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The Anatomy of Taste
Some of my favourite food experiences have been entirely unmemorable, an emergency package of instant ramen at 2AM for example, a handful of almonds just out of the shell, or a quick fried egg with plenty of salt and pepper, the experiences stimulated by nothing other than intense flavour.
Still I maintain that dining is a complete sensory experience, taste complemented with sight, sound, touch, and smell. My fleeting gustatory pleasures were enhanced by my own mental context. I like the idea that expectations can be challenged simply by capturing one's imagination, that experiences can be taken to new levels involuntarily through sensory stimulation.
Synesthesia fascinates me, especially as it relates to gustatory perceptions. That is- a rare lexical-gustatory condition where individual words evoke taste sensations in the mouth, like that the word "blue" tastes like ink. While synesthetes experience this condition involuntarily, we've seen more people, companies and brands shift our preconceptions and expectations of them and their products in recent years, paving the way to exciting new creative territories. Here are some inspiring examples of innovation in the world of food and more.
Flavour Tripping
Most of us have heard of miracle fruit (Synsepalum Dulcificum), and some may have even attended the many flavour tripping parties that have made their way around the world. Native to West Africa, the fruit contains the active ingredient miraculin which when eaten, binds to the taste buds and makes bitter or sour foods taste sweet. Examples are lemons which taste like toffee and vinegar that tastes like sherry. The effects can last between 20 min and 2 hours.
Bompas & Parr
The ultimate example of what I'm talking about, Bompas & Parr are the young UK duo famous for creating food experiences on an architectural scale with cutting edge technology. Their projects explore how taste is altered through synaesthesia, performance and setting.
Alcoholic Architecture
Their creation Alcoholic Architecture was a walk-in cocktail housed in an unassuming London bar space. Visitors wore protective suits when entering into a cloud of vaporized gin and tonic which they imbibed through inhalation. A forty minute stay in the bar equalled a one ounce G&T beverage.
Another great example was their Scratch n Sniff Cinema, where Peter Greenaway's classic movie The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover was transformed into a scratch n sniff event. The pair captured key moments of the film in aromas like rotting meat and dusty books, which were then micro-encapsulated and printed onto scratch n sniff cards for the audience to follow along.
Visual Scent
For a non-food example, here is Boudica, a London-based design team responsible for the visual perfume that is Wode. This is a tribute to the mythical Queen Boudicca and her tribe, who wore a cobalt blue war paint on their skin that gave them ferocious look when advancing into battle. The perfume sprays on as a cobalt blue dye on the skin and clothing, but disappears within minutes, leaving behind a strong scent of cardamon, coriander seed, and juniper berry.
Le Whif
A good friend of mine was a student of renowned Harvard Professor David Edwards and part of his small team of students researching and creating a revolutionary product at the crossroad of gastronomy and science. The group collectively came up with Le Whif- an inhalable chocolate containing zero calories but rich in taste. Culinary art was combined with particle engineering and aerosol science to create a perfect particle size small enough to become airborne and big enough not to enter the lungs.
Le Whaf
David Edwards' newest project is Le Whaf, a new way of eating by breathing liquid droplets, as opposed to Le Whif, which was the breathing of dry particles. This is inline with the work done at David's biotechnology startup, Pulmatrix, which makes respirable aerosols that deliver large quantities of drugs like antibiotics to the body.
Grant Achatz
Another person who inspires me incredibly is Grant Achatz. One of America's most celebrated young chefs, he found himself battling tongue cancer in 2007 that suddenly rendered his taste buds useless. After undergoing intense treatment, he is now slowly regaining his sense of taste, but has continued to challenge our preconceptions of foods and restaurants through serving some of the most innovative and mind-bending dishes at his Alinea. He recently sat down with LIFE to discuss the work of some of his peers at the world's best restaurants, and here are some examples from El Bulli, wd-50, Aronia de Takazawa, and The Fat Duck. In his own words.
elBulli: Sopa de Lletres (Alphabet Soup)
"Just looking at this makes you smile, which I am sure was the intent of chef Adria when he thought of spelling out 'The Soup' by cutting the letters out of strawberry-flavored meringue. At elBulli, evoking emotions is a big part of the experience. And in this case, Ferran triggers humor by making a cheeky presentation that pokes fun at itself."
wd-50: Everything Bagel, Smoked Salmon Threads, Crispy Cream Cheese In New York City
"Chefs often reference classical dishes and flavor combinations in the form of a tongue-in-cheek play on the original. Here, Wylie riffs on the traditional NYC combo of bagels and lox. He manipulates temperatures and textures to create a deceptive presentation that visually mimics a bagel, but after the first bite the diner finds out it is really ice cream. Even though the flavors and ingredients are basically the same as the original, the dish is new, surprising, and humorous. It reminds us that cooking should be spontaneous, whimsical, and -- most of all -- fun and enjoyable."
Aronia de Takazawa: Salt Circles
"I really like how Yoshi arranges the very geometric forms of the salt circles next to the organic shapes of the tempura. The gradual transition of color in the salt is also very effective in giving the diner a sense of flavor anticipation. I expect the darker brown circles to have a deeper, almost rich flavor, the green hinting at herbal, the white a sweeter almost vanilla note, and finally the pink suggesting a fruity flavor. This enforces the idea that we taste first by sight, with the brain processing colors, textures, and forms in terms of flavor before we even take out first bite."
The Fat Duck: Sound of the Sea In England
"I was fortunate enough to experience this dish when I ate at the Fat Duck in 2007. In this case, the edible portion of the dish is inspired by the look of a shoreline. But because Heston wanted to involve sound in the experience, he had the added pressure of figuring out a way to conceal an iPod playing the cry of seagulls and the crash of the waves on the beach. His solution was brilliant. A large conch shell houses the music player, and disguising the electronic, non-organic device helps preserve and even enhance the overall theme of the presentation."
conversations with @jennygao and @kmeganc
I'm like "No"
and she goes "OK" and dumps it down the drain
Banker to the Poor
Book 1, January 2010
- Credit is a fundamental human right.
- Poverty and need to survive are the strongest motivations to repay.
- Support groups provide essential peer motivation to succeed.
- The bank should be designed 100% around the customer, with payment terms aligned with the borrower's motivations.
dumpling nostalgia- the xiaochi stalls of Guanghan
I was born in a small township outside Chengdu, a dense metropolis that is the capital of Sichuan province. The town is so small that its name may not even matter if not for the fact that I'm writing about Sichuan's xiaochi, or street snacks, and the only place where the commerce of traditional xiaochi stalls still thrives, is my hometown Guanghan.
The eateries were many and each separated from the next by little more than a thin wall, and differentiated from each other by little more than the crackling paint on it. There was scarcely an empty seat, but the turnover was high, and a new set of patrons entered every twenty minutes. Ours was a square room with communal tables, chairs that croaked with history, and a plump woman selling tickets - ration-style- at the entrance.
You skim the list of xiaochi, pick a weight; half kilo of noodles? Full kilo of dumplings? Or one and half kilo of each if you are in a ravenous mood. You find a seat, and join in the cacophony of diners when, having barely blinked, your food arrives.
My mother always ordered the jingsimian, noodles as thin as strands of silk, swimming in a clear chicken broth. I'd wrinkle my nose in distaste. It would be years later that I learned to appreciate the simplicity of the golden broth, and the velvet mouth feel of the thin noodles. My father ordered the sanheni. To this day I have no desire to find out what ingredients lie in this mucous bowl of brown. The paste of ground flour is mixed with various nuts and dried fruits and emulsified in a thick oil. I can't get past the aesthetics, but can understand the nostalgia it evokes in my father from having grown up in a time of famine.
It has been many years since I've returned to my hometown. The roads have widened, shops have closed, and news customs have replaced the ones I knew. "Why don't we go to the xiaochi place for lunch?" I ask. My grandmother looks at me with alarm, "That place? We would be insane to go there when there's fresh food at home. Those xiaochi places are so dirty and unsafe anyways."
Some memories can be recreated, and others are jolted only to discover they could never take form again. But as I sit in thought, steam hits my nose and I see the hot oils slowly seep into the dumplings, painting my bowl into a sea of red.
Once Upon a Time a Proletarian at TIFF
Just read a provocative piece on Xiaolu Guo, China's literary wonderwoman in the superb FLYP magazine. Hefting ward-winning novels in Chinese and English, and films that have toured some of the world's leading film festivals, she is only in her 30s. Her gallery and works here.
She writes about the split between the East and West, between external and internal worlds, and the fragmentary nature of her film narratives accentuate what she calls "the individual voice of the peasants" in order to tell a larger story. "Only by understanding their interior voices," she says, "can you understand how a nation is being constructed."
Toggling between Beijing, Paris, and London, her own life is a permanent state of impermanence that lends to her subjects , taking form in protagonists who are in a constant battle struggling to reconcile the dialectic tensions between East and West.
Her film Once Upon a Time a Proletarian shows at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday September 19th, 2:45pm. I'm buying a ticket, and if you're in Toronto that day, feel free to join me.
From the description of "Once Upon a Time a Proletarian"
"Much like the written ideograms in Chinese languages, the twelve chapters forming Guo Xiaolu's latest documentary, Once Upon a Time Proletarian: 12 Tales of a Country, transcend conventional narrative and float into a poetic world of images that succeed in rendering a sharp portrait of post-Maoist China. These twelve lyrical and politically insightful visual essays unveil the social landscape of China today."
a morning in paradise, an afternoon in hell
We arrived in Koh Kong yesterday, a tiny city at the border of Cambodia that most tourists use merely as a stop-over on route to Thailand. The journey by bus seemed to last an eternity. Don't get me wrong, the scenery outside was stupendous, rice paddies and lotus flowers turning into rolling hills and valleys. It was the television screens inside the bus, projecting music videos to cambodian love songs full-blast, that was, oh how do I put it delicately, like putting in eyedrops with turpentine. Ok it was like watching fat kids drown in a tub of bacon fat, Ricky Gervais in a speedo, a sight so terrifying you can't look away. If there's one industry headed for big things in Cambodia, its the entertainment industry. Go long now.
There is little to do in Koh Kong other than extreme trekking in the Cardammon mountains and visiting Koh Kong island, which we planned for the next day, so we made the natural choice to enjoy a very long happy hour in an air-conditioned wi-fied cafe instead. It was raining most of the evening anyways. We ate copious amounts of pizza, pasta, and fries to supplement our hard life and fell asleep watching "Not Another Teen Movie" on StarTV, a work of cinematic genius if you ask me, brilliance in screen writing... "let's make like a tree and... branch out of here...", "I am the token black guy. I'm just supposed to smile and stay out of the conversation and say things like: damn, shit, and that is wack.", "good night pumpkin tits.", "damn, that shit is wack.".... bahahahah seriously can it get better than this??Anyways, this morning we rented a speedboat to explore the largest island off the coast of Cambodia, fourty minutes from shore. The beauty of the island was so unexpected it knocked my clothes off. Well, since we were sunbathing it was inevitable, but it was truly something like what I'd have imagined Alex Garland's fabled beach to be like. In contrast to Ko Phi Phi, this actually felt unchartered, we were the only life to be seen for miles, sharing the land with thousands of small cream-coloured crabs scampering in and out of tiny sand dunes. The water was a million shades of crystal, and behind us, for as far as I could see water, were green hills and coconut palms. Like, this can't even be real, I kept thinking to myself. I think we played for what could have been hours. All too soon, our driver started waving at us to head back. I heard something about choppy waters in the afternoons here, so reluctantly we returned to the boat. The waves were larger now, rising a meter high and bringing our boat with it, but were no real cause for alarm, yet. I have experienced choppy waters before, and after a stomach churning episode on the Thai seas, I thought I had seen it all. And at least this boat, albeit plastic and alarmingly evocative of an oversized fisherprice toy, actually worked in contrast to our speed boat in Laos. We kept on our merry way, until the sun disappeared, and the sky turned rather...ominous. This is when it started raining heavily, the waves rose even higher and we came down each time in a crash so thunderous I swear it made my insides shift. Seriously it was like if by some sick design hell had a waterpark.I couldn't see, had trouble swallowing, tried to formulate prayers in my mind, but kept envisioning the final scenes from The Perfect Storm. Rajnee and I squinted at each other through the crashing waves hitting our faces and torrents of rain water and communicated last words silently. I mean, being stranded on the Mekong is one thing, at least I could see both banks of the river and could probably float to each effortlessly in 3 minutes. This was the freaking Indian Ocean with NO LAND IN SIGHT. And we were on a TOY BOAT. If my organs were functioning properly I think I would have crapped my bathing suit. A million times. After what seemed an eternity, and legitimately was probably an hour, we finally saw land, and the waters calmed almost instantly. We were carried by the waves now instead of going against the current. I've never been so happy to stand on firm ground. Shaking, we handed our smiling driver 60$, repeating "Akun, akun", the Cambodian word for "thank you". The sun came out again as if on cue, saying "hah! you survived this one...but maybe not so lucky next time"
Sihanoukville tomorrow! Ps... I stupidly forgot my camera cord back in Bangkok, so I cannot upload any pics until I get back. :( You'll have to do with my stupendous descriptions of my adventures for now. x
after the flood
I did not realize how essential drainage systems are. As the city came alive with the morning sounds of commerce, little children, elderly ladies, vintage mercedes, tuk-tuk drivers, and food vendors waded their way through knee-deep murky waters, as if there was nothing out of the ordinary. I realized I needed a sturdy pair of flip flops if I wanted to do any sightseeing today.
Josh Greenspan's Thailand
Read this and be transported.
Bangkok, October 30
Bangkok. Unique. Head throbbingly vibrant. Standstill traffic twelve hours a day, hundreds of motos and tuk-tuks fighting for that last inch of space to squeeze by. Pretty girls sitting side-saddle on motos, their feet just missing a car, a food stall or me. And then the rain. If Tokyo rains sideways, Bangkok pays no attention. It just rains straight down in long neverending sheets broken only by the all-too-close clap of thunder and sliver-thin bolts of lightning. The city simply moves, undulating. Nothing fancy, certainly nothing organized. The people move around ... or they don't. They cook anywhere and everywhere and eat in just about the same fashion. Nearly every street is a no-name street and where yesterday there was a food stall, today there is a t-shirt vendor or a streetside mechanic, all bathed in the harsh white-blue glow of flourescent tubes. Boats fill the river and with no median to separate them, they glide in every direction. Fast boats, longtails with oily black-brown clouds trailing them. Boats with peaked rooves bearing the flag of a fancy hotel. Water buses, the ticket woman shaking her silver change tubes making sure everyone pays the 30 cent fare.
via Dorie Greenspan's website
i spoke too soon
mad men
How many people have tasted this 'ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being'? We glorify this paean to bohemian hedonism or the beat generation, and yet few would stray from mainstream values to embrace that other. A spontaneity without conventions. I close my eyes and swing to the rhythm of Sal Paradise's underground America; the fast jazz, the heightened sensation amongst inebriated revelry, and cannot tell if my burning desire is for a life on the road or the thrill of observing others at it. There's safety in watching the first snow through the glass. Sometimes I would think I was born in the wrong generation. I saw Ai Weiwei's introspective at his Three Shadows Photography Centre a couple of months ago. It was titled New York Photographs 1983-1993, a deluge of prints chosen from over 10,000 that he took in that decade. "At that time, I didn't really have anything to do. I was just hanging out, whiling away my time everyday by taking pictures of the people I met, places I went, my neighborhood, the street and city." I liked him instantly. He was broke, he was aimless, he was revolutionary, he was a genius. And no one saw it except the friends who rolled through his East Village apartment. People like Chen Kaige, an icon in his own right, just another face in the day, immortalized in frozen frame. Thee air was electric then. You could disappear to the big city, be faceless and nameless, sit in a studio apartment discussing Joyce and Eliot for hours, sleep at dawn and spend all your time chasing the intensity of an unforgettable exuberance. I found myself wishing I weren't bound by my circumstance of birth that restrains me from hitchhiking across America, picking up beatniks along the way. Even the words of Allen Ginsberg, friend to both Ai Weiwei and Kerouac, and inspiration behind Carlo Marx in On the Road, romanticizes the Beat generation to a certain degree. It was not until I read parts of Kerouac's biography, that my fascination with the madness started wearing off, when I realized Kerouac's grand aspirations of one-upping Ulysses consistently produced work after work of drunken revelries at some next party, and the pubescent desire to destruct the safety of the known. Another member, George Corso, did a great job of summing up the glory and absurdity of the Beat generation. In his poem 'Marriage', he explores in his mind all the rebellions he would perform against a life of routine and suburbia, summing up all my fears as I sit here now, but playfully mocking the Beatniks for never growing up. I realize there are realities in which I live, but indulging in the poetics of Kerouac's life on the road may just be the next best thing."Then I dressed and off we flew to New York to meet some girls. As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it (for room and board and 'how-to-write', etc), and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of our relationship), but I didn't care and we got along fine- no pestering, no catering, we tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends...And his criminality was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for joy rides). Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn't care one way or the other, 'so long's I can get that lil ole gal with that lil sumpin down there tween her legs, boy', and 'so long's we can eat, son, y'ear me? I'm hungry, I'm starving, let's eat right now!' - and off we'd rush toeat, whereof, as saith Ecclesiastes, 'It is your portion under the sun.' A western kinsman of the sun, Dean...Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me. " - Jack Kerouac, On the Road
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at
dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient
heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the
machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high
sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz
