Taste Smell Chemical senses Mc Donalds Fries Win

Taste & Smell: Chemical senses

• Mc. Donald’s Fries – Win best taste competitions – Not the method, potatoes, or machinery – Taste of fried foods determined by cooking oil – Mc. D’s uses 7% cottonseed oil, 93% beef tallow: a fry has more beef fat/ oz than a burger – Mc. D’s world locations

Obviously there was criticism • Mc. D’s changed to pure veg. oil 1990 • Problem: how to make them taste like beef without using beef? • “natural flavor” – Explains why most of our food taste the way it does.

Natural Flavor vs. Artificial Flavor • • • Both are man made 90% of our food $ is for processed food Canning, freezing, & dehydrating destroy flavor Big money in making flavor Name food brands Name the companies that makes flavor

International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) • World’s largest flavor company – Also makes smell of best selling perfume’s, deodorant, and soaps – 2005: 1. 9 Bil. • Givaudan: 2 nd • Haarman & Reimer: Largest German • Takasago: Largest Japanese

Smell owns taste • Aroma can be 90% of a food’s flavor • What evolutionary benefit would organisms with a better sense of smell have? – Find food – Distinguish good from bad Evolution puts pressure on us.

Flavors vs. smells • Taste buds can detect ~ 5 basic flavors – Sweet, sour, bitter, salty, astringent, umami – About 4 -10 K taste buds on tongue, cheek, pharynx, epiglottis – Bumps called papillae • Olfactory system can percieve thousands of different chemicals

Mastication releases gases • Thin layer of nerve cells called olfactory epithelium receives gases and transduces them into smell signals • Brain combines smells signals with simple taste signals and decides if its something you want to eat.

Food preferences & personality form early in life • Babies will adjust to hot & spicy, bland health food, or fast food depending on what the people around them eat. Baby eating sushi

We don’t know it all yet • Psychosomatic effects happen • Color of food can determine perception of its taste • People can grow accustomed to bad smells. – Come back from a long vacation and immediately take a good whiff of what your house smells like. Other people smell that whenever they visit you

Aroma & memory • Nerve signals for smell go right past parts of our brain associated with memory. – Smelling salts (ammonium carbonate can wake you up by causing an inhalation reflex – Smells can bring back memories – Comfort foods – Mc. D’s makes billions on this (Happy Meals)

Flavor in history • Empires built, seas crossed, religions and philosophies changed over taste. • Columbus went looking for flavor • Salzburg Germany: Founded to protect salt trade • Saffron is 12$ a gram

• So artificial flavors cropped up from perfume companies after canning started • German scientist playing with chemicals: suddenly lab smells like grapes methyl anthranilate grape Kool-Aid purplesaurus rex

1. 4 Bil a year • ~10 K new food products a year • ~9/10 fail

Tech • • • Spectrometers Gas chromatographs Vapor detectors Can discern chemicals at 1 ppb Human nose can tell 0. 0000003 % Dogs better still

Complex flavors • Coffee, roast beast, strawberries; thousands of chemicals at once • Chemical responsible for flavor of Bell pepper only need 0. 02 ppb: a drop could flavor a swimming pool • And its cheap: flavor in 12 oz of Coke = ½ cent

• Often though, 1 chemical provides the over-riding sense of the food. • Ethyl-2 -methyl butyrate = apple • Methyl-2 -peridylketone = popcorn • Ethyl-3 -hydroxybutanoate = marshmallow • Hexanal = fresh cut grass • 3 -methyl butanoic acid = B. O.

So what? So natural flavor means its made using old technology • Natural • Artificial Getting amyl acetate from distilling bananas from mixing vinegar with a solvent with amyl alcohol, adding H 2 SO 4 as a catalyst Both taste exactly the same, both happen in the same factory, but people want to see natural on their label.

Art or Science? • Mouthfeel: Its not just flavor, • TA. XT 2 i Texture analyzer uses 250 probes to create an artificial mouth that senses bounce, creep, crunch, density, chewiness, gumminess, lumpiness, rubberiness, slipperiness, softness, wetness, spread, springback, tackiness • How do you juggle all of this with subtleties of flavor?

Genetics • Dominant gene • Phenylthiocarbamide, also known as PTC, or phenylthiourea tastes very bitter or not at all depending on genetics • Discovered when a guy at du. Pont accidently spilled a bunch of crystalline PTC, some complained, some did not • May explain why some people are more offended by cig. smoke

Super Taster ~25% of people of European dissent • Maybe more fungiform papillae • Linked to food preference, body type • Coffee, alcohol, may be too intense • Olives too salty

Things go horribly awry • Ageusia (pronounced ay-GOO-see-uh) Loss of sense of taste – From neural damage • anosmia - a loss of the sense of smell. – Cold – Parkinson’s – Alzheimer's