You May Also Like (32 page)

Gillette had cautioned me that sensory experts were people whom “you didn't want to go to lunch with.” And yet there we were, in a McCormick canteen, eating udon noodles with katzu and oregano, among other flavor-forward delicacies. As a trained panelist, she said, “you're really sensitive to aging and oil. An oil starts to go bad after a little bit; the consumer will be happily eating something that we would consider rancid, and wouldn't even notice it.” Aldredge told me she will suddenly stop eating during a meal. “Your friends are like, ‘Why did you stop eating?' You say, ‘I really don't want to talk about it.' And then they're really interested.”

The golden-tongued gourmet, or the flavoring industry “nose,” with superhuman powers to divine dozens of discrete compounds lurking in things that to us seem an undifferentiated mass, has long been an alluring cultural figure. Brillat-Savarin, in
The Physiology of Taste
, talks of the “
gourmands of Rome” who “could tell by the flavor whether fish
was caught between the city bridges or lower down the river.” In
Don Quixote
, Sancho Panza—himself possessing a “great natural instinct in judging wines,” virtually a heritable trait in his family—tells a story of two of his relatives, challenged by villagers to describe the characteristics of a cask of wine: “The one tried it with the tip of his tongue, the other only smelled it; the first said the wine tasted of iron; the second said, it had rather a taste of goat's leather.” The vintner protested his cask was clean. When it came time to empty the cask, a small key, with a small leather thong attached, came tumbling out.

But we should be wary of people reeling off ornate wine or coffee descriptions: Our ability to correctly identify particular odors in a complex, blended mixture, for example, begins to hit a “ceiling” at three. Beyond that, tests have shown, people become worse than chance at picking out correct aromas.

As for that “great natural instinct” of Sancho Panza, talk to sensory experts, and they will dismiss the idea of innate talent. As an aspirant master sommelier said in the 2013 documentary
Somm
, “A great samurai sword maker is someone who had a teacher. We think about this with wine and think that someone must be a natural. But we never think that someone is just a natural at making swords.” “Honestly,” Aldredge confessed, “I don't think I can taste better. I just know what I'm tasting and can describe it.” Surely, there are individual differences in sensitivity, which often come into play on the panels. Tasters also need basic levels of ability, like being able to pass a “triangle test”; that is, which of these three things is not like the other two? But the real key to becoming an expert taster is not being born with a gifted tongue.

The secret—and it is no secret—is those things we have already discussed with our other experts. First, practice: McCormick's experts have roughly 150 hours of training before they get onto a panel. A sample question they are asked before being accepted is, “Are you willing to eat safe but unpleasant foods?”
The importance of practice, versus some unwavering innate ability, has been shown in a number of studies in which experts, trained on one set of stimuli, are then given a new set. They do not do as well identifying and matching the new flavors. Or they simply transfer terms they know from another set, even when inappropriate.

Second, memory: To know that a pretzel has a roughly Ritz cracker–like “persistence of crisp” requires remembering the crispiness of a Ritz
cracker. To say a carrot has a hay-like flavor aromatic means remembering the smell of hay.
Studies comparing expert with novice wine tasters have generally found that what experts are best at is not the
absolute detection
of odors in wines but the
recognition
of odors in wines. When the odors were unfamiliar, experts and novices did almost equally well at detecting their presence.

Perhaps most important, there is language. Going back to John Locke, you could not use words to adequately understand how a pineapple tastes if you had never had one. Once you actually tasted the pineapple, however, language could help you unlock what you were actually tasting. Tasters sometimes talk about a kind of feedback loop in which the more you taste, the more words you come up with, which then unlocks more flavors. How much of the flavor of mint comes from the word “minty” itself?

Language and memory are inexorably intertwined when it comes to taste expertise. An Australian study tested wine experts and novices on their ability to recall lists of wine words that “provided a consistent description of a variety of wine.” They were given sets of cards with typical sensory descriptors for wines (alas, they were not offered the actual wines). The Riesling, for example, had a “mineral and lime” palate, a “crisp with flowers” nose. Then the subjects were given shuffled sets of sensory words, which no longer seemed to describe any one wine. The experts were actually able to recall
fewer
wine words than novices when the words were shuffled,
much as a chess expert's superior memory for chess positions seems to evaporate when the pieces are random—not the familiar patterns seen in thousands of games.

Wine experts and sommeliers internalize a certain way of talking about wine, generally based on a “taste grid” that lists a wine's qualities in a very particular order—not unlike the familiar strategies employed by a chess master. The
ordering
of these words becomes so dominant in memory that the words themselves, when encountered outside those familiar combinations, become less memorable. In any case, the words are as important as tasting itself.

We might think of a wine-tasting panel as a group of people sitting around, sniffing and aspirating their way through wines, then trying to summon the mysterious secrets lurking within through colorful language. What is usually happening is rather the opposite.
Wine experts first consider a wine's category (for example, New Zealand sauvignon
blanc), summon a prototypical version of that wine, then look for things in the wine that match their memory of the prototype. It is far easier to recognize, say, the aroma of wine when one has a sense of what one is looking for. As the psychologist Sylvie Chollet and colleagues note, “
think and sniff” is a better strategy for correctly identifying odors than “sniff and think.”

Wine experts think
so
prototypically, in fact, that when you tamper with wine in interesting ways, it can backfire. When the sensory scientist Rose Marie Pangborn added flavorless red food coloring to white wine, it was wine experts—not novices—who suddenly declared it sweeter. “
Possibly,” noted Pangborn, “through their familiarity with sweet rosé wines.”
The wine experts' knowledge colored their taste, just as the substance colored the wine.

Maybe we want to ascribe natural talent to expert tasters because of the trouble we have, in tasting the very same products, “seeing” the things they are seeing. As the professor of philosophy Barry Smith notes, this discrepancy invites a dilemma: “
Either the aromas and flavours of a wine are there for all to recognize, or there are flavours and aromas available only to those who enjoy particular taste sensations, who have special sensory equipment, as it were.” By now, it should be clear that the answer is largely the former. Taste is less a gift than an outcome.
It is less what you have than what you do with it.

Most of us do not do so much with it. In general, we skim across the surface of the sensory world, and taste is no different.
The “acoustic ecologist” Murray Schafer once observed that to really hear, you needed to retrain the way your brain processed sound. His suggested training exercises ranged from closing one's eyes to help purge distractions to trying to craft an “onomatopoeic” name for a sound (an echo here of using language to try to describe flavors). But we typically consume food or drink with any number of distractions, with little or no language for what is going on in our mouths. Most of what we learn and remember about that food is “incidental,” often beneath consciousness.

Samuel Renshaw, an Ohio State University psychologist, was known for creating a training system to help American soldiers during World War II more readily recognize enemy planes and ships. But he also worked with a distillery to improve its tasters' ability to detect variations in its products. Renshaw argued that most of us manage, in daily life, something “
on the order of twenty percentile utilization of
the sense modalities.” Do we have a hidden reserve of discriminatory abilities, waiting to be deployed with the right training or under the right conditions?

In a fascinating Dutch study, subjects were asked to pick out the 1.4-percent-fat milk they usually favored from a sample of five milks with varying fat content. Few could do it reliably; all options seemed similar to their “own” milk. But when a different group was given the same milk, and this time asked to pick out their authentic “Dutch” milk from a group of what they were told were cheaper, lower-quality foreign imports, panelists suddenly became much better at choosing the 1.4 percent milk. People were suddenly
motivated
to detect differences (
How dare you replace my milk with this cheap foreign stuff!
).
This emotional response “unlocked” implicit preferences that were there all along. The implication of this experiment is that our very own preferences are often hidden from us (
We are strangers to our taste
) and that simply asking us what we like may provide hardly a clue.

As I was talking over the sensory attributes of pretzels with the experts at McCormick, my attention somehow drifted to a can of Dr Pepper, one of a number of drinks offered on a nearby table. Like Locke with his pineapple, I realized that I did not have a good sense of what the flavor of Dr Pepper was, nor, admittedly, had I invested much thought in it. My thought was that it tastes “like Dr Pepper.” How would I describe its various qualities to someone who had never had one? Clearly, the company uses this epistemological murk to its advantage, prominently advertising “23 flavors” right on the can. This invokes an appetizing mystery: What could those flavors be? Surely 23 is better than 11!

That mystery indeed informs the heritage of the brand. In the 1960s, the perception of Dr Pepper, notes Joseph Plummer, was riddled with misconceptions: It was medicinal or made from prune juice. But the company was able to turn the eccentricities of this brown not-tasting-of-cola drink into strengths.
By the early 1970s, it was the country's fourth most popular soft drink. Not being able to identify a precise flavor can actually be a strength. As Howard Moskowitz had suggested to me, part of the popularity of Coca-Cola versus, say, an orange soda is its more complex flavor blend. Consumers tire of it less quickly than of an orange soda, which has a simpler, more recognizable
profile (which might be “easier to like” on the first go-round). The more you can identify any one flavor, Moskowitz said, the more it sits in memory and thus is easier to remember.

As it happens, I am agnostic on Dr Pepper. It is not something I generally seek out, nor is it something I would reflexively avoid. Whatever my level of liking, it is a feeling for the thing
as a whole
, instead of an analytical distribution of various sensory and trigeminal attributes. My feelings may be partially informed by exposure. Dr Pepper has a southern regional identity, and not having been raised in the South, I have not had as many chances to consume it. But could it be a lack of appreciation as well? If I knew more about Dr Pepper, would I like it more?

It occurred to me: What better time than sitting with a bunch of sensory experts to have a taste test? “Let's train Tom on the aromatics of Dr Pepper,” Gillette announced. I bring the glass to my nose. “What does it smell like to you?” Ridgway asked. “If you can't describe it, what does it remind you of?” There was something, but it evaded me. I could almost
feel
some frustrated synapse waiting to be fired that would connect my sensory machinery to my memory. Gillette, sensing my struggle, put her nose to the glass. “I smell something that isn't a beverage. It's something that I love to eat for dessert.” An image shimmered at the edge of my mind. “It's always tough when you don't have the language first,” Ridgway said, consoling me. Gillette gently asked me if she could help. “It reminds me of burgundy cherry ice cream. The vanillin, the creamy note, the black cherries.”

It was as if a door had been opened. I smelled it again, and there it was, hanging like a sign right in front of me; how could I have missed it? I clearly knew the smell; this was no Lockean pineapple. Did I have some memory of what I thought it was, and did it take that terminology to bring forth the memory?
Odor is famously talked about as a strongly evocative triggering mechanism for memory (particularly when the smell is unpleasant). But what triggers the memory for odors?

Science is rather divided on whether words (that is, “semantic mediation”) are essential in triggering odor memories or whether smell memory fundamentally works on its own. Regardless, it struck me as curious that I could be having this clear sensation, smelling Dr Pepper, knowing that it was not Coca-Cola or 7UP but not really knowing what it was. How much of life itself comprises this sensory sleepwalking,
these subconscious perceptions? How different is this sensation from hearing a piece of music from an unrecognizable genre or not being able to make out something in the distance with our eyes?

Paying too much attention could drive you crazy, I thought as we compared tasting notes. “I thought it was pruney,” Aldredge said. Someone else countered, “I went nonfood—mulch.” “Ah!” Gillette said, eyebrows raised. “There are some earthy notes,” Aldredge said. “It's woody.” A bit sheepishly, I proffered, “Some clove?” “Maybe,” Ridgway responded evenly. In any case, no one in the room was going to nail all twenty-three flavors; remember the finding that people begin to peak after identifying three compounds. We were talking about flavor, using language to unlock our senses, forging new memories—and thus future tastes—in the process. As Gillette told me, “
You will never experience Dr Pepper the same way again.”