An Introduction to Gastrography
A taste language could lighten the load on our food imagination. Imagine graphing our tastes on a coordinate system from bitter, sweet, salty and sour. Four different axes and we could “quantify” every food. Then we could create a taste language. Each taste would have a value, of say 1-100. We could create a clever notation to describe different ranges. And then recipes and menus could tell us, in the proper notation, what mixes a certain dish was. Rather than choosing based on the type of food, we could choose based on the tastes - and we could dream up new food combinations that have never been tasted before.
3 Comments:
It's tough to plot a four-dimensional graph in a three-dimensional universe...
To me this is akin to creating a numeric scale to describe a piece of art. Like art, the beauty of fine food is the nuances. Maybe I just hate the idea that complex flavors could be reduced to something as cold as graph.
Did you happen to see the NY Time's year-end round-up of Ideas (12/11 issue)? In it is a description of a menu-management program that has been given extra information about qualities of food and kinds of cooking, so that it can make its own connections when you ask it for a recipe that's "Indian-ish food but soupy".
Post a Comment
<< Home