Read Online You May Also Like by Tom Vanderbilt - Free Book Online Page B

the MREs of tomorrow stand up? Did they still deserve the unfortunate sobriquets such as “meals refusing to exit” or “meals rejected by Ethiopians”? I took a bite of “MATS Salmon,” “MATS” standing for “microwave-assisted thermal sterilization.” The name could use a little work and the fish was, admittedly, a bit tough. “It’s a little chewier than we’d like,” Darsch told me. Not surprisingly: The salmon had been bombarded with over 120,000 psi of pressure, literally rupturing the cell walls of any lingering bacteria with the ruthlessness of a bunker-busting bomb. But the taste was there, at least more than one would expect for a shrink-wrapped piece of room-temperature fish with no immediate sell-by date. Would it fly at Del Posto? No. But to a soldier faced with a long-range patrol in a hot desert, it might be just good enough.
I MAY KNOW WHAT I LIKE, BUT I KNOW I DON’T LIKE WHAT I DON’T KNOW: LIKING IS LEARNING
    On the morning I went to Philadelphia to meet Marcia Pelchat, a longtime researcher at Monell, I was nursing a slight cold. When I arrived at her office, Pelchat, a petite, polite woman with a disarming sense of humor, offered me coffee. I asked if she had tea, explaining that whenever I have a cold, I prefer tea, which suddenly seems to taste better than coffee. She considered it for a moment, then said, “Coffee without the aroma would seem like ashes to me.”
    Here is that thing that is so easy to forget yet never fails to startle when we experience it firsthand: Most of the action when we are tasting something comes from the nose. Coffee is one of those curious things that smells better than it tastes, and to lose the smell of it is in essence to lose what we like about it. To remind yourself of this basic sensoryfact, it is worth, every once in a while, administering to yourself what Pelchat does to me on this morning: the jelly-bean test. She handed me three jelly beans and asked me to hold my already stuffed nose. They each tasted, simply, sweet. When I released my nostrils on the last jelly bean, I suddenly experienced, even with my cold, a spreading flood of flavor, something like Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream, through the back of my mouth and nose. I had, in fact, just eaten a coffee-flavored jelly bean, as well as its banana- and licorice-flavored cousins.
    Our taste-bud-studded tongues do the basic sensory sorting: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and, less officially, umami (and maybe fat). But all the finer distinctions—mango versus papaya, lamb versus pork—come “retronasally,” from the mouth up through the nasal passage, as a smell. The things we know as strawberries or Coca-Cola or
sriracha
sauce are not tastes; they are flavors. There is, strictly speaking, no “taste of honey”; there is “retronasal olfaction of honey.” Honey, to be honey, needs to waft on a gust of inhaled air into our nasopharynx. Even seemingly strong “tastes,” like lemon, only read on the tongue as a collection of sours and bitters and sweets.Terpenes triggering receptors in the olfactory mucosa make lemon lemony.
    How we perceive something, Paul Rozin has argued, influences how we feel about it. Even people who do not like the taste of coffee can no doubt appreciate the aroma. By contrast, on a plate, Limburger cheese may strike us, via our nose, as unpleasant. Once in the mouth, however, it undergoes a stunning change into something we may find pleasurable. It is as if the brain, sensing that food is in the mouth, and thus no longer represents some external hazard, shifts its whole outlook. Give someone who has a nose-blocking cold a cup of beef broth to which yellow food coloring has been added, Pelchat told me, and he will think he is eating chicken soup. Take away the retronasal passage, and it would be like going from a cable television package with an almost infinite number of channels down