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.
