Flavor: the ultimate status update | Ali Bouzari | TEDxKish

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.

What is the tipping point of Taste? This is a question, masterly answered by Ali Bouzari, who shares how our understanding of life and the world is intertwined with flavor.
Ali Bouzari is the Chief Science Officer and a Co-Founder of Pilot R+D, a culinary development company, based in Northern California. As a culinary scientist, he has the ability to translate complex scientific concepts and esoteric culinary ideas into a language, which is approachable and accessible.

Here's a piece of an orange.

I'm going to eat this.

And when I do,

I'm going to feel something,

I'm going to taste something.

A transfer of information
is going to happen.

On the surface, it feels like something
in that orange had taste.

And I sensed it, and that was it.

That's what that orange tasted like.

That's how I always thought it worked.

But what if I told you
that the taste of that orange

was a tiny fraction
of what was actually going on there,

and that there was a massive
amount of additional information,

encoded in that experience.

Not just about the orange, but about me,

and my surroundings, and you,

and my past, present,
and possibly my future.

What if I told you that eating that orange
created a perfect snapshot

of exactly who I was at that moment.

Like, a more perfect picture
than I could get from my own DNA.

Every day, we eat the ultimate
personal status update.

Everything we are,
and everything we have been,

is distilled and packaged
into a single moment.

I want to know how we can access
that information.

And what could we learn from it?
And what could we do with it?

So let me tell you how I got into this.

Because my story starts
in the late 70's in Austin, Texas,

when a short Iranian guy,

who kind of looked
like a Persian John Lennon,

asked a tall daydreaming
hippie out to dinner.

She was from a small town,
and she was charmed

by his jumpy broken English.

And she decided that dinner
would probably be exotic and delicious,

but at the very least
it would be entertaining.

So over the next few years,
my dad's English got way better,

and my mom mastered Farsi.

But regardless of what language

they were butchering,
trying to talk to each other,

the conversation was always about food.

And that made me a confused,
but well-fed baby.

(Laughter)

10 out of 12 of my first words
were food words,

split between two languages.

And most of my memories from childhood
revolve around food.

And now, it is my job
to play with food all day.

And it's absolutely my parents' fault.

Because food and family, my family

shaped me from the very beginning.

But the defining moment in my life

was when my dad died a few years ago.

Now, this is not a sad story,

my dad was a wonderfully hilarious
and ridiculous human being.

He was just not a sad story kind of guy.

But the morning after he died,

I woke up...

to this suffocating sense of dread,

that I would forget his hands
or his voice, or his amazing ability

to mistranslate the punchline of a joke
and still have you laugh,

usually at him.

And it's apparently a very common fear:

to worry about losing memories we cherish.

So I woke up that morning,
and I walked downstairs to our kitchen,

and I found three of his brothers,
my uncles, sitting around a table,

doing what they did best,

which was eating
insane quantities of food.

So, I sat down and joined them,

and I remember having
toasted bread with cheese, beets,

and leftover shish kebab,

which was kind of our usual thing.

And with one bite of that,
memories of my dad hit me so hard,

that I remember taking my hands

and pressing them to my forehead
just to get a grip.

Because all of a sudden, I was 10

and my dad was cooking
for my friends and I at my birthday party.

And then I remembered being 16

and in a lot of trouble,

sitting at a very silent, awkward,
and tense breakfast table

the morning after my parents found out

that I'd set a field on fire
with illegal fireworks.

And then I remembered

the last time I ever had
breakfast with my dad.

And it was wonderful.

All these memories
came out of nowhere in perfect clarity

from a bite of leftovers.

So at the time, I had been studying
biochemistry in college.

And I had fallen head-over-heels in love
with the science of cooking.

So I was in this mindset where I thought,

maybe there's something
about the science of eating,

some secrets there that would help me
figure out what was going on.

And possibly help me strengthen
this connection, that I felt to my dad.

So I started researching
what we knew about it.

And the first thing I found
was that in English

the word we use most often
to describe food is "taste".

But taste is only the beginning.

It doesn't come close to capturing
everything that happens when we eat.

And I found that scientists
prefer another word,

a more powerful word, to encapsulate
that entire experience.

And that word is "flavor".

Now my first reaction was,

"I thought taste and flavor
were the same thing."

I used them interchangeably all the time.

And I definitely didn't think that flavor

was some profound philosophical
concept that needed defining.

But flavor is profound.

We can't agree on exactly what it is yet.

But there's a general consensus

that it starts with
all five of our senses.

So, the most obvious is taste.

It's the one that we switch in and out
with flavor all the time.

But with just taste,

we wouldn't be able to tell or identify
what foods are in our own mouths.

Because our tongues are stupid.

For real. You get sweet, sour,
salty, bitter, and umami.

And that's it.

Smell is the sense,

that starts to layer on the characteristic
identity of individual foods.

So: whether they're smoky,
or floral, or fruity, or nutty.

And you can smell things
two different ways,

both before,

and after you put food in your mouth.

And it's that second type of smelling,

that causes your brain
to combine taste and smell

to tell what is going on.

What I mean by that is,

if I eat this piece of candy,

as it's on my tongue,
I'm going to be tasting it.

And at the same time,

there're going to be aromas, traveling up
the back of my throat to be smelled.

And the combination of the two

is how I figure out what this candy is.

So if I tried that same thing,

holding my nose,

it's almost impossible,

because I can taste it:
sweet, sour - this is weird -

but that's it!

If I let go of my nose,

it's amazing, it's like, a spotlight
turns on in my head,

and I can tell you,
without a doubt, that it's lime.

So touch comes in, the third sense,

and it builds shades of contrast
on the first two:

with temperature, texture, and burning,

and cooling, and numbing, and tingling.

All those sensations that we get
from hot chili peppers,

and mint, and horse radish,

it's touch, not taste.

And at that point, you get hearing,

which accents the whole ensemble.

You get the percussive sounds
of crunchy foods,

that echo through your jawbone.

And you get the soft hissing
of anything bubbly.

And then, vision comes in
and ties everything together.

Because visual cues set our expectations
and our context for what we're eating.

Now, all these senses are not static.

They're constantly changing,

depending on your genetics
and your current physical condition.

So I have a question,
I have some questions:

How old are you?

Are you male or female?

What time is it?

Are you sick?

When was the last time you slept?

When was the last time you ate?

When was the last time you smoked?

All of this stuff affects
how your sensory machinery works

at any given moment.

And that embeds
another layer of information

in the data that they collect.

But at this point, that data
is just raw, it's meaningless.

It's paint, not a painting.

Flavor is a painting.

And our brains are the painters.

And the process,
by which the painting is created,

is where our knowledge just drops off.

And it's in this sort of gray area,

that I think this vast
wealth of information lies,

waiting to be discovered.

And where I think I might find

my most profound connections to my dad.

So, what makes that painter paint?

We know a few things.

So, we know that the senses
can talk to each other

through our brains.

So, when I see a strawberry,

if I see a more vibrantly red strawberry,
it's going to smell more aromatic.

And if I'm eating potato chips,

if I hear a louder potato chip,

it's going to make it
feel crispier in my mouth.

So there's this tug-of-war,
that happens between the senses

in our brains

regarding data from the food.

But what about our surroundings?

What about information about my mood,
and memories, and my focus, and attention?

What does that do for flavor?

Because we know it matters,
we just don't know exactly how much.

And I think we might find
some of those answers,

by looking at the concept
of thresholds in our senses.

So, by thresholds I mean,

to perceive salt, there needs to be
- I'm not going to eat this -

there needs to be enough salt
in this piece of food

to set off sensors on my tongue.

And the same holds true
for all of our other senses.

Whether something is
aromatic enough to smell

or loud enough to hear.

So if we have thresholds
for all of our senses,

do we have thresholds
for the other half of flavor?

Like, is there a point,
at which my memories, or my attention,

start to affect the flavor
that I perceive when I eat?

So I think that, for instance,

eating seafood is way better
when you're near the ocean.

What I want to know is,

exactly how far from the ocean
do I have to be to affect flavor?

Or how vivid and grotesque do my memories
of food poisoning have to be

to affect how I feel about milk?

Or how tired do I have to be
to affect the flavor of coffee?

Or how in love do I have to be
to affect the flavor of chocolate?

Now, with the senses
we can actually lower our thresholds

and get more sensitive,
better at detecting subtle signals.

So can we do that with the other stuff?

Are there ways where I can train myself
to become more in tune with culture

or memory, and connect
with those things better when I eat?

Now the craziest thing about our senses

is that even below the lowest threshold,
our experiences are still affected.

Salt still affects
your perception of flavor,

even when there's so little salt,

that you can't pick out
the saltiness itself.

And there can be particles,
tiny pieces of food in a sauce,

that are too small for your tongue
to be able to read them and say,

"These are lumps."

And even though you cannot
consciously pick them out,

they affect the way that fluid
moves around in your mouth,

and they affect the texture.

So these things are in the background.

We're not even consciously aware of them,

and they're affecting our reality
of this flavor perception.

And that leads me to the thing
that I cannot get out of my head:

What if it all matters?

I'm serious! I'm talking
about memories we've forgotten,

and emotions that have faded away,

and tiny details from our environment,
that we don't even care about.

What if flavor forces us
to take all five of our senses

and funnel it through the lens
of who we are,

of everything that's happening
and has happened in our lives?

What if flavor really is this ultimate
personal status update?

It would contain a staggering
amount of information.

So, all of our individual
unique life experiences

would mean that no two people
have ever experienced the same flavor.

It would mean that no one person

has ever experienced
the same flavor twice.

And we could use that to find
something like a fingerprint,

but even better and more specific,

because it would be talking about
individual moments in a person's life.

And it could tell us how that person
is doing, emotionally or physically.

And all of our interactions
around food, and in the vicinity of food,

would mean that flavor could connect us

in some really wild ways.

So any time you eat in the vicinity
of another human being,

you form part of that person's
permanent flavor record -

flavor memory.

And we could use that
to trace the dynamics between us.

Whether it's a relationship
between two people

or a movement across entire cultures.

Reality check: This is going to be hard.

We're talking about the intersection

between our food, which is complex,

our bodies, which are complicated,

and our minds, which are usually crazy.

So to unearth flavor and use it

as a societal or personal
litmus test or x-ray,

we're going to need to figure out a way
to study all of this at once.

But luckily for us, it's possible now,

because this is the era of Big Data,

so computer people tell me.

I mean, we've figured out
how to decode genomes

and map entire systems

that for a very long time
we thought were impossibly complex.

So we may not be far from figuring out
a platform, on which to study flavor.

But it doesn't even exist without people.

None of this matters
without human beings, eating food.

There is no flavor, until that thing
is inside of your mouth.

So if we're going to get
anything from flavor,

even learn how to define what it is,

we need to get used to
talking about it more.

So, I have a homework assignment:

The next time you eat anything,

experience what you're eating.

Check in with all five of your senses

and see what each of them is telling you

in contributing to your experience.

And then stop,
and think about where you are

and how you feel.

And please, think about who you're with,

and what you remember.

Because the flavor that you experience

is going to be wrapped up
in exactly who you are at that moment.

So take that moment,

to see what you might discover.

Thank you.

(Applause)