5 Reacting to Fake Tastes

After having spent an inordinate amount of time concerned with food, it is hard to accept that good tasting food is nothing but an attempt to fake out the natural senses.  I cannot count the times I have searched for restaurants offering unique dishes, the number of supermarkets, groceries, bodega, and the like I have gone through looking for something interesting, the recipes I have read through, the books on food I have bought and read, the blogs on food adventures I’ve monitored, and so on.  This is all because I was fooled by the makers, purveyors, writers and so on into thinking something real was happening? 

All the people I’ve known who were concerned with food were well-intentioned, decent, honest folks and I cannot believe they would have anything to do with faking people out.  And good cooking has been talked about for three or four millennium at least, so it’s not a function of current society’s goals or directions.  Something very basic is here.  People have sensors in their heads that give them good feelings when they are triggered, and the feedback of people eating something delicious is very obvious to the people involved in preparing and serving it.  Pleasing people may be part of our inner nature, our deep programming, our brainstem’s wiring, and the happiness that ‘good’ food creates probably hits this trigger very strongly as well.  So, ‘fake tastes’, as I called it before, is part of a social behavioral process that is more general than any individual setting. 

As noted before, the process is made possible by the difference in time scales.  There is a short-term one.  You liking food takes a second or two and the wellness feeling that comes from satiety comes in tens of minutes.  There is a long-term one.  Your health deteriorates over days, weeks, months or years if the food is only good tasting, and not sufficiently nutritious.  Growth is affected similarly to health.  Poorly fed people don’t grow as tall as well fed people; this was clearly documented, among other sources, by the post-war increase in height among Japanese.  So, good cooks or clever food industrialists can get inside the second time scale to manipulate the first.  The human body does not have a mechanism to connect poor health or restricted growth with nutritional deficits except for gross malnutrition.  So there is no safety mechanism to protect us against fake tastes.

Now the engineering problem is clearer.  The customer has no way of rapidly judging the real quality of food, measured by how well it supports his health, growth, longevity, capability, and so on, but he does have a clear way of rapidly judging the tastes that are involved, and his judgment is very much affected by the psychological effects they have.  Should we engineer food to be more nutritious or to taste better?  Some, probably small, fraction of the population is immune to good tastes to a large degree, and is unaffected by them, especially in subtle ways, and they can make conscious intelligent decisions to consume nutritious food that covers the requirements spectrum.  The remaining, probably huge, majority, wants good tasting food that they would hope would be nutritious.  Watching people in a supermarket clarifies the division of consumers.  Cart after shopping cart full of less nutritious food, maybe easy to prepare or preparation-free, will parade by before you see one with a concentration on health, at least in the lower level of supermarkets.  Premium supermarkets have a larger fraction of nutrition shoppers.

Children are a special subset of food consumers.  Taste preferences develop with age.  The ones which operate at birth relate, most likely, to mother’s milk tastes, and others may or may not be present that early.  However, one of the simple tastes, sweetness, seems to come on strongly very early.  There is a question, perhaps not yet known to food scientists, as to what portion of food preferences are learned, leaving the rest to be genetic.  Genetic ones can appear at later ages, and learning is obviously something that happens as time progresses, so there is no obvious way to tell the difference by observing how children develop a diversity of taste preferences. 

Cooking, by an engineer or not, for children, needs goals also, but the goals should be those of the parents.  They decide what to serve their children.  These goals then motivate the engineer to do his best to satisfy them efficiently, cost-effectively, and sufficiently.   What should the engineer’s expectations be, allowing him to plan for the most general case of feeding children?  Most of us have observed parents who know no other mode of operating than being a servant to their children, treating them as royalty, and trying to please them.  Other parents are indifferent to the desires of their children, and cook what they like, with extra portions for the children.  Somewhere in the middle, or off to one side of this spectrum, are those who recognize their children need to learn about foods, and plan menus that have usual foods plus something new, which is mandatory for the children to taste or even consume completely.  Engineering is supposed to be a moral profession, committed to the common good, safety, and other positive social attributes.  Should an engineer use his skills to help parents with ‘royal children’, in other words, parents whose psychology is so negative that their self-image will not permit them to put any pressure on the child, or parents who gain all their positive feelings from pleasing other people, not bothering to think if that is the right thing for a child? 

This is obviously related to the question as to whether an engineer professing to be moral will help people eat, more efficiently, cost-effectively or whatever, food which undermines their health or sabotages their immune system, leaving them vulnerable to infection, or which will restrict their growth to below that of a well-fed individual, or any other less than optimal solution?  Who’s in charge: the engineer or other professional, or the consumer? 

Alas, I hoped in this blog to quickly use my engineering experience to say something intelligent and useful about cooking and food in general, but instead, the very first step of figuring out goals for the activity turned into a swamp of conflicting ideas.  Not having realized that good taste is largely a euphemism for tricking the complicated set of food sensors in the head into classifying the food as healthy in the extreme, it seemed that some use of databases about foods could be done to make things efficient, or some scheduling algorithms might speed up food preparation, or something else bright might come out.  Instead, I need to ponder why people have sought to have fake tastes for a long time, and how modern industrial techniques are making that easier and easier, while more and more dangerous, or at least worrying. 

To digress a bit toward thinking about a more general view of the problem, we can think about the human being as an organism that is largely controlled by his brain, which responds to sensors in the body, and which communicates via electrical networks in the brain and by neurochemicals, produced by various glands and other organs, which affect the brain.  You could say that a person’s goals are to produce the right pleasure chemicals in his brain, and there are many ways to do this.  The goal that underlies the decision-making process in a human is not something connected with his own welfare, but with the chemical constituents of some portions of his brain.  When technology, either primitive from millennia past or current, figures out how to affect these chemicals, it allows the technology-user to bypass the welfare of the client or customer, and simply go directly to the more powerful method of affecting the chemicals.  This happens in food preparation.  It also seems to happen in multiple other scenes.  Examples include relationships of all kinds.  If one person can say or do something that changes the chemicals of the other person’s brain to be more of the pleasure-related ones, they then have power over that second person.  If the second person is principally reacting to statements, and responds by taking actions, the leverage that the first person has over the second is very high.  Without any kind of contract, the second has become the servant or vassal of the first.  Someone who learns the art of creating pleasure reactions in others with nothing more than speech or communication gains a great amount of power if the others do not understand what is going on.  Is this what advertising is?

What does this all mean?  Maybe I can figure out something for another blog.

4 Nutrition is a Puzzle

5/20/13

Despite the tremendous amount of writing about nutrition, it doesn’t seem to be understood very deeply.  Let me first talk about ways of understanding something like nutrition.  They are the same three ways we can understand anything complicated, and correspond to three of the many lobes of the brain or three of man’s mental capabilities.  

One way is verbal.  You can read a description of nutrition, maybe some sort of a list of do’s and don’ts for staying healthy, or avoiding obesity, or keeping your immune system going.  If you remember them, and understand the terms used and the grammar involved, you can say you have a verbal understanding of some aspect of nutrition.

Another way is numerical.  You can read about the number of calories needed to keep you healthy, or the amount of fat that is on a dish you are about to eat.  You can add up the saturated fat you consumed in a day or a month, and compare it with recommended guidelines.  You can make a record of your daily weight and figure out the trends in your weight, perhaps how much you are losing each week on an average.  If you do this, you can say you have a numerical understanding of some aspects of nutrition.

The third way is structural, which relates to processes, organizations, categories, and procedures.  You can’t say you have a structural understanding of nutrition because no one does.  Shockingly, scientists have not yet figured out the details of how nutrition works in the human body.

Why on earth hasn’t research in this area been heavily funded for the last fifty years, so now we know exactly what goes on with food in the body?  Since so much health is related to nutrition, what is stopping scientists from simply marching through the nutrition process and nailing down all the unknowns.  Certainly it would be a lot easier to control one’s weight if we understood just what happens when we put some combination of ingredients into our mouths. 

The bottom line is that few seem to care about this.  In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has the responsibility for ensuring the safety of foods that Americans eat.  Food has a wide range of risks involved, so maybe the FDA can excuse itself from not having sponsored enough nutrition research by saying they have lots of other things to worry about, like salmonella in tuna fish or whatever.  The National Health Service (NHS) is run by people who know nutrition is an important factor in health, so they should be dumping big bucks into nutrition research, except they are not.  There are thousands of things that affect health, so maybe they have an excuse as well.  The National Science Foundation (NSF) has all the billions of scientific questions on their plate, so they can’t put too much of their money into nutrition.  And the same goes for all the supporters of research in the US.  If there isn’t funding, there isn’t research, and there isn’t a knowledge explosion.  Too bad for all the people who eat food. 

 

There is no doubt that understanding nutrition will take a lot of work.  Consider what has to be done.  First of all, we are still in the caveman era of feeding ourselves.  Five or ten thousand years ago, some people figured out putting seeds in the ground would grow crops, everything from fruit trees to wheat, and we have been doing this ever since.  This is amazing, considering the revolution in everything else in our lives.  We don’t travel the way we did in caveman days, we don’t live in caves, we don’t die young typically, we have ways to kill infections instead of enduring them, and ways to deaden pain safely, we don’t believe the sun travels around the earth as cavemen did, we don’t fear spirits in trees and rocks, but we still plant seeds and eat the result.  Hopefully somebody will soon figure out how to replace it, but for now, we are stuck with it as a source of all our edible ingredients.

Plants and animals are complex biologically, which means that the basic ingredients of our food are not describable by a simple chemical formula, but instead are a very complex amalgam of multiple chemicals, most of them complex hydrocarbons, including various trace minerals.  It is not a simple puree of these chemicals, but there are cellular structures still present in many foods.  The nutrition process has to deal with these cells, which may be a barrier to absorbing something from inside the cell after it is eaten.  Besides the cellular structure, much food consists of pieces of intact plant or animal, i.e., multiple cells bound together, which again is a challenge to the nutrition process. 

 

This may have been the easy part.  After all, we can take some food element, like a piece of salmon, subject it to whatever food preparation process we are studying or including, and then examine it using all the forensic tools present in a modern biochemical laboratory.  After a huge amount of effort, we might come up with a description of what that piece of prepared food was structurally and chemically.  This might be a count of cells of various types present and how they were connected and bound chemically to each other.  Then we could describe each of the cell types in terms of contents and internal structure.  It would a breakthrough of sorts, as we haven’t done this for complex plant and animal cells, even human ones.  The complexity is too forbidding. 

 

The next part is harder.  In the mouth, as we have described before, there are both physical changes from chewing and other mouth physical actions, and chemical ones where the saliva begins to affect the ingredients.  To find out the effect of the mouth on foods, one would have to collect chewed food in the throat and compare it to the starting attributes of the food.  This might have to be done on all of the various types of foods.

Next is the effect of the stomach on foods. Now the collection problem is much harder.  Perhaps some animals with identical stomachs to humans could be used.  The intestine is next.  Most people have heard that there are more microbial cells in the intestine than make up the body – of course they are one ten-thousandth the size so the volume is small compared to the volume of a human.  However, there are many varieties of them, and the distribution of them over the different varieties varies between people and within one person with time, especially if food choice changes.    This bacterial mix is not identical everywhere in the intestine, either.

These bacteria play an important role in nutrition, as they consume some of the biochemicals in the food that reaches them, and excrete some other biochemicals.  After they have had a chance to consume what they prefer, the lining of the intestine absorbs some of the chemicals into the blood stream.  From there they are transported to various organs and parts of the body.  How much of what gets transported where is another question for the nutritional researchers.  The various absorbed biochemicals have to diffuse through the capillary walls in order to get into various organs, and then the organs’ own chemical processing factories, their cells, do their work to produce what is needed, and perhaps what is not.

 

Things are easier to study when they are linear, meaning, one effect is proportional to some input.  Linearity would mean that if you ate twice as much vitamin C in a second trial compared to the first one, whatever cells took up vitamin C during your initial trial would get twice as much on the second.  Saturation exists, despite many writers ignoring it.  Some intestinal bacteria which, despite your wishes to the contrary, eats up your vitamin C before it gets to your bloodstream might not be able to deal with twice as much, so in your first trial, the bacteria gets fed vitamin C and in the second trial, both you and your bacteria get their fill.  This is very non-linear.  The opposite effect can happen.  For example, cell walls can change their permeability.  If some cell of your body takes in vitamin C through a pore, just designed for it, that pore might close when the cell gets some amount of the vitamin.  So, in the first trial, you get all you need, and the second trial, the additional amount circulates around in the blood because no cells allow it in, and then is excreted as waste.  Now, which of these two events, or many others we could hypothesize, occur in the body?  Another gap for nutrition researchers to fill.

The question of where does saturation occur is a valid one for all biochemicals we ingest, and saturation is only one of many non-linearities we can imagine.  Some of them involve our bacterial companions, others just our own cells.  So, if someone asks you, how much vitamin C do I need, you need to say you don’t know.  One of the more interesting non-linearities concerns inventories.  There may be places where biochemicals are stored but not used, and the cells involve take their signature biochemical out of the bloodstream or put it back in, depending on the level in the bloodstream, or the presence or absence or amount of a completely different one, perhaps one which is produced as waste of the biochemical being stored. 

 

With this level of complexity, scientists hack off small parts of the problem to study, and there are many results from good scientific exploration.  But there is no comprehensive overview that includes the whole process and gives us a structural view, to the level of detail needed to make nutritional computations, of the entire thing.  So, we are left with some simple approximations or estimates or guesses or hypotheses as to what is going on to what amount.  This leaves the door open to all those who want to write about a new diet they have invented.  And it leaves us in a quandary, as bad as the one concerning taste and other attributes.  We need to ask, what would a good engineering team do in this situation…

3 Figuring Out Food Attribute Goals

5/16/13

Perhaps it’s obvious to everybody else, but it’s not obvious to me what the basic goals are for a food preparer relative to the attributes (the five categories listed previously) of the food detected in our heads, to say nothing of nutrition and harmlessness.  Some foods we eat raw, like fruit, some vegetables, sometimes meat or fish, milk.  There are people who eat only raw vegan foods; one of my best friends from long ago was one, and he would amaze me consuming raw potatoes and other raw vegetables which everyone else cooked.  He was incredibly healthy, so I would assume the diet didn’t harm him. 

This raises not only the question of what should a food preparer strive for in taste, but a more general question:  Why cook?  Even in salads, which are usually solely raw vegetables, we cut and mix the vegetables together, which doesn’t interfere with tasting each one separately, but then we add dressings of various strong flavors on top, which tend to override the flavor of the raw vegetables. 

Some possibilities stand out.  In situations, most likely in the past, where food was scarce and food which had started to go bad had to be eaten, dressings could be used to mask any unpleasant aspects of the food ingredients.  I have read long ago that this was the origin of spices in India.  If so, why do we still do it with perfectly healthy, perfectly fresh foods?  Most recipes I have read tell you to start with fresh ingredients and then start to doctor them.

One variation of this involves food preservation.  Food that is temporarily available might be preserved, by putting it in brine, by fermenting it, by salting it, by freezing it or keeping it at low temperatures, by refining it into parts none of which is attackable by pests or which is easier to store and defend from pest (bacteria, insects, worms, anything).  If food preservation came into existence long after our food detection system had evolved, food preparation using preserved ingredients would have to have some tricks to get it past our detectors.

A second variation of this involves some natural material that is basically inedible, but can be transformed somehow, such as by milling and separating it, into something that is.  And the transformed food can’t be eaten raw, but must be further transformed before it is digestible or nutritious or palatable.  This means complicated food preparation.

A third variation, not too distinct from the last one, involves some natural material that is harmful, but which can be transformed into harmless by some process, such as heating, marinating in alcohol, or whatever.  The harmfulness doesn’t even have to be part of the material itself, but could be from adulteration, biological transformation, infection or something else.  If something has some chance of harming the body, does heating it, i.e, something like pasteurization, eliminate that chance and leave us with a useful food ingredient? 

Another situation is that people might have to eat foods they don’t like.  Why would someone not like a food that was healthy and safe – is this a failure of the food detection system in the head, where it classifies a perfectly fine food as dangerous or non-nutritious?  Perhaps if the system is based on familiarity, and a new food had to be introduced, it could be disguised by adding something to it.

Perhaps it was due to imperfections in the system – a perfectly good food is not only not familiar, but is similar to bad foods in some attribute, and the food system tries to bar it.  Included above are five examples where the logical mind, which knows that the food is edible, tries to trick the reptilian part of the brain, which operates more simply and classifies the food as non-edible.  Doesn’t it strike you as odd that we have a competition between different lobes of the brain, and carry the combat out into the physical world, where the smarter, later evolved part, fools the more primitive one?  Is this actually what we are doing by food preparation?

Another aspect relates to something not yet discussed – nutrition.  Does mixing things together, or heating them, or coating them, make nutrition more efficient?  This discussion needs to take place after an exploration of the nutrition system in the body. 

Even further, we have feedback systems in the body that control the amount we eat – sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t.  Could we be trying to affect those systems, and for example, override a food limitation signal the intestine sends out so we can eat more, perhaps because we logically can predict that there will be no more food after a while and we need to fatten up in the near future.  Seasons in the northern and southern hemisphere would provide a motivation for this.

Could it also be that some food preparation is designed for alternative purposes?  There are special situations, where we want to protect the eaters from some possible harm, like infection, so we give them some ingredients that will assist in that goal.  This might be classed as a form of nutrition, but what about inebriation?  Maybe we want to prepare foods that produce good feelings not related to nutrition being improved, but related to some chemical change in our brains.  This is principally alcohol-related, but there might be others.

A more subtle goal might be the most powerful of all.  We feel good when we eat very nutritious and safe foods, but that good feeling comes from the food detection system anticipating the nutrition that is underway.  The detection system can be manipulated by using ingredients that create the great-nutrition signal without actually providing nutrition, perhaps little or none at all.  So, to have the eaters feel good, we can use food preparation to trigger the good feelings.  Since there may be hazards to blatantly fooling a natural system like this, we need to explore this goal before taking it as one to follow.  Delicious is not a synonym for nutritious and harmless.

So, there are at least eleven different motivations for why we don’t just eat our food raw.  If we are food preparers, would it help to know which of the ones we were targeting when preparing the food?  If we knew the goals exactly, could we better tailor the processes we use to accomplish it?  Here are the eleven already-mentioned possible goals, there may be more:

1.       Overcome food aging

2.       Use preserved foods

3.       Transform inedible materials into nutritious items

4.       Eliminate possible harmfulness in a food

5.       Overcome food novelty

6.       Overcome false bad-food signals

7.       Improve nutrition

8.       Override food limitation signals

9.       Provide some non-nutritional benefit

10.   Provoke some attitude change

11.   Make the food-detection system give great nutrition signals

Could it be our chefs and recipe-writers have forgotten exactly what it was that caused us to shift from some particular raw food only diet to food preparation in the extreme?  Are they doing things that are non-productive, wasting time on things that aren’t necessary, going down the wrong paths, missing what is important in food preparation, causing some losses in nutrition unnecessarily, or encountering other pitfalls?  If we are going to try to prepare food like good engineering teams would, we will need to sort out the goals of food preparation better than what we see in the food literature.

Fake Tastes

5/13/2013

As noted in the previous post, the food sensors we carry around with us were evolved to detect both the benefits of the potential food, that is, nutrition, and the safety of it, meaning the absence of toxins.  Nowadays, food taste is more like the cook's choice rather than a representation of the food's natural attributes.  Those attributes may be played with, but there is much more added to the natural attributes, and typically prepared food is a mixture of things, some of which might be checkable by the sensors, and some which might not be.  The sensors probably evolved before grains were invented by some tyro agriculturalist, and many things are made from grains now.  Foods are also separated now, such as oils extracted from them.  Perhaps are sensors can take that in stride, or perhaps they are not suited for these separated products.  Cooking is also likely to be post-sensor.

One point of view is that food preparation is a little like music or painting, in that it is done to amuse and interest the spectator (i.e., the taster).  But the analogy is somewhat inappropriate, in that real tasting of naturally collected wild food provides a very important benefit to the human tasting it, and listening to music or looking at a painting does not.  The tasting benefit is physical, and there may be some psychological benefit from music, but it is of a different category.

If we are trying to use engineering processes to prepare foods, we run into a roadblock at the first preliminary step.  It's not clear what we should be doing about the food's detectable attributes.  People still need to have nutrition.  Should that be somehow coupled with food attributes as it was in the primitive days of human existence?  Or should we forget about it entirely and just treat it like a palette to design an experience with?

Quite frankly, it is possible to make a non-nutritious food taste great.  If one was diabolical, or very profit minded, one could use foods with unhealthy attributes and make them taste great as well.  Immediate poisons would get the cook into jail quickly, but something that undermined health and only slowly caused damage or weakness might not be a crime at all - in fact, it isn't if the damage is slight enough.  People sold cigarettes for a long time despite known health impacts, and they still do.  So food can fall into the same category.

To search for some answers, let's think through how an engineer deals with materials he uses in other areas of engineering, like building factories or complex equipment or infrastructure.  We may have all heard the horror stories of bolts that were inferior, causing a structure to collapse or a plane to come apart.  Engineers set requirements for their materials and components, and then test them to ensure that they meet the requirements.  These tests might be done at the receiving dock, in a special laboratory, at the vendor's manufacturing site, or by the manufacturer or a third party without the engineer (again engineering team) being directly involved, but informed of the tests and their results.  The engineer would have to have some experience or some deep insight into figuring out how the vendor might carelessly or deliberately produced something that wouldn't work, and then makes sure barriers to this risk were in the requirements and testing procedures.

Fortunately, building and other engineering trades are so commonly done that there are national and international standards for most typical components, such as bolts.  The engineer doesn't need to write specifications, but just to reference the standard.  The standard is a set of requirements that can be used to meet common tasks.  For unusual components or materials, the engineer has to write his own.

How does this relate to food preparation?  Is there a standard for a pea?  Does it include strong safety requirements and a minimum of nutritional requirements?  Unfortunately, not.

There are standards, so one cannot sell spoiled peas as peas or beans as peas or cardboard pellets as peas, but the standards are far short of what an engineer would use for components in building a bridge.  Yet feeding people is an important function, just as is allowing them to cross a river.  Perhaps there should be tough standards; however, since there are not, a good engineer has to do something else.  What?

Welcome

May 12, 2013

I have been very frustrated at times with cooking.  The frustration comes from the way cooking is taught -- "Follow the recipe" is the main mode I've seen.  Why should I follow a recipe?  There must be a better way to cook than to follow recipes, even for beginners or less experienced cooks.

I am not an engineer, instead a scientist, but I have worked with engineers my whole career, and they seem to have a way of doing business that works very well.  Many times I've seen engineers dive into new areas, master it quickly, and start being productive.  They don't follow strongly scripted procedures completely, which is what following a recipe is.  Instead, there are multiple short procedures that are melded together to produce some result, like a building.  There are preparatory steps as well, that cooking seems to be unaware of.

So, in an attempt to "Cook Like an Engineer", or at least figure out how to do that, I am starting a blog to record my thoughts in this area.  I have no blogging experience, so, if I ever have a reader, please have some patience while I learn blogging at the same time I am trying to solve the "Cook Like an Engineer" puzzle.  This blog is not intended for people who cannot think like engineers and is not "dumbed down" in any way that I am aware of.  Many people think like engineers, and many more simply have minds that do not work that way.  If you are not used to taking problems apart, analyzing them, gathering relevant information and organizing it, and then synthesizing an answer, this blog is not for you.  I don't know how to not think like an engineer, so I'm no use to the rest of you. 

I'll use the word cooking here in the usual general way it is used, food preparation.  It is not restricted to the application of heat, but can include such things as ceviche - raw fish prepared by marinating it in lime juice.  For ceviche, there is no heat applied from catch to consumption.

I have worked at and observed almost all stages of engineering.  A project usually starts by setting some goals, and then come requirements, an overview of the processes, and ways of checking and verifying, to name a few steps.  Goals are set by the customer that the engineer (typically engineering team) works for, and often customers are not completely clear on their goals - the engineers assist in the process of figuring out what those goals might be and should be.  When the customer has a good set of goals in his/her mind, they need to be written down unambiguously.  Often they are hierarchical in nature, and the depth of the hierarchy is chosen to been deep enough to allow the customer to completely visualize or imaging what the product will be.  Let's struggle with cooking's goals.

Top level goals for cooking seem obvious.  Provide palatable nutrition without causing harm to the eater.  This goal has three key foci: taste and other food attributes that are detected while eating, nutritional value, and harmlessness.  These relate to the process of consumption.  Food passes through a set of sensors which have some evolutionary function, such as deciding if the thing in the mouth is worth eating and safe to eat.  Then it passes through the rest of the digestive tract, and must transfer the nutrients inside it into the body.  It should not carry anything that, when in the digestive tract or in the body, will lead to damage.  Let's deal with each of these as separately as possible. 

Engineers usually don't stop with a simple sentence for a goal, but try to elaborate to make sure everyone understands what the goal actually means, what it doesn't mean, and what is still ambiguous.  Note: when I talk about what engineers do, I am talking about what I have observed very good teams of very good engineers do, sometimes participating.  I don't know what less competent ones do

Engineers typically have good math skills, as most things they do are quantitative.  I'll try to discuss how math might relate to cooking, but I'm operating in a vacuum here.  Not much has been done.  You'll get my best shot.  They also are good at collecting, organizing, and interpreting information related to the product.  I'll try to do a little of that here.

Palatability and the human sensors

A human detects some attributes of food.  These are divisible into five categories.  The simplest is perhaps temperature, which are detected by thermoreceptors in different parts of the mouth, and if the temperature is too far from the acceptable range, another set of sensors, nociceptors which give a warning, and then, if very hot or cold food has too long a residence time in the mouth, pain sensors responding to damage.  We are all familiar with accidentally taking something too hot into the mouth, and the involuntary reaction of moving it around to spread the heat transmission, and by expectorating it if necessary.  Hot and cold items are detected by different types of cells - there is no universal thermometer cell.  The data transmission for thermoreception out of the mouth is sufficiently wideband that we can detect if a food consists of separate hot and cold chunks. 

A related category is chemesthesis, when a chemical affects the nerves that transmit signals such as hot and cold, but without being hot or cold.  Menthol is the best known chemical that simulates cold, and certain spices simulate hot.  Maybe that is why, at least in English, we use the word 'hot' to mean spicy, even though the temperature of a spicy food is exactly the same as other non-spicy foods.  The neurochemistry of these nerves is known to some degree, as is the transmission channels to the brain and the reception areas there.  It's not clear that would be relevant to cooking, however, but keep an open mind.  There are probably other chemesthesis sensors - one might be astringency.

A third category is texture, which is detected by a lot of pressure sensors and muscle extension sensors.  Clearly if the person is able to sense the pressure of his/her tongue upward dynamically, as well as the force exerted, a strength of the materials can be estimated.  There are probably many other ways texture is determined, and many aspects of texture to be measured.  If some food is stringy, the mouth's correlation of spatial location and presence of an object will detect that.  Chunky food is similarly detected.  Viscosity might be estimated by the use of the tongue in a curved shape, which is certainly within the tongue's capability of internal muscle control.  Lips and teeth also provide texture information.  Again, viscosity might be measured by reducing the pressure inside the mouth with the lungs and forming a small space between the lips, and monitoring the flow rate perhaps by the elastic shear of the lip surface.  Rigidity of solid chunks can certainly be estimated using the tongue and roof of the mouth.  The totality of texture sensing might not have been completely worked out yet.   

There is taste, which is the response to some chemosensor cell groups that operate in the liquid phase and are located on the tongue, with lesser numbers on the roof of the mouth, its sides and elsewhere.
In the mouth, there are types of cells known which are chemically specific to five tastes (sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami). Each of these has one or more types of receptor cells, and typically a molecule or atom, such as a sugar molecule for sweetness and sodium for saltiness, binds to a site on the nerve outer surface, creating a shape change that leads to an electrical change in the cell.  The neurology of these cells isn't too well known right now.  What is known is that different humans taste sensors respond quite differently to some molecules.  

Smell is the most complex, meaning it has by far the widest variety of types of signals that can be received.  Smell occurs in the nasal cavity, and typically is chemoreception of a volatile chemical that was in the food, dissolved in the mucus coating of the epithelium which contains the cells. Some cells can detect non-volatiles if they are transported to it.  Hundreds or thousands of smells are detectable, and humans are different in which ones they can or cannot smell, and the faintness that they can detect.  The molecules can enter through the nose through inhalation (as a wine-taster would) but mostly when the lungs exhale air past the food in the throat and mouth onto the smell sensor cells.

What is the purpose of these sensors?

If you are going to cook something, and it is going to strongly interact with these sensors in the eater's head, it makes sense to know what they are there for.  Evolution doesn't throw complicated neural systems into creatures by accident.  At least originally, it was for some purpose related to our survival or welfare.  Now we can do what we wish with food to light up some of these sensors, but a good starting point for treating food preparation as an engineering task is to understand what the sensors are or were for.

It seems obvious to me that the sensors relate to giving a reading on the food for nutritional value and safety.  Obviously, in the wild there are things with toxins in them naturally, and more toxins can develop as part of the process of spoiling.  Evolution has given us a wide variety of food sensors to separate out the good stuff, the dangerous stuff, and the useless stuff.

The fine details of the sensors may be able to tell the wild food collector to eat a lot of this, little of this, and none of this, depending on how much the body needs of the constituents of each.  So we can expect some feedback mechanism in the body to respond to food sensor outputs with a desire to eat a lot, eat a little, and eat none respectively.

Food preparation, such as baking or sauteing, marinating, or even simply mixing purees of things which do not appear in nature, may lead the food sensors to give many signals that would not occur in the original stage of human development, when food was eaten raw.  Now, instead of the food sensors being safety switches on found or caught foods, they are being played like instruments by chefs and corporations who create combinations and treatments of ingredients to be sold or simply consumed.  What exactly should we make of this?