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?
No comments:
Post a Comment