There’s no accounting for people’s taste when it comes to food. Some like thin, greasy burgers fried on a restaurant grill. Others of us like thick, juicy burgers broiled to perfection over a fire, gas or otherwise.
Some of us love a wide variety of spices from rosemary, sage and thyme to Jamaican curry and even turmeric. On the other hand, someone I know, who will remain nameless, is repelled by virtually all but the most basic spices. Salt and pepper generally will do for this person.
I’ve just read that individual taste not only depends on what kind of taste buds you have in your tongue, but what your emotional state might be. And now, after digesting this week’s ACS PressPac, I’ve learned even more about taste: There’s something new and exciting going on with the tongue and it’s not the one inside your mouth.
The "electronic nose," which detects odors, has a companion among emerging futuristic "e-sensing" devices intended to replace abilities that once were strictly human-and-animal-only.
It is a "magnetic tongue" — a method used to "taste" food and identify ingredients that people describe as sweet, bitter, sour, etc. A report on use of the method to taste canned tomatoes appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
Antonio Randazzo, Anders Malmendal, Ettore Novellino and colleagues explain that sensing the odor and flavor of food is a very complex process. It depends not only on the combination of ingredients in the food, but also on the taster’s emotional state. Trained taste testers eliminate some of the variation, but food processors need more objective ways to measure the sensory descriptor of their products.
That’s where electronic sensing technologies, like E-noses, come into play. However, current instruments can only analyze certain food components and require very specific sample preparation. To overcome these shortcomings, Randazzo and Malmendal's team turned to nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) to test its abilities as "a magnetic tongue."
Image: iStock
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