go to local county fairs

02:01:17.640 | and ask people, ask, first of all, for twins. If, if they saw twins on the grounds,

02:01:25.880 | they would bring them over to the booth and ask them both to taste, uh, cilantro and, and say what they

02:01:31.960 | thought. Bottom line is, um, uh, cilantro has molecules that, uh, kind of, uh, I was going to

02:01:40.680 | say cross-react. That's not exactly it. They, they're also found in soaps. And so for a lot of people,

02:01:48.520 | depending on whether they've been acculturated to cilantro early in their lives or not,

02:01:53.400 | if they're only encountering it as an adult, the first thing they're going to think is,

02:01:58.520 | that tastes like soap. I don't want to put that in my mouth. Uh, unless, you know, you're in company

02:02:04.520 | where it's important to go along with the, with the gang. Um, so there's a good, uh, basis for

02:02:11.960 | this kind of divergent set of reactions, but it has more to do with the, the cultural appearance of those

02:02:20.520 | same flavor molecules than with the material itself. I see. So for those of you that don't like cilantro,

02:02:27.560 | you can, uh, cite this, uh, discussion. I have a colleague at, uh, Harvard, um, Catherine Duloc,

02:02:35.000 | who studies the olfactory system. You're probably familiar with Catherine's work. Yeah. And, um, she's

02:02:39.800 | French, uh, as the last name suggests. And she would tell this story about different students and postdocs in

02:02:47.080 | her lab who come from a variety of different countries, um, being split down the middle in

02:02:54.520 | terms of their experience of microwave popcorn that some people in her lab like love the smell of

02:03:01.640 | microwave popcorn, but then there's a separate population of people in her lab that experienced

02:03:06.120 | the smell of microwave popcorn as exactly the same as pungent vomit. And she claims it's on the basis of a

02:03:15.080 | variant in one of these olfactory receptors, which also speaks to the relationship between smell and taste,

02:03:20.200 | you know, like nobody wants to eat something that smells putrid. Yeah. Yeah. Generally, one would hope.

02:03:25.160 | What are some other examples of foods where people tend to diverge on the basis of something,

02:03:29.720 | uh, known to be, or almost certainly biological as opposed to just,

02:03:34.760 | I wasn't raised eating that or that seems weird. So one thing that comes to mind that isn't quite that,

02:03:41.480 | um, is, uh, parmesan cheese, which, um, has as one of its primary, uh, flavor components, butyric acid,

02:03:53.000 | which is also the main thing that makes vomit smell like vomit. And some people, uh, just can't eat

02:04:01.160 | parmesan cheese for that reason. Others don't notice it. Uh, others kind of notice it, but it's okay. It's part of

02:04:08.840 | being parmesan cheese. Uh, so a lot depends on not only the sort of the individual apparatus

02:04:17.080 | experiencing a food, but then also what's kind of normal for that food to contain. And because,

02:04:23.720 | uh, uh, uh, cow's milk is especially rich in, um, uh, butyric acid as one of the components of the

02:04:34.680 | fats. That's what you get when the breakdown takes place.

02:04:38.840 | I like the example of parmesan cheese more for me, more for me. My last question is, um, not in the

02:04:47.720 | domain of food or chemistry, but, um, it's about poetry. This is a science health podcast, but you're

02:04:54.200 | here and, and you have the expertise. So I'm going to ask you, I love poetry. What is something that you

02:04:59.160 | learned about Keats that most people don't know that is, at least to you, particularly interesting.

02:05:04.360 | And then I'll ask you to suggest, uh, a Keats starter pack. Um, maybe name one, one, uh,

02:05:11.640 | Keats poem that everyone should go read. We'll put a link to it. But first question is, uh, you spent

02:05:15.800 | considerable amount of time researching Keats and learning about him and his work. So, um,

02:05:21.800 | what's something that we're not going to learn elsewhere? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I think one of the most

02:05:29.240 | important things about his, his development, uh, and the reason that he wrote the kind of poetry he did,

02:05:36.120 | which was often, um, concerned with, uh, with death eventually, ultimately, um, is that he started out

02:05:47.960 | life as a medical student? He was a medical student at, uh, uh, uh, Guy's Hospital in London,

02:05:57.560 | which still exists and has a long, um, uh, amazing history. Um, he was a medical student. He, uh, had a

02:06:08.840 | mother and a brother who both died of TB and he attended them, uh, in their illnesses. And, uh,

02:06:19.800 | so to know that, and then to read, uh, a poem like "To Autumn," which is the poem that I would, uh,

02:06:31.320 | suggest people read, uh, I think just adds a dimension of, um, um, uh, appreciation to that poem.

02:06:44.200 | Because there's, there's nothing about death in the poem. It's just a description of a natural scene

02:06:51.640 | in the autumn, um, but that those experiences are there. And, uh, knowing that and reading not only

02:07:01.160 | that poem, but, but many others, um, I'm sure it was, um, well, I, I think he wrote poetry both to, um,

02:07:12.120 | comfort people and to kind of work through what it is that life is all about, that he needs to come to

02:07:21.560 | terms with in order to have lived that, that life. Thank you for that. We will go read, uh, to Autumn

02:07:30.040 | and, uh, we'll look for those experiences, uh, inside of that. A couple of things I want to say. Uh,

02:07:37.400 | first of all, uh, thank you so much for coming here and, and sharing your knowledge with us. Um,

02:07:42.920 | I'm certain that it's going to change the way that people experience food and drink, and if nothing else

02:07:48.760 | will get them chewing their food and pausing between bites here and there to get deeper into

02:07:54.120 | the experience of food. Uh, it's also nice. Uh, in fact, it's very refreshing to be able to talk about

02:08:00.840 | food, uh, on this podcast, uh, not within the context of just fueling the body and health benefits. Uh,

02:08:08.760 | those are critically important, but obviously food has cultural aspects and it has

02:08:13.960 | taste aspects and it's one of the great sources of pleasure in life. So, um, you've taught us how to

02:08:18.920 | get more pleasure from, from food and also it's links to history and human evolution. I mean, there's,

02:08:24.360 | there's so much there and we'll put links to your books that explore, uh, chemistry of food and, and

02:08:29.240 | other, other aspects. I also just, I want to thank you because whether you intended to or not, um,

02:08:35.080 | you're a wonderful example of how somebody, uh, follows their interests and blends them. Um, and

02:08:41.640 | how talking about your interests with people, um, can help you get opportunities to get paid to do what

02:08:49.800 | you do? You know, people often wonder, you know, how do I take my varied interests and, and put them

02:08:54.360 | into something and they'll try and like, like thread the needle from this to that. And, and I, I'm not

02:08:59.400 | going to make up a story here, but what I gathered was that just by being you and being open-minded and

02:09:05.240 | answering questions when people ask that, uh, you've been able to, uh, braid together your, your interests

02:09:10.520 | in a way that's allowed you to have a very unique career that's very impactful. Your books have been read

02:09:15.720 | by so many people and this conversation will be heard by so many people. So thank you for that.

02:09:21.320 | It's a reminder to just be oneself and things generally work out and that you're continuing to

02:09:27.480 | do the great work that you're doing. So once again, thanks for taking the time to come down here and

02:09:31.960 | talk to us. I'm going to try some new foods. I think I'm going to do this tea thing. I need some

02:09:36.360 | greenery in my place and I'm going to, I think I'm going to do that. So I have questions for you about that.

02:09:40.280 | And, um, yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate the work you're doing.

02:09:44.200 | Well, you know, thank you very much, Andrew. If I can just say a word, um, about how, um,

02:09:51.000 | how rare it is to talk with people who are broadly interested in sort of the details of life,

02:09:59.960 | but also the meaning of life and, you know, what's, what's possible and what's not, uh, that, um, that makes

02:10:07.160 | me especially happy to be here. Um, and I was just going to say that, um, I, I looked at this,

02:10:13.960 | the book about food as being, you know, a one-off and then I would write about gardening or, you know,

02:10:21.640 | something else. Um, and I just got captured by the subject. You know, there's, it's hard to think of

02:10:27.960 | something that's more central to, um, you know, just sustaining human life, but also getting pleasure

02:10:34.760 | from it. And, uh, so I, I went down the rabbit hole and I'm still down there.

02:10:40.360 | Well, we're grateful you are. So thank you. And thanks for putting the knowledge you collect in

02:10:45.160 | that rabbit hole out into the world. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion

02:10:49.960 | with Dr. Harold McGee to learn more about his work and to find links to his books.

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The Chemistry of Food & Taste | Dr. Harold McGee

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