May 16, 2023
Every time we taste food, a true match happens, like in a dating app: the bond between food and flavor is like a love story.
Remember when, as children, our parents would let us have a bit of the chocolate cream they had prepared to decorate a cake? That long wait watching the ingredients blend together, change color and texture to the rhythm of a whisk, ending in a perfect balance of density and sweetness, like the instruments of an orchestra creating a melody that's hard to forget.
It is said that the first memories of living beings are linked to food. Like Marcel Proust, who only needed a few crumbs of a Madeleine dipped in a steaming cup of tea to relive his childhood and the feasts of sweets at his aunt’s house, our memory is soaked with flavors that can deeply influence our personality.
Every time we taste food, a true match happens, like in a dating app: although the example may seem strange, the bond between food and our perception of flavor is a bit like a love story. Each single ingredient is made up of many small molecules that, amid the chaos of all the other ingredients and other very similar molecules, are drawn toward their perfect match, their “soulmate.” Scientifically defined as the receptor-ligand bond, it is the mechanism through which nature has given us the ability to identify bitterness, distinguishing it from sweetness, sourness, or saltiness.
When this bond occurs, when the food molecules meet their perfect match, a message is sent to our brain that immediately identifies what we are eating and builds memories around that food. The evocation of flavors actually forms the psychological basis of appetite, the famous mouthwatering sensation, consequently setting our psychological well-being.
Like in a true love story, memories of a good experience with food, of a dish we loved, carve grooves in our brain, like rails, along which travel the sensations that precede the possibility of tasting that dish again, of reliving the same emotions as the first encounter.
There are countless studies on the chemistry of food. A very interesting and constantly studied dynamic is that between flavor and smell. Gordon Shepherd, professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Yale, argues that flavors are not in the food but are created by our brain and, more specifically, are mostly created by our olfactory system. Odor molecules carry information and stimulate our olfactory receptors, which transmit this information to the brain, translating it into images. This connection to the highest cognitive centers of the brain is a special property of smell, which is fundamental to the experience of flavor. When it comes to food, we can confidently say it’s all about the nose!
The elegant alchemy that governs how ingredients and olfactory molecules bind to their receptors resembles the relationship between script and direction in a theatrical play: a positive result comes from the perfect dynamic between shots, music, and the theatrical act, just as in a dish it comes from the balance of odors and flavors.
And, like a masterfully crafted theatrical play, we will be inclined to buy a new ticket; we will never give up lingering a few more seconds in the memories of a few crumbs of Madeleine.
