A Table Full of Weird Science
Taste takes a beating.
The first memory of tasting something exquisite involved a piece of suet. I was around five and surely couldn’t have known what I was reaching for. Maybe it was because my sister and dad were tusseling over who would get the largest, crispier pieces. While they argued I popped a bit into my mouth. It melted on my tongue, its flavor becoming a mighty touchstone ever after for pleasure food and cooking gives us.
The grapes are almost ripe. When I try them at the first dawn, they're cold, bedewed and elastic, spurting sweet juice as you bite into them.—Colette, Claudine a I'Ecole, 1900.
Taste, like it’s four sister senses, is always surprising, universally central to our lives yet private in its effect.
Giuseppe, though, has other ideas about exactly what taste is. In many ways it may diminish the glorious power of flavor to surprise and delight us.
Giuseppe is the AI spawn of the Chilean-base company NotCo, named in honor of the artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, famous for creating portraits arranged from all manners of flora and books instead of flesh and blood.
NotCo’s aim with Giuseppe is a noble one: to reduce, if not elimanate, the environmental impact of raising livestock by surplanting animals with plant-based food. In the process, the company also foresees it as defeating world hunger.
Guiseppe is fed recipes that it then combs through to break down the molecular structure of their ingredients. It searches for plants with similar structures that will replicate the characteristics of their flavors, consistency, and look. Then it reinvents the recipe by exchanging its ingredients with plants. Many, many hundreds of trials later a team of chefs and NotCo employees check out the results before agreeing on the exact clone of the original recipe.
One example from the company’s website is discovering that pineapple and cabbage share the same tiny atoms as diary. Mix the two together and there you have it—the possibility of ships full of nutitious milk sailing around the world to every country.
In all the bad press about AI, Guiseppe is being heralded as one of the good guys, one that truly has the potential to benefit mankind.
Here’s the rub, though. Giuseppe is designed around a theory that taste is not an indidivual sense. Instead, it is a bi-product of scent which conjures an emotional connection that then triggers our brain to associate it with a remembered taste. For instance, going back to my suet, the taste of it was not due to lusciousness of fat nor the complicated mixture of herbs burnt into it. Rather my taste was a response to its fragrance and emotions drawn from a child wrapped in the warmth of the family kitchen.
Many people don’t realize that when we eat, much of the ‘taste’ is actually coming from smells and aromas.—Matias Muchnick, Co-founder & CEO of NotCo.
This is what differentiates NotCo from other plant-based food companies which strive to mimic the original taste of their produces by relying heavily on a concrete ingredient—fats. Coconut was a favorite but because it burned too easily, sunflower is favored. Human psychology isn’t even a glimmer in the eyes of NotCo’s competitors.
Since it’s founding in 2015, NotCo has become one of the fastest growing plant-based company. Their current offerings of milk, burger meat, and chicken nuggets are carried in stores. Whole Foods seems to be the biggest source. In the last few years they have begun to collaborate with the Kraft Heinz company for many of their products, including Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Shake Shack is their latest partner. They’re beginning to roll out at select store frozen chocolate custard and hamburgers.
Always game, I spent the last five days on a mission to see for myself (and you) if NotCo will hook into my emotional connections and change my taste life. There was one handicap: I don’t have much of a comparison resource with other brands since I’ve only eated plant-base food on rare occassions and except to fill my stomach nothing else was around. That being said, I strived to be open-minded. I was also hungry.
NotCo’s site indicated the markets where I would find its milk and meat. Shake Shack gave a map of locations around the city serving the chocolate custard and burgers. The Whole Foods by me had both whole and chocolate milk but didn’t carry the meat. Unfortunately none of the Manhattan and Brooklyn Shake Shacks indicated on their website panned out. I tried to buy the meat on Amazon but they were sold out and weren’t sure it would ever be available.
So that left me with the milk: According to Giuseppe’s algorithm the slight tinge of pineapple and cabbage substitutes should have brought back the long ago afterschool taste of the glass I poured to accompany the cookies after coming home from grade school. It was certainly sweet and pleasing but it brought up the memory of my mom’s glazed ham and cabbage side dish. The chocolate milk looked very enticing, a smooth pleasing drink, but smelled of nothing, especially chocolate. I guess that was why I didn’t care if I ever had a glass of NotCo chocolate milk again.
The one question for NotCo that the company doesn’t mentioned and which lingers in my mind is, if they succeed in their mission where will all the cows, pigs, and chickens go? Where will they live out their natural life and wouldn’t the considerable environmental damage they create by being living creatures continue to exist?
Giuseppe doesn’t seem to consider that which leads to the other question of whether NotCo has really thought through the well-fare of animals.