The Science of Flavor with Arielle Johnson

What is flavor? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly explore the science of what makes some foods tastier than others, what is “umami,” and how flavor changed in the 20th century with food scientist Arielle Johnson.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, I don't know if that episode made me more hungry or less hungry.

• 0:03Chuck Nice?

  I think if we're talking about stinky herrings and less hungry, I'm going with less.

• 0:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're going with less.

• 0:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 0:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was like so many elements and aspects of food that I hadn't even imagined. And we just began to plumb the depths of it.

• 0:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But here it is, Flavorama all the way.

• 0:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk, special edition. Got with me my usual co-host, Gary O'Reilly. Gary?

• 0:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Hi Neil.

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, hey, former soccer pro turned soccer announcer, and we get to share you with the soccer universe. Thanks for being part of the StarTalk family. And of course Chuck Knight, Chucky Baby.

• 0:57Chuck Nice?

  Hey, what's happening?

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, you and your producers put this together, so give me the setup for this.

• 1:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so I suppose we all do it. We all eat.

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You think? Okay.

• 1:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Our bodies need fuel. We shovel it in and we burn it up.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Into your pie hole.

• 1:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Yep, in the pie hole, then it goes. But how many of us stop to consider the fundamentals of what we eat, such as flavor? Is it luck where some meals taste better than others? Or are we being cleverly led into a foodie heaven? Then ask yourself, why do some foods work better than others? And whose idea was it to put sea salt on caramel? Really, whose idea was that? Because it works really, really well, but it wouldn't come straight to your mind unless somebody came to you. So then you go, is cooking just cooking? Or are we looking at science here?

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm going to guess it's always science. That's what I'm going to guess.

• 1:53Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, then. There's you out on a limb again, Neil.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we've got with us a repeat guest. This might be your third time on StarTalk, scattered over five or six years. Ariel Johnson. Ariel, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me back.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have the coolest designation as a flavor scientist. That's a thing.

• 2:14Chuck Nice?

  Labor.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  It's a niche field, but yeah, we're passionate about it.

• 2:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you are the flavor scientist. That's how niche it is. You're advisor to some of the world's top chefs, top restaurants. You have a PhD from none other than UC Davis, which has a, I know about their wine division, but they also have a food division there?

• 2:38Speaker 03

  They, they do. I was actually in the wine department because they have a really like strong experience with the science of flavor.

• 2:45Chuck Nice?

  So, so do I.

• 2:48Chuck Nice?

  But that's, that's anology, isn't it? That's.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, viticulture and ideology. Yeah.

• 2:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're co-founder of the fermentation lab, which sounds a little weird, you know?

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's better than the fomentation lab, I guess. And what's it have to do with that world renowned restaurant in Copenhagen called Noma?

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, uh, Noma started with, in retrospect, a little bit of a, a stupidly difficult creative constraint, which was let's cook with ingredients only from Scandinavia.

• 3:20Chuck Nice?

  Oh, God.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Which, yeah.

• 3:22Chuck Nice?

  And I mean, seriously, and we're celebrating this place?

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Potatoes, beets, onions.

• 3:27Chuck Nice?

  Let's, let's just get real life.

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cabbage.

• 3:29Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 3:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This Noma restaurant is world famous, possibly even across the galaxy. And I know people, they are people with means, who said, this weekend, let's go eat out at Noma. And they chartered a plane and flew there just for that. So that's, so this has got to be, have some remarkable draw upon people's taste buds. So what was your relationship with that restaurant? Remind us.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Uh, well, so when I was in grad school studying, uh, flavor chemistry, I went to grad school because I was really passionate about food and wanted to, you know, be a scientist that was working with chefs and restaurants and applying that. Noma was a place that had started their own Nordic food lab to study ingredients and flavor and were working with techniques like fermentation and wild ingredients and, uh, just was sort of everything, you know, that I wanted to be doing. So I kind of talked my way into a internship in their, uh, in their initial lab and really hit it off with everybody and, um.

• 4:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just, you just talked your way in?

• 4:32Speaker 03

  A little bit, yeah.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool. Great.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I think they were a little skeptical, but after, you know, some light hazing, a couple of, you know, cases of rhubarb to juice to see if I would do it. Um, yeah, no, it turns out that, uh, you know, they're, they're sort of deep thinking about flavor and how to find it and how to work with ingredients. And my knowledge of, uh, you know, food chemistry was really complimentary.

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're also the science officer that even such a thing on Alton Brown's TV show, Good Eats.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah.

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh. Boy, just to remind people, we had both of you on stage at the same time for a Star Talk Live at the, was it at the Beacon Theater? I think it was.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  The, uh, town hall here in, uh,

• 5:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it was some years ago. So we've been exposed to you before. Is that relationship still exists?

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Good Eats isn't in production right now, but Alison was actually kind enough to, uh, come and do, uh, my initial book launch event here in New York, the Zoli Bookstore. So.

• 5:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that the Flavorama book?

• 5:33Speaker 03

  That, that is the Flavorama book. I have it. Uh, uh, this is the book.

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my God.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  That I wrote.

• 5:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's cool. And when did it come out?

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Uh, this came out in March. So it's been about three months.

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  March 2024. Uh, and subtitle, A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavor. Can't argue with that. I mean, come on. No, yeah, everybody loves flavor.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, they do. They do.

• 5:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody loves flavor. Tell me, are you helping to create meals for a Michelin star restaurant so that they keep their star? Or do they not previously have a star? Until you arrived. Kind of investment they then earn one or more of their Michelin stars. We need another star. Go get Ariel.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Well, I don't think about things like Michelin stars, but it's the kind of thing where, uh, a place like Noma is constantly, uh, you know, pushing the boundaries and trying to kind of not rest on the laurels and find ways of, you know, being more creative, coming up with new ideas. And it turns out science is really helpful for that. So I don't feel like I can take any credit for, uh, uh, whatever, uh, you know, awards or stars, but, um, I do know we, uh, work well together and make some tasty stuff.

• 6:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you just? A kid in a chemistry who just got a chemistry kit and you never let go of it. Is that what you are as a full grown up?

• 6:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it feels that way sometimes. Definitely. Yeah. So, you know, I kind of do a mix of just playing.

• 6:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How comfortable would you get to light on fire, right? This is

• 6:57Speaker 03

  Some foods, yeah.

• 6:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dream, right?

• 7:00Speaker 03

  No, it's great. Yeah. And, you know, fast reactions, slow reactions, all kinds of chemistry going on.

• 7:05Gary O'Reilly?

  So are there some fundamentals, Ariel, to your sort of view on flavor? Or actually the way flavor exists and how we experience it?

• 7:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or is it as simple as salt?

• 7:20Speaker 03

  It often is, but not always. So, you know, going back, like, you know, we agree. Everyone loves flavor and they do. It turns out that everyone loves flavor, but no one really understands what it is or how it works. But fortunately, in the sciences, we do actually know that that information just hasn't crossed over.

• 7:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Crossed over. I like that because the science of the rest of the world has a crossover. I don't know.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scientists are up on it. Yeah.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  The walled academic garden. Yeah. So the first things I like to kind of bring people up to speed on is that flavor is molecules. So, you know, everything that you experience as a flavor started as a molecule that binds with one of your many receptors. Flavor is an experience created by your brain. Flavor is the mostly the senses of taste and smell. And those are our two chemical senses. So whereas, you know, vision is sensing light and hearing senses pressure vibrations through the air.

• 8:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We call that sound, by the way.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. But no, but that is what's, but is it sound until your brain interprets the signal into into sound? Is it or is it just waves through the air?

• 8:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Philosophers like distracting themselves with that question.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:33Gary O'Reilly?

  So there's a there's a difference, Ariel, is there not, between? Ortho nasal olfaction and retro nasal olfaction.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:41Gary O'Reilly?

  And I'm not quite sure I know the difference, but you will, won't you?

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Okay. Yeah, I do. Fortunately. So flavor is taste and smell. Most people understand that flavor is taste because all of flavor feels like taste. It's, you know, happening in your mouth. When I tell people that flavors also smell, and in fact, that smell is like probably a more a larger part of flavor than taste. That's kind of a hard sell for people.

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw people knew that if you hold your nose, you don't taste your food. We won't do that as an experiment.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  Some, some, some people know. Yeah, no, and it's a, it's a good experiment, especially now that more people have had COVID.

• 9:15Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say a better analogy is to have a cold.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 9:18Chuck Nice?

  Just think how you, how you feel about food when you have a cold. And the reason is that normally you can't smell things and so food isn't nearly as appealing.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. So as like flat tasting as food is, that is actually flavor with only taste, flavor without smell. Without smell, tastes themselves are very flat. So yeah, the, the tricky way that smell is a part of flavor. So first off, while we're eating, our brain tricks us. It doesn't, we experience smell, but it doesn't feel like smell. It doesn't feel like it's happening in our nose. We'll be perceiving smells in our nose, but it's a pretty famous psychological illusion, actually, that, that sensation gets kind of moved so that you perceive it as happening inside your mouth. So if you, you know, were to take a jelly bean and chew on it with your, with your nose closed like that, and then open your mouth, you'll feel like the, the, the kind of fruity flavors of the jelly bean bloom on your tongue.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  It's actually happening in your nose, but it's sort of translocated in your brain to, to the mouth.

• 10:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The brain just never telling us the truth.

• 10:17Chuck Nice?

  Your brain is always a liar.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I think it's important to, to know, you know, what's perception, what's reality, how are the two related? I mean, the other thing is when you say smell, most people think like sniffing. So like, oh, you have a plate of food and there's smells coming out of it and I guess you sniff it before you chew it. I mean, you do. But yes, this, there's actually two types of smell, two types of olfaction, as, as Gary mentioned. Sniffing is ortho nasal olfaction. So it's, you know, ortho because it's normal, forward, the, the front of the nose. But since your, you know, nasal passages in your throat is basically just a tube, air can go in through the nostrils, but air can also travel from, you know, your lungs out. And so while you're chewing your food, it's full of volatile molecules that are able to float through the air

• 11:03Speaker 03

  and they just sort of float up the back of your throat.

• 11:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Normally, when we think of the word volatile, we think of something that would ignite into flames or a person who is otherwise unstable. But I think when a chemist used the term, they're just referring to molecules that will readily evaporate from whatever, wherever they were.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, so molecules that are kind of light and then sticky enough to be gaseous some of the time. But yeah, retro nasal olfaction. Every time, every time you have food in your mouth, all the, every time you're chewing, every time you're swallowing, you get these little puffs of sort of scented air that go up the back of your throat and into your nose. And those volatile molecules can bind with your olfactory receptors and then you're smelling as you're chewing.

• 11:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, I was intrigued as a kid, I saw a map of the surface of the tongue. And where, so here is, is sweet, here is sour, salty, whatever. Was that just?

• 11:52Chuck Nice?

  Ah, that's BS. Come on, tell the, tell the truth.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  Unfortunately.

• 11:56Chuck Nice?

  That's gotta be BS.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  There we go. Yes. So unfortunately, the map, the map is a fiction. You don't have many taste buds in the center of your tongue.

• 12:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the only thing I could conclude was that if I put flavors in the center of my tongue, I did not taste it.

• 12:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was, I found that to be so.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Taste buds are like much more concentrated along the kind of edges and tip of the tongue.

• 12:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I wasn't entirely misled by it.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  No, no, but unfortunately, it's not quite as tidy as having like the sour area.

• 12:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause it was like way tidier. I said, evolution is not this tidy.

• 12:32Chuck Nice?

  It kind of makes sense when you look at the construction of your mouth and eating. So along the edges is where you chew and the first taste comes in through the front of your mouth. So that's the tip of your tongue. So it would make sense that that's where you would want to stimulate taste the most.

• 12:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got a good one for you. I, I forgot what two cities I was between when I was giving a public talks. And I had a driver and her name was Taylor, I think if I'm remembering that correctly. We had a whole chat about all kinds of things and she used to work for FedEx, but then started Gendro Trucks. And that like, like big trucks. And now she became a driver, like a car service driver. So I had. And she she knew I was a scientist. We just started talking sciency things. And she said she made a discovery. And I said, and she told me the discovery was like, whoa, I'm gonna try that. So here's her discovery. She eats her hamburgers upside down.

• 13:30Chuck Nice?

  You mean hanging upside down like a bat?

• 13:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 13:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think that's what she meant. If you invert the hamburger and you bite it, all of the toppings you put on the pickle, the ketchup, the cheese, that hits your tongue sooner than it otherwise would if it were face up. And it made sense to hear it, but then I tested it. It's like, yes, I don't have to keep swishing around the food to get to my tongue.

• 13:59Chuck Nice?

  See, I have a better way of doing that, because this is how I do it. I just put all the condiments on both buns.

• 14:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Both sides.

• 14:07Chuck Nice?

  Both sides, like the sauteed onions. I put them on top and bottom.

• 14:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two slices of cheese.

• 14:12Chuck Nice?

  Everything, you know.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  True innovation. Yeah.

• 14:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. And now the only thing that I don't do is two slices of cheese, top and bottom. So maybe I'll try that. Yeah.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  That's good.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  Hello, I'm Alexander Harvey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 14:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just wondering a couple of things. The big part of what you do, I think this is what drives modern chefdom, is not just what a flavor is, but what a melange of flavors might be, then what insights you might have in combining those flavors to come up with something transcendental.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  You know, a lot of restaurants now are much more like seasonally driven and are interested in, you know, things like local produce and things that that peak and change with the seasons and figuring out the best way to kind of express the flavors of all those ingredients and put them together.

• 15:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought it was odd, first time I ate at a Chinese restaurant, and there were food items called sweet and sour, or hot and sour, sweet and sour. And what I'm thinking to myself, do I really want sour with my sweet? And why are they putting? Uh, something that burns my tongue in the middle of the honey. Why is there hot honey? Like, who's, who's thought this stuff up?

• 15:46Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it's interesting because, uh, like Chinese cuisine is really like the oldest continuously developing cuisine. I mean, there's like recipes that are, you know, 6,000 years old that are, uh, from ancient China that, you know, are still good.

• 15:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Still good, really?

• 15:58Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, they're still, they're, they're like, uh, much more advanced than what people in, uh, in Europe was cooking, uh, 6,000 years ago.

• 16:03Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, they're still in use. It doesn't necessarily mean they're good.

• 16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. Let's clarify that.

• 16:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, cuz.

• 16:11Gary O'Reilly?

  So, so Ariel, is there like a color wheel for flavors? Where, you know, when you're matching things that, you know what? The sweet will go with the sour because it sort of lines up in the spectrum.

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that question.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, yes and no. Um, I mean, a lot of other flavor scientists have, um, spent time kind of building wheels like that. There's, uh, the wine aroma wheel was, uh, one of the first ones.

• 16:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Um, out of UC Davis. Yeah. I mean, it's tricky because flavor is so multi-dimensional. Um, I mean, you know, color, depending on how you look at it, has like three or four dimensions, um, or can be, you know, sort of expressed that way.

• 16:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean like there's brightness, there's hue, there's.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  Exactly. So, yeah, or like cyan, magenta, yellow and black. There's like several different ways of, uh, of expressing it. You know, with flavor, we have, uh, we have five tastes, uh, sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami.

• 17:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about umami, because we, none of us grew up with umami. Umami just, somebody just, that just showed up at the doorstep.

• 17:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 17:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then, and then everyone go, this has umami, this has umami. It's like, what the hell is umami?

• 17:12Speaker 03

  Umami is like the most recently identified of the tastes. Uh, you know, you can go back to like classical antiquity and find the Greeks writing about, you know, sweet and sour and salty and bitter. Umami, you know, chemically speaking, it's the taste of glutamate, which is the ion form of, uh, glutamic acid, one of the 20 amino acids that are in all of our proteins. It's a savory taste. It's a kind of, uh, Mouth-filling, broth-y, savory-ness.

• 17:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Didn't we just call that savory, though? Back in the day, we just called that savory. So did Mommy bump out the word savory from the vocabulary?

• 17:47Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I basically, you know, whoever discovers something first gets to name it. So, you know, we had a concept of savory, but it wasn't until the early 20th century that a Japanese chemist, Dr. Kikune Ikeda at the University of Tokyo, he was studying seaweed broths. So in Japanese cuisine, they cook a lot with kelp called konbu. It's very savory tasting.

• 18:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is kelp the same as seaweed? I mean, are they considered the same?

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Kelp is a type of seaweed.

• 18:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  There are, you know, there are brown seaweeds, red seaweeds, various macro algae, things like that. But yeah, kelp is a particular type. So, yeah, konbu, it's actually like a very, it's like one very long blade or leaf.

• 18:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've all seen kelp forests.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 18:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think it was even in Finding Nemo. So that meant it's really.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  It's legit, yeah.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  So he was studying his broths and sort of concentrating them down and concentrating them down until he eventually purified the savory component in them, which was glutamate. So he identified it as glutamate and then, you know, called the sensation of pure glutamate umami, which comes from umai and me, which means delicious flavor, delicious taste in Japanese.

• 19:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I thought it'd be something deeper than that.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that was, you know, around the turn of the century, but it took about another 80 or 90 years to actually find the taste receptor for umami. So there was some controversy throughout the 20th century of.

• 19:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As to whether it really existed.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Is umami a real taste? Does it just enhance other tastes? What is it? But then, you know, we know what the umami receptor is. It's been well characterized. So it's kind of now officially enshrined as one of the basic tastes.

• 19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, that's fascinating.

• 19:28Gary O'Reilly?

  As you've discussed with us just now, you've mentioned the ancient Greeks, you've mentioned the Japanese. If you had the same plant, same protein in Japan, would it have exactly the same flavor were it in Eastern Europe around the Mediterranean? Or is there some way it's varied, the flavors that come out of?

• 19:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, are you talking about a variation in the plant or a variation in regional taste buds?

• 19:55Gary O'Reilly?

  In the flavor itself, will the environment and then maybe the food chain that's involved, if it was a predator?

• 20:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Would that change?

• 20:05Speaker 03

  I guess there's like two ways of looking at this. One, um, you know, if, if, uh, if you drink wine, they talk about the concept of terroir, which is, uh, kind of, uh, you know, sometimes it's described to just like the taste of the rocks and the soil, which isn't really how it works, but it is like the taste of place. So, um, you know, they have a lot of like clones of grapes. There's like Pinot Noir clones that are genetically identical. And, uh, if you grow it in the Sonoma Valley versus in, you know, New Zealand, they're going to taste different, even though they're genetically identical. So phenotype. So, you know, the way, the way that a, uh, an organism, you know, appears and is constituted.

• 20:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm going to add to that, Ariel, since you hung out at UC Davis.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 20:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe they, there's something about this. I like French wines more than I like Italian wines, but there was nothing greater than the taste of an Italian wine, Tuscan Italian wine that I had in Italy, in Tuscany, on a ravine, overlooking, I mean, just.

• 20:59Chuck Nice?

  That was psychological, man. You were sitting there like, damn, I spent a lot of money to be here.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Basically, the composition of any organism, uh, chemically, biologically, is going to be an interaction of its environment and its genes. So, growing the same plant or, you know, animal or whatever in two different locations will make it chemically different, depending on how it responds, and then it'll taste different.

• 21:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  If you had exactly the same fruit, two of the same fruit that you cloned, uh, well, not cloned, but replicated, uh, so they were chemically and biologically identical and.

• 21:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A structure, we use the replicator.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. Um, to, uh, in two different locations, two different people with different experiences with food wouldn't necessarily have the same eating experience of them. We use our sense of flavor to kind of figure out what to eat, to, you know, uh, to not die, but also to, you know, fuel ourselves and, you know, hopefully increase our quality of life. So, we use, you know, both taste and smell to help us with that, but we'll use like any context cues that we can find to figure out if, uh, this thing that I might be eating, is it, is it a good idea or is it a bad idea? And so, you know, you're, we're actually wired to kind of build up a, a bank of those memories and experiences and kind of pull them up the next time we taste something and be like, okay, have I tasted this before? Did I have a good time? Did I have a bad time? Do any of you guys like root beer? Do you drink root beer?

• 22:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  Ah, Gary, yeah. So, um, so, you know, root beer is a very American drink. It's got, uh, yeah, uh, kind of herbal flavors with some kind of wintergreen kind of stuff going on.

• 22:31Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Uh, in, in Europe, they don't really use those flavors for food. Uh, in fact, that kind of, uh, root berry, root berry scent flavor is most prominently used in bathroom cleaning products.

• 22:43Chuck Nice?

  You know, and that's why we don't drink bleach here. I mean, unless you're trying, unless you're listening to a certain former president who knows how to cure a certain kind of disease.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  Please don't do that. But yeah, no, I know. And I have European friends that have come to America and tried root beer. And they're like, this is absolutely disgusting. This tastes like a toilet. Like, why would you drink this?

• 23:05Gary O'Reilly?

  There's a, uh, an antiseptic ointment.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 23:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Tastes exactly like root beer, which is like.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  Amazing. Good to know.

• 23:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, tasting your ointment.

• 23:16Gary O'Reilly?

  No, it smells.

• 23:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Smell.

• 23:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Smell is very much the case.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  So you've experienced that, uh, you know, aroma experience before, but not in a food context. It's in a very much not like a non-food context. Um, so, you know, it's possible to like override that by exposing yourself repeatedly to, to a new flavor in a, in a food, uh, food way, but, uh, without deliberately doing that, people are going to have, uh, bring different experiences to their, uh, you know, immediate surroundings and interpret flavor differently.

• 23:44Chuck Nice?

  So cool.

• 23:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So now we all agree, I think, in spite of the raw food movement, that most of us like our food cooked. Not only does it change the texture, but flavors rise up in ways that were not there with the food remained uncooked. So when I think of heat, I think of breaking apart molecules, not bringing them together. So are there complex molecules in uncooked food that somehow manifest flavors once the molecules break apart?

• 24:15Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I, I mean, I guess to a, a chemist would think of heat as like molecules moving around faster. So, you know, when they move faster and collide, they can break apart, but they can also kind of stick together. It's like if you threw a bunch of Legos in a clothes dryer and, uh, let it go, like if you had a Lego figurine.

• 24:34Chuck Nice?

  At the end, you have a pie.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  But they, uh, they do stick together.

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the end, you have Megatron.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  Or, you know, something less ordered but stuck together in a, in a different way. Um, so yeah, I mean, like, if you think of like a steak, um, as you, as you cook it, first you'll get reactions between the oxygen carrying molecules in the muscle, the, uh, the heme and the myoglobin, there's like a little iron atom and, uh, iron is quite reactive. That will react with some of the, the cell membrane lipids in the cells and create that kind of like cooked beef flavor. And then as you continue heating up the outside, um, you'll start to generate reactions between sugars and amino acids. There's like trades amounts of both, uh, in the kind of, you know, meat juices essentially. And that will create the myard reaction, which is a lot of people's favorite food

• 25:22Speaker 03

  chemical reaction because it creates the flavor of, uh, well, well-seared steak, but also chocolate, roasted coffee, toast, brown butter, butterscotch, things like that. So any kind of, uh, delicious toasty nutty brown flavor, uh, comes from that myard reaction.

• 25:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did a lot of cooking in my life and I would say one out of 20 times, something happens by accident.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 25:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of those accidental times, maybe one in 10 of those is, hey. And so how much of what we count as cuisine really came about by accident? Somebody made a mistake or somebody was missing an ingredient and they had to grab something else off the shelves and invent an entire new taste experience.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I, I think, I think a lot of it, uh, comes from that, both from, uh, well, from messing up, from adapting to, you know, uh, straightened circumstances where you can't cook what you know how to cook. And also, you know, I guess just the right proportion of weirdos that like to mess around with things on purpose.

• 26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, now I'm wondering about your PhD. Was that just, you just walked into a kitchen and made stuff up?

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Uh, I guess I like to think of it as like guided making, making stuff up. Organized chaos, you know?

• 26:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Organized chaos, that's the best word.

• 26:37Gary O'Reilly?

  So when, when you make a reduction in a sauce, why did the flavors become that much more concentrated?

• 26:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, you're evaporating out the water and water's got no flavor.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 26:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what, what, what?

• 26:49Gary O'Reilly?

  I didn't ask you.

• 26:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a hard question.

• 26:52Gary O'Reilly?

  I didn't ask you, did I? I wanted to know for me.

• 26:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They don't reduce sauces, that's only in France. So you're stuck with your watery liquid gravies. Is that what's going on?

• 27:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Possibly.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  But yeah, while you're reducing, you are evaporating water. And so the taste molecules, specifically taste molecules, aren't volatile. And you'd have to put them under like an insane vacuum to make them evaporate. So they get more and more concentrated.

• 27:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just so that our audience knows, the less air pressure there is on the surface of anything, but let's say liquids, the less air pressure, the more likely the molecules of that liquid, whatever it is, will jump off the surface and go into the air. So you use the term, in a vacuum, you could possibly evaporate some of these molecules. But at normal air pressure, you're not.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, okay. So I just want to make everybody was understanding.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And interestingly, this practice of creating a vacuum to evaporate things at lower temperatures, a lot of bars and restaurants use that now in the form of a rotary evaporator. So they're able to distill things at, you know, 30 degrees Celsius instead of boiling.

• 28:04Chuck Nice?

  Well, how about sous vide? And I mean, that's low temperature cooking too. Without the vacuum, it's just a closed environment that you put whatever it is that you're cooking.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, you'll use like a vacuum chamber to basically like shrink wrap a piece of meat or whatever else you're cooking. So then when you put it in a temperature controlled water bath, you get good contact with the entire surface.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Last time I sous vide, I didn't have a vacuum chamber, but I accomplished the same thing.

• 28:29Chuck Nice?

  A plastic bag.

• 28:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, a plastic bag.

• 28:32Chuck Nice?

  Plastic bag, yeah.

• 28:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A sturdy plastic bag. If you submerge it, all the water in the plastic bag wants to get out.

• 28:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it wants to float up. So you just have a little straw hole in it. And as you lower it, the bag looks like it shrinks down on the food. Then you seal it and I have basically a vacuum packed bag.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's a handy, handy trick for if you don't have a vacuum sealer. Yours is broken. I've done it before.

• 28:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It works really well. It's like, yeah, yeah. Look at it, it's as though it had been vacuum sealed.

• 29:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 29:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so there's a case, getting back to Chuck's point, we're not cooking it at high temperature. And so sous vide, especially meats, has become quite the rage in recent.

• 29:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Months and years. So who said, let's not sear it and still cook it? Well, no, I know what it is. They still sear it only after they sous vide.

• 29:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's it. And that's what happens. But it's, but I gotta tell you, when you do that, it's like you're sealing in all the flavor with the sear.

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's, and it sears very quickly.

• 29:33Chuck Nice?

  Very, very quickly. That's the other thing, too. It's like.

• 29:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's already almost at the right temperature.

• 29:37Chuck Nice?

  It's already, it's already, it's almost like you pre-cooked it, really. That's all it is.

• 29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what it is.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  I mean, what, quite literally, yeah.

• 29:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The red meat at 130 degrees and say, here's your steak. Just slap that puppy back on the pan.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  So I mean, if you're cooking a steak on like a grill or a griddle, um, not sous vide, you're, you're kind of doing, you're using like the, the high heat of the pan to do two things at once. One, you know, bring the interior of the steak to your desired doneness, which might be like 130 Fahrenheit, something like that. But then also create flavor on the outside of the steak by bringing it to a much higher temperature than that and, uh, hoping that not too much heat leaks into the center. So you've got to kind of like time it so that's, uh, the inside and the outside are the way that you want it.

• 30:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Notice how she said 135 degrees Fahrenheit, specifying her units of measure here.

• 30:25Chuck Nice?

  As opposed to the vaporizing 135 degrees Celsius.

• 30:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Errol, when I grew up, no one seemed to fear the idea of artificial flavoring in foods. We, we just viewed that as science, making things easier and faster and more profitable. And now, of course, it'd be highly objectionable to most people. What does the industry of artificial flavors look like today?

• 31:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I mean, there's still a huge flavor industry. It's, you know, multi, multi-billion dollar, uh, a year industry.

• 31:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was pissed off. Last time I bought truffle oil, only to find out that it was artificially flavored.

• 31:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, no truffle in the oil, baby.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  No truffle. And usually, you know, something like a truffle will have dozens or hundreds of different flavor molecules in its flavor profile. Usually for something like truffle oil, they'll pick like one, the one that smells most strongly of truffle.

• 31:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, I'm blaming you for this because you like, you could have stopped them. You could have called me right at the minute I was buying that product.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  Why didn't you text me, Neil?

• 31:52Gary O'Reilly?

  So folding back into what we were discussing just a little bit earlier about the environmental psychological effects on flavor and taste. Why is it that foods that are bad for us taste better than foods that are good for us? Because that doesn't seem to be us evolving well to defend ourselves.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean, I don't think that's necessarily universally true because I've had, you know, beautiful, delicious vegetables and fruits and things that are, you know, quote unquote, natural and great for you.

• 32:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Tell that to a five-year-old.

• 32:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ariel, Ariel, we have to discount the whole interview because we know you're lying.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  I mean, I love a Dorito as much as the next girl. But yeah, I mean, you know, even in food science, deliciousness is not really like a quantifiable feature. Palatability is. So, you know, we'll often talk about highly processed foods with a lot of flavor added as being highly palatable. So, yeah, not so much that it is the most delicious thing that can be achieved, but that people tend to enjoy it and eat a lot of it. So, yeah, on the one side, you've got this feature of that, you know, processed, shelf-stable or, you know, long-storing foods are much more profitable than fresh ones. And so there's a lot of money put into making them as palatable and, you know, sensorially interesting as

• 33:10Speaker 03

  possible. On the other hand, you've got agronomy and plant breeding and agriculture. You know, for the whole 20th century, we've basically been breeding all of our fruits and vegetables to be, you know, higher and higher yielding, grow faster, grow more uniformly.

• 33:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And prettiness, they gotta be pretty too.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 33:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ugly fruit. Yeah.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  No, no, no. And, uh, you know, if you compare an, an heirloom tomato, that's sort of like bulbous and a novelty to a, uh, perfect, uh, supermarket tomato, one is definitely easier to, to look at than the other. But yeah, I mean, essentially a, a, a huge amount of time and money has been spent into basically optimizing everything except flavor in, uh, in plants and ingredients.

• 33:51Chuck Nice?

  Like if you look at like just corn, if you look at corn from 200 years ago, you will not recognize it. It just doesn't look.

• 34:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go back to caveman days. There were these tiny little corn stalks.

• 34:05Speaker 03

  Teosint, yeah. Uh, the, the original ancestral corn.

• 34:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you're right. So Ariel, before we, uh, turn this over to our Q and A section, uh, with our Patreon supporters, cause they, we told them we were going to talk to you.

• 34:18Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 34:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And questions just flowed in like rivers. Uh, just give us a quick overview of, of your book, uh, Flavor Rama. And who published it?

• 34:27Speaker 03

  Uh, Harper Collins.

• 34:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Harper Collins.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  So, uh, Harvest, a division of Harper Collins. It's really, uh, you know, giving you the, um, the lay of the land and the tools that you need to, uh, understand the science of flavor, uh, well enough to improvise with it. So I think a lot of, um, you know, science books about food can take a kind of like bossy tone of like, well, this is the right thing to do, or, uh, oh, this is, this is correct. And, um, I think, you know, with, with cooking, you know, what, what, what you love, what you find delicious is really, uh, up to you. So I'd rather give people the tools to figure out how to, how to achieve that easily.

• 35:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love the idea. Right. So this, this, this should be in everyone's kitchen is what you're saying.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  I, I think so. I think it will help.

• 35:09Chuck Nice?

  She's definitely saying that. She is definitely saying that. That without a doubt. She's like, not only your kitchen, it should be in every kitchen of every person you know.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  Buy it for your friends. Um, yeah, no, I mean, and you know, I, uh, spending time working with, with chefs in, uh, different, different restaurants who were like really skilled at what they do, but like didn't have a background in science. Um, I, I found myself explaining a lot of the same concepts over and over again and, uh, saying like, oh, I wish I could give you a, a book.

• 35:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The surest force operating on book writing.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  That's how, that's how it happened.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's, let's pivot this to our Q and A.

• 35:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. So, um, seeing as Noma is in a Scandinavian country, let's visit that particular region. Frederick Johansson. Hello doctors and lords, for those who wish to be appropriately titled. Frederick from northern Sweden here. Famous dish in Sweden is surströmming. It's fermented stinky herring. When I was younger, I hated the smell and taste, but after trying it over the years, I today believe it's the most delicious food in the world.

• 36:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's quite a come turnaround.

• 36:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. How can someone's perception change so drastically? Is there then an evolution in our tastes and flavors developing over the, our years as we, as we age?

• 36:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So I guess, uh, surströmming is a pretty extreme example. For those who haven't tasted it before, it's, uh, it comes in a, in a can that's sort of bulging because of all the like fermentation gases have, uh, it looks like a bad idea.

• 36:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Listen next.

• 36:44Gary O'Reilly?

  It sounds explosive. She's over there and you throw it.

• 36:47Speaker 03

  No, it's, it's recommended not to open it inside because, uh, when you put the can opener through, uh, you can emit a jet of concentrated juices. Uh, so yeah, it's, it's just, just, just getting the food is an extreme sport.

• 37:00Gary O'Reilly?

  There's a health warning on the kid, on the can.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  I, I think so. Um, I, I've, I've, I've been around a can. I haven't tasted it myself because, um, you know, it was, uh, it was really too, uh, too, too much for me. Um, which I guess I need to remedy now that I'm braver than I was then. But, uh, yeah, so, so, so surströmming, I've, I've heard the tastes, uh, compared to dirty diapers. Um, it's, it's really, it's really an intense, uh, intense experience, but, um, you know, there are other things that, uh, that most people don't enjoy when they first try them, they come to, to love. Um, I, I, I, I used to work with someone whose favorite T-shirt said, what's that smell? It's either bad meat or good cheese. Um, so there are, uh,

• 37:45Speaker 03

  yeah, there, there are, you know, processes, especially in the fermented foods that, uh, you know, microbes can do.

• 37:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the American South, a food that resembles this, this story arc is chicken wings. Right, this pig intestines boiled for half a day.

• 38:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 38:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But seasoned.

• 38:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 38:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then.

• 38:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and I will never eat it. And my, my mother used to make it all the time. My grandmother made it. And I called it slave food, because that's what it is. And I was like, I'm not eating it. Uh, you know why? Because if a pig came into your house and took a dump in your kitchen, that is what chitlins smell like.

• 38:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, they're perfect.

• 38:23Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, no way, no way. I mean, you literally are eating something that smells like literal poop. It's ridiculous.

• 38:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Say it's some of the best food they've ever had in their life. It mirrors this example here.

• 38:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you know why? And in both cases, here's why. Because at some point, your brain, um, capitulates and accepts the abuse that is being heaped upon you. So, in, in Frederick's case, this is just kind of like a stinky fish Stockholm syndrome. Where at some point, he's just like, you know, this is actually good because, you know, all those years of abuse as a child being made to eat it finally caught up with him. That's, yeah.

• 39:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you get that off your chest?

• 39:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 39:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like the confession here for Chuck.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  I mean, so yes, those are two excellent examples of a quiet taste. But then, I mean, even, even something like a strongly flavored cheese, you know, like, like a camembert or a Lindbergh. Um, if you compare that to, to milk, uh, it's horrifying. Uh, it's like, well, milk should not smell like that. But then, um, you know, we're basically built as, as humans to, uh, be skeptical of new things. But then, um, once we eat something a few times and, uh, don't get sick and kind of, uh, record that sense memory as a, uh, as a positive one, uh, well, we can develop a taste for just about anything, actually, so.

• 39:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Arrow, I, the day I knew I was grown up was the first day I realized I liked blue cheese.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 39:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except I'm grown up now.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  That's a, I remember at one point I was 18 and I got a sudden craving for olives despite having like hated olives every other time I tasted it. Yeah, they're bitter, they're pungent, uh, yeah, so.

• 40:03Chuck Nice?

  Not when you start drinking martinis at 12. That's all I'm saying.

• 40:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. I keep going. Who's next up?

• 40:13Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 40:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go ahead.

• 40:13Gary O'Reilly?

  From hello from North Vancouver, please visit. Is it possible to genetically make vegetables taste more appealing? Like a chocolate flavor or Oreo flavor? Yes, I am Canadian, so put the letter U somewhere. Because you matters. That's how we see it.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so I have friends that are, you know, synthetic biologists that do exactly that. Not so much with vegetables, but it is definitely possible to, you know, most since flavor is molecules.

• 40:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I just have to clarify here. Nowadays, when we refer to someone as a synthetic biologist, they're freaking making life, right? They're genetically modifying organisms. But the GMO got a bad word in recent decades.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They found another thing to call them. So it's not that the biologists themselves are synthetic. They're real, but they're making synthetic food types.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean, one, one famous example, and I think this is actually in, in use in the flavor industry, is that once you figure out the kind of enzymatic pathway that a plant like vanilla or rose uses to make one of its flavor or smell molecules. People have tried, you know, inserting those genes into a yeast and making, making a fermentation. That's kind of like brewing beer, actually. But the end result is a lot of flavor molecules.

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From the beginning, not added later.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. So you basically brew up vanilla flavor and then purified it and the sort of yeast soup. In theory, that's possible. I do know quite a few people. I mean, going back to our, like, you know, earlier conversation about how, you know, all the flavor has been bred out of vegetables. So, you know, when people say like tomatoes don't taste like tomatoes when I was a kid, like, it's literally true. Most, most commercially available fruits and vegetables have very little flavor compared to, you know, 50 years ago. There are people that are interested in changing that. I have, I have some friends at Washington State University that have a bred lab. So they, they breed wheat.

• 42:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that St. Louis?

• 42:16Speaker 03

  Uh, oh, no, uh, WSU in north of Seattle. So in.

• 42:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would be in Washington State. I'm thinking of Washington University.

• 42:22Speaker 03

  Washington University, yeah, is in, is in St. Louis. Um, yeah. So, so there are like academic, uh, wheat breeders and vegetable breeders that, you know, up until maybe 10 or 15 years ago, would have been making these terrible supermarket varieties that are like high yielding, et cetera, um, that have kind of gone rogue and are, uh, really interested in making, making seeds for, for fruits and vegetables that express a lot of flavor and are, uh, easier to grow maybe than our little seeds, which is what people have, uh, traditionally tried to use if they want like a really delicious tomato or wheat.

• 42:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know if we have time to go here, but I, I heard, and it made sense to me, that the reason why children don't like vegetables, but as adults, we're either neutral to them or come to like them, children don't like vegetables because vegetables on average are bitter. And most poisons in nature are bitter. And poisons are much more potent on a small body, such as an infant or child or toddler, at, than they are on an adult. So that this was an evolutionary, uh, resistance to not dying by eating something that was poisonous.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, that, that's exactly how it works. Uh, children also, babies and children have, uh, more taste buds than adults. So we're, you know, born with a lot of taste buds that we sort of gradually lose over our, uh, lifetimes. Um, so, you know, everything they're tasting is more intense than what an adult will taste.

• 43:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can imagine a whole new TV show where children who can't otherwise speak yet, you just hear their thoughts. Stop shoving this down my throat. I can taste this and you can't because you're old. But I could just, I could picture the whole dialogue.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:11Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, I mean, our tastes are, and our like enjoyment of tastes is like pretty hardwired. So like babies are born liking sweet foods, liking umami, being very like disgusted and aversive uh towards, towards bitter.

• 44:24Chuck Nice?

  Breast milk is, is sweet, so.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is sweet, yeah. Um, so.

• 44:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Than what we think of as regular.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, cow milk, yeah, good source of calories, uh, and.

• 44:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Human breast milk, because all mammals would have breasts, so.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  This is true. It's in, it's in the name.

• 44:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So next up, give me another question here.

• 44:48Chuck Nice?

  All right, Alekon Hemrod says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Lord Chuck, Dr. Johnson, Gary. My question is, how is molecular gastronomy change the way we eat in the future? Uh, is everything just gonna taste like chicken?

• 45:05Chuck Nice?

  Where'd that come from, anyway? Taste like chicken?

• 45:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I think, uh, you know, not, not, not to harp on about the, uh, destruction of flavor in the 20th century, but, uh, you know, if you eat, if you eat a, uh, an heirloom chicken or a wild chicken, it has a very intense flavor. So, uh, the, the kind of blandness of, of current chicken is, is a relatively new phenomenon. So, um, maybe it will taste like chicken, but tastes like, you know, the chicken of the 19th century or the, uh, you know, uh, red jungle fowl.

• 45:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ariel, what does chicken taste like?

• 45:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sorry.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  That's a good question.

• 45:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a deeper question than any of us ever expected it would be.

• 45:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Molecular gastronomy, this is thinking about, uh, food and cooking on a molecular level rather than just on a macroscopic level.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, do you see a trend line here in the future?

• 45:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you know, so you've got, uh, like, large food companies paying, you know, more and more attention to flavor, especially as they're making, you know, plant-based meats and things like this. But I think, um, the other people working on food, whether that's farmers, seed breeders, chefs, are, um, you know, finding a lot of different ways that understanding, uh, the molecular side of things helps them do what they need to do. So, yeah, no, I think it's gonna change, change the way we eat in, uh, in so many different ways that there's not gonna be like one particular trend. And if you don't like.

• 46:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the end, chicken will always taste like chicken. Okay. Whichever side of the road it's on.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 46:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Right, next question. Renee A. Chen. Hello everyone from Silver Spring, Maryland. When we ultimately inhabit the moon, how will cooking differ? Will the boiling and freezing points of water change? Will food cook faster or slower? Will we need special equipment?

• 46:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm, I can handle this, Ariel, if we...

• 46:53Speaker 03

  No, I think, I think you actually have more experience with this than, than I do.

• 46:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, sure. So if you have a hab module, presumably it's pressurized, and if it's pressurized, then everything is normal. The boiling points are normal, as we discussed earlier. The, the pressure of air or of an atmosphere on top of the liquid affects what evaporates and what doesn't, and at what temperature. So now the fact that there's lower gravity, uh, I don't know that gravity matters much, Ariel, in, in food preparations. What do you think?

• 47:25Speaker 03

  Um, I, I don't know for cooking. I know that for people that have been trying to like research growing food in microgravity, um, water has such high surface tension that, uh, it's sticky in a way that, uh, that most plants are not used to dealing with. So in terms of growing food, definitely. In terms of cooking, probably not so much.

• 47:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Probably not so much. But I can tell you this, with a lower gravity, honey will never come, pour out of it.

• 47:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're waiting for the ketchup to come out of the ketchup bottle, so I think, yeah, that, that'll be quite frustrating. But if they don't pressurize the cabin, that, that's the old running joke. You know, the restaurants on the moon would, would all be fascinating, uh, but they'd have no atmosphere.

• 48:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, I guess you wouldn't have barbecue, barbecue outside, would you, on the moon?

• 48:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we can have barbecue, provided your source of heat does not require oxygen.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  Oxygen. Yeah, yeah. So there's

• 48:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No flame.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  Hard to get all those smoke flavors from wood without mixing some oxygen in.

• 48:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay. One more. Let's see, we get one more in here.

• 48:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Willist74. Hello, doctors and comedic lord. Will from Hawaii here. In the movie The Matrix, they were discussing if machines have gotten the flavors wrong, to which Dozer replies, "It's a single-cell protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins." I say vitamins.

• 48:50Gary O'Reilly?

  And minerals, everything the body needs. What do you think about getting the flavor wrong? If food is made up of certain chemicals and combinations thereof, will food taste the same to everyone who has the same similar receptors? Or is this more philosophical versus scientific perspective? Like when determining how red is the red one sees, if red at all?

• 49:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, one of the reasons that like the science of flavor is not more well-known in the public is um, we didn't really have the instrument sensitive enough to tell what was making flavor until the last like forty years or so. And um, there's even, yeah, there's been papers in the last ten to fifteen years, kind of like identifying completely new natural flavor molecules that we just had no idea about because they were in such infinitesimally tiny amounts that a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer couldn't sense it, but our nose could sense it. Um, so I mean, like, provided that you have perfect data and then could access all of those chemicals, in theory, it's definitely possible. Um, but it's something that, you know, practically is a, is a bit tricky.

• 49:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I think the matrix got wrong there, it assumed that the flavor was something separate and distinct from the molecular structure of what you were eating. But if, if you reproduce the molecular structure of it all, it should have the flavors that it would have in the authentic version of itself. So I think they got that wrong.

• 50:16Speaker 03

  And, you know, like, there's experience in eating where, um, you know, we have things like glutamate receptors in our intestines, so that doesn't like create the sensation of umami, but uh, yeah, the experience of eating is uh, kind of shaped by chemistry, even after we swallow.

• 50:32Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, like you have sugar receptors in your gut as well. So it prepares your brain to receive the signal that, hey, I'm eating sugar, this is great. Yeah.

• 50:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Again, we got time for one last question.

• 50:42Gary O'Reilly?

  One. All right, here we go. Bruce Ryan. Hi, gents, and of course, Ariel. He's from Alexandria in Virginia. I always wondered why carbon dioxide sticks to water to make fizzy drinks. Do other gases work the same way? If so, why don't people make fizzy drinks with helium? Thanks for all you do. Well, you're welcome, sir. Now, that would be fun, huh?

• 51:04Chuck Nice?

  Nah, yeah, don't.

• 51:05Speaker 03

  So, um, carbon dioxide sticks to water because gases are able to dissolve in water. And all gases, I think, are able to dissolve in water. Beer gas, so if you're, if you're setting up a tap system at your, at your restaurant and, uh, using gas to dispense it, is usually a mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen or nitrous oxide. Depending on what, what beer you're pouring, you'll use like a slightly different ratio. So that like really creamy head on a Guinness is often because there's like a lot more nitrous oxide in, in the gas. Um, but of course, you know, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide have different flavors. Um, nitrous oxide, uh, is kind of creamy. Um, it's, uh, you know, it's got that sort of like whipped cream smell a little bit.

• 51:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I thought it was laughing gas. Isn't that nitrous oxide laughing?

• 51:47Speaker 03

  Uh, yes, yes. So, um, there are, there are also recreational uses for, uh, whipped cream, uh, devices.

• 51:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whip it more, maybe, I don't know.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly.

• 51:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  But, uh, yeah, no, carbon dioxide is special, um, because it, it has a, uh, a prickly flavor. Um, and we're not actually sure yet, uh, what, what that mechanism is, whether we have a distinct, the carbonation taste sensor, or if it's interacting in a special way with our sour receptor.

• 52:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're telling me dissolved helium wouldn't have a prickly sensation on your tongue?

• 52:22Speaker 03

  Probably not. Um, and, you know, you consider like, you know, a human's experience with carbon dioxide. Um, you know, usually if you're breathing in a lot of carbon dioxide, uh, you're in a lot of danger because you're about to suffocate. So, you know, our, our suffocation reflex is actually from like high carbon dioxide as opposed to like low oxygen. Uh, so it's, uh, it's a little bit masochistic, I guess, that we like to, you know, just microdose on suffocation.

• 52:47Chuck Nice?

  Look at that. Pepsi, it's your new auto erotic asphyxiation.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  Flirting with danger, yeah.

• 52:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who would have thought?

• 53:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we got to end it there, guys. Ariel, thanks for coming back on to StarTalk. I mean, we should have you more often.

• 53:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

• 53:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'd love to. Just let me know.

• 53:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've got 10 other subjects I wanted to cover. There wasn't any time, and we went over anyway. Actually, we just learned you are a resident in the city. So you come by my office and we could totally make this maybe a regular thing.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 53:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the food spectrum.

• 53:23Chuck Nice?

  Right. And this, and next time, we'll do it with the taste test.

• 53:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 53:27Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bring some of your damn food.

• 53:29Speaker 03

  I will, I will run so many tests on you guys. It'll be.

• 53:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not what we said. We didn't say that.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  You have to take the test and then we can, we can eat some fun things.

• 53:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Ariel, delighted to have you back on. And watch out for her book, which, which hit the stands just a few months ago.

• 53:48Chuck Nice?

  Flavorama.

• 53:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Flavorama. Yes.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  Thank you so much.

• 53:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me the full subtitle of that book.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  Oh, A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavor.

• 53:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love it. When you put art and science in the same sentence, you know it's going to be good. All right, Gary, good to have you.

• 54:02Chuck Nice?

  How's it going?

• 54:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good to have you there. This has been StarTalk Special Edition. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.