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?