Tasty (19 page)

The love of heat was nothing more than these two systems working together, Rozin concluded. Superhot tasters court danger and pain without risk, then feel relief when it ends. “People also come to like the fear and arousal produced by rides on roller coasters, parachute jumping, or horror movies,” he wrote. “They enjoy crying at sad movies, and some come to enjoy the initial pain of stepping into a very hot bath
or the shock of jumping into cold water. These ‘benignly masochistic' activities, along with chili preference, seem to be uniquely human.” Eating hot peppers may literally be a form of masochism, a soliciting of dangers that civilization cocoons us against.

Rozin's theory suggests that flavor has an unexpected emotional component: relief. A study led by Siri Leknes, at Oxford University, looked at the relationship of pleasure and relief to see if they were, in essence, the same. Leknes gave eighteen volunteers two tasks while their brains were scanned: one pleasant, one unpleasant. In the first, they were asked to imagine a series of pleasurable experiences, including consuming their favorite meal, drink, or cup of coffee or tea; the smell of a fresh sea breeze or freshly baked bread; a warm bath or smiling faces. In the other, they were given a visual signal that pain was coming, followed by a five-second burst of 120-degree heat from a device attached to their left arms: enough to be quite painful, but not enough to cause a burn.

The scans showed that relief and pleasure were interwined, overlapping in one area of the frontal cortex where perceptions and judgments form, and in another near the hedonic hotspots. As emotions, their intensity depended on many factors, including one's attitude toward life. Volunteers who scored higher on a pessimism scale got a stronger surge of relief than did optimists—perhaps because they weren't expecting the pain to end.

Ed Currie's website features videos of people eating Carolina Reapers. They are studies in torture. As one man tries a bite, his eyes open with surprise, then his chair tips back and he falls on the floor. Another sweats up a storm and appears to be suffering terribly, but presses on until he has
eaten the whole thing. Watching these, it suddenly seemed clear to my son and me that whatever enjoyment might be derived from savoring chili flavors, true satisfaction comes only in the aftermath: the relief at having endured, and survived.

CHAPTER 8

The Great Bombardment

D
uring World War II, Ireland endured a regime of meager rations, bland flavors, and overall deprivation called the Emergency. With most resources directed to the war effort, housewives stood in line with coupon books to obtain basic items including tea, sugar, butter, flour, and bread. People were allowed to cook with gas for only a few hours per day, while utility company agents nicknamed “glimmer men” went door-to-door to ensure pilot lights were otherwise kept off. But a thirty-year-old entrepreneur named Joe Murphy saw opportunity in scarcity. The Irish craved fresh fruits, the only source of essential nutrients including vitamins C and D; imports had been cut off as German U-boats patrolled the Atlantic. In Britain, people satisfied this need with a drink named Ribena, a cordial made from the syrup of black currant berries. The British government had mandated the cultivation of the berries early in the war, and distributed Ribena to children as a nutritional supplement. Murphy secured a supply for Ireland: every bottle sold.

After the war ended, basic items such as meat, butter, and cheese became available again, and a modest array of snack
foods helped fuel the baby boom. Soft drinks were stocked on shelves next to bottles of Ribena. In 1954, Murphy founded a potato chip business. Potatoes were Ireland's national staple, used as the foundation of stews and shepherd's pies; boxty, a potato pancake; and champ, mashed potatoes with scallions and milk. Yet in the 1950s, Ireland still imported all its potato chips from the United Kingdom. Investing five hundred British pounds, Murphy began with two rooms, two deep fryers, one van, and eight employees. He named his company “Tayto,” after his toddler son Joseph's mispronunciation of the word.

Though his chips sold well, Murphy was not satisfied. During the war, the challenge had been finding products to meet demand. Now he faced a problem of oversupply. Large snack brands dominated the market, and with a product that was identical to theirs, his business seemed unlikely to grow. Dissatisfied with what he called the “insipid” flavor of plain chips, Murphy decided to give the senses a rattle. He began sifting cheese or onion powder on the potatoes as they came out of the fryer and selling the spiced chips as a novelty. One day when they had an excess of both ingredients, Murphy's partner, Seamus Burke, sat down at a table and combined them into a third flavor. These were the first flavored potato chips.

In the 1950s, American potato chip manufacturers faced the same monotony problem on a much larger scale. In Ireland, the cheese-and-onion combination quickly caught on, and Murphy's business grew rapidly. So American companies appropriated the idea and began making their own flavored chips. In 1958, Herr's Potato Chips of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, introduced barbecue chips, as did H. W. Lay & Company around the same time. More followed suit. Then came sour cream and onion, the American riff on cheese and onion.

The spiced potato chip was one of the first modern junk foods. As companies continued to experiment with seasonings, textures, and chemical formulas, the chip was transformed. It became a kind of industrial flavor template, generating profits by delivering precision-engineered jolts of flavor to the senses. Sixty years later, the diversity of potato chips is astonishing. Many flavors are lifted from world cuisines and tailored to suit local tastes. There are hot chili squid chips in Thailand, red caviar chips in Russia, shrimp and garlic chips in Spain, a chip in Australia flavored with Vegemite. In Britain, there's a chip that tastes like Yorkshire pudding.

The potato chip's metamorphosis was part of a contemporary sea change in food and tastes, comparable to controlling fire or fermentation. From the time people started cultivating grains twelve thousand years ago until about 1900, most of humanity lived on limited, starchy diets. The foundation of the meal was harvested grains or roots such as potatoes. Meats, milk, eggs, fruits, or vegetables were luxuries, available only occasionally. Food historian Rachel Laudan calls this “humble cuisine.” Most of its calories came from a basic starch such as millet or maize; women prepared it and families ate out of a common bowl, sometimes using their fingers.

The wealthy ate quite differently. They built elaborate kitchens, employed teams of chefs, purchased animals for slaughter, and obtained foreign spices. Their food—high cuisine—was a diverse and sumptuous affair, embodying power and status. Meats, sweets, fats, and alcoholic beverages provided most of the calories. There were condiments, prepared sauces, multiple courses, and a sense of tradition and ritual. When starches were employed, it was the costlier grains such as rice and wheat.

By the twentieth century, sprawling, interlocking industrial food systems began doing what palace cooks and per
sonal chefs had always done. They raised, killed, and rendered cattle, manufactured cheese and beer, grew and processed wheat, and formulated the recipes for condiments. Millions, then billions, of people around the world could now taste the seared meats, varied courses, and desserts once reserved for princes. A cheeseburger and french fries might sit at the farthest imaginable point from “haute” on the culinary scale, but it's a distillation of five thousand years of high cuisine. Laudan calls this “middling cuisine.” Savory beef, salty-fatty fries, spiced-up ketchup and mustard, umami-rich cheese, and piquant onions are a court feast in microcosm. In the early 1900s, a period of food and flavor democracy began, bringing more robust nutrition to the masses.

But gradually, this system went haywire. As chips and other tasty snack foods proliferated, food companies competed to see how many sensory buttons they could push at once. Examining emerging insights into the biology of flavor, they found new ways to manipulate perceptions and desires, from genetics to cognitive tricks. Processed foods—sold in supermarkets or fast-food chains—bombarded the senses and toyed with the brain and the gut. As consumers became inured to these, food companies ladled on even more sensations. This era of overstimulating junk food dazzled the palate, but it harmed public health. In the United States, a Harvard study that tracked the diets and weight of 120,000 healthy men and women over two decades showed each gained an average of nearly a pound every year. In descending order, the extra weight was tied to potato chips, potatoes, sugary beverages, and red meat. Supertasty potato chips had become a leading cause of death.

• • •

The potato was once the quintessential humble cuisine. Like the chili pepper, it is descended from wild ancestors in the Andean highlands (and also belongs to the nightshade family,
Solanaceae
). Wild potatoes are knobby and bitter, yet early Americans recognized they packed a lot of nutrition into a small space and began to cultivate them. The Incas developed sophisticated systems for growing, storing, and preserving their potatoes. They used a series of steps to neutralize the roots' bitterness, which is caused by a pair of alkaloids, solanine and tomatine. Frozen at night and dried in the sun, spuds were trampled and then soaked to remove the skins and soften the flesh, and finally sun-dried one last time. The resulting cakey substance,
chuño
, could be stored for months and transported easily. It's still made today. Chilies were often used to flavor it.

When the Spanish brought potatoes to Europe in the 1500s following the conquest of the Inca, their bitter taste put people off. But the nutritional advantages ultimately proved too great to resist. Facing wars and revolution in the eighteenth century, the French embraced the potato after a pharmacist named Antoine-Augustin Parmentier subsisted on them during several stints as a prisoner held by the Prussians in Germany during the Seven Years War. When freed, he promoted the potato as the ideal solution to Europe's repeated famines. Marie Antoinette appeared in public wearing a garland of potato flowers in her hair; her husband, King Louis XVI, wore them as boutonnieres. The potato fueled a century of European population growth—though over-reliance on it brought disaster to Ireland in the nineteenth-century potato famine.

The potato chip is an American invention. Its exact origins are cloudy; the most famous story suggests it was born
at the Moon Lake Lodge in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1853, when a diner found his side dish of fried potatoes soggy. He sent them back to the kitchen. The chef, George Crum, made more, but the dish was rejected again. Crum did not appreciate being second-guessed. He thinly sliced some potatoes, threw them in the frier, and sent the browned, crisped, salted chips back out to his guest: the culinary equivalent of sarcasm. The dish was also delicious, and word spread. Soon chips were sold everywhere, from barrels in grocery stores and from horse-drawn carts. By the early twentieth century potato chip factories dotted the eastern United States. Most of them had begun as mom-and-pop operations like Joe Murphy's Irish one, hatched in somebody's back room, garage, or barn.

Combining the bland, white potato with boiling oil and salt had turned it into something quite different. Potato chips are innately gratifying knots of energy. Starches, fats, and salt have a synergy more powerful than that of umami: they give a powerful rush to the brain's pleasure centers, sparking delight and craving in equal measure. Their satisfying crunch is a learned, Pavlovian signal of freshness and imminent deliciousness. Bite into a chip, and the brain instantly recognizes something good is at hand. This snap judgment draws on tastes and aromas. But there are more forms of flavor perception involved that science has only just begun to decode. The emerging understanding of them may require revisions to the concept of basic tastes that dates back to ancient Greece.

Though starches are tasteless, the mouth may be able to sense them unconsciously and alert the brain. A 2014 fMRI study done by scientists at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, found that volunteers who rinsed their mouths with a starch solution received a 30 percent boost in activ
ity in the visual and motor cortices over a group that rinsed with a control solution. In response to this signal of food energy, the volunteers' attention became more focused and acute. How the mouth detects it was not clear. But the tongue clearly has capabilities besides the five tastes.

Scientists once attributed the powerful allure of fatty foods to their creaminess and rich aromas, but recent research suggests that fat is actually a sixth basic taste: there are fat receptors on the tongue that trigger a unique and pleasing perception. This makes sense. Like starches and sugars, fats are essential nutrients. They metabolize into fatty acids, a major energy source for cells. When human ancestors began to eat meat, the dietary surge in fatty acids helped make brains grow larger. A mutation unique to humans assisted in this transformation by helping to burn cholesterol and cutting the risk of heart disease from fat—at least, until people began to consume so much fatty food that this advantage was neutralized.

The fat taste is a molecular waltz: one type of receptor protein acts as a kind of chaperone for fat molecules, helping them to bond with a second receptor that alerts the brain. The more of these chaperone-proteins there are on the tongue, the greater a person's sensitivity to fat, and the richer it tastes. Some people are thousands of times more sensitive to fats than others. The fat-insensitive are more likely to be obese; according to one theory, they get little pleasure from fats because they can barely detect them, and overeat to compensate. They crave fat because they cannot get enough of it. But the overstimulation only dulls the fat sense more, a vicious cycle similar to drug addiction and sugar overindulgence.

Then there's salt. All life came from the sea, and some
400 million years after the first land-based animals appeared, the sea remains with us. The nervous system's messages travel via the electrically charged salt ions in the body's tissues. Healthy blood plasma and hydration both depend on keeping up a certain salt concentration. The body fastidiously husbands its salt to maintain this balance. An overdose can fatally disrupt it. As salt rises in the bloodstream, water diffuses from tissues into the blood to equalize the concentrations. An overwhelming thirst descends, muscles weaken, and the brain shrinks. Salt deprivation also kills. The body can manage for weeks without consuming it, but when the internal supply nears total exhaustion, an insatiable craving called sodium hunger kicks in. This is another example of the amazing plasticity of taste: in dire straits, seawater becomes delicious (and drinking it in this state is not fatal). When salt-starved rats drank a solution three times as salty as seawater in Kent Berridge's lab, neurons in their hedonic hotspots fired in the same pattern as they did when the rats drank sugar water: they loved it.

The salt taste—good in small amounts, awful in large ones—is calibrated to keep the body safely between those extremes. Neuroscientist Charles Zuker of Columbia University unraveled the mystery of how these contradictory sensations work. A salt receptor detects the “just right” taste of a pinch. But a sufficient concentration will activate bitter and sour receptors, triggering a highly unpleasant fusion of these two bad tastes.

This dual identity is a fixture of both cuisine and culture. Salt's talent for enhancing flavors is unmatched, and it has been used since prehistoric times as a preservative, flavoring, and all-purpose utility ingredient. It counters bitterness, makes fats tasty, makes soups and other liquids seem
more robust, and boosts overall pleasure. A pinch of salt on baking bread catalyzes Maillard reactions, turning it golden brown. Prehistoric herders managed the movements of their livestock by handing out dabs of it, guiding animals to salt licks to keep them healthy. Sauces, salad, and sausages all derive their names from the Latin
salsus
, or “salted.” “You are the salt of the earth,” Jesus declares in the Gospel of Mark, comparing its presence to the teachings of God. An excess of salt, meanwhile, is a common symbol of barrenness and death; remember what happened to Lot's wife in the Book of Genesis. Fleeing the city of Sodom before its destruction, she ignored divine instructions telling all to not look back, and was turned into a pillar of salt.