The Physiology of Taste

"I’ve chosen The Physiology of Taste by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin — a French philosopher, early physiologist, a gourmand who was fascinated by taste and eating and diet and ways of living all involving the consuming of food and drink. What I love is the particular attention to detail that allows him to focus exactly what is going on in us as tasters when we’re consuming food and drink. Most people of the day would have talked about how good or bad the food was, how well cooked it was, whether or not it came from the right place, was it of good provenance, whether you had a Bresse chicken; but in fact he’s interested in what happens to us, the experiences we have as a result as consuming food in the way we consume it. He might have been the first person — certainly in the French philosophical tradition — to notice something that has now been confirmed by science namely that what we call ‘taste’ is actually a combination of taste and smell. He has a lovely quote where he says ‘In fact, taste and smell might be part of the same apparatus. You can think of the mouth as the factory and the nose as the chimney but they’re all in the business of producing a certain range of experiences.’ Lovely metaphor! Part of the early industrial revolution, of course. Here he is writing in the early nineteenth century and he’s fascinated by how we might discover these properties of our own experience and he’s one of the first to describe something that’s now a standard view of taste in sensory science and in the food industry: e.g. if you hold your nose pinched tightly shut and you start chewing something in your mouth you get very little flavour. You’ll think it doesn’t taste of very much; you might get some saltiness or sweetness or sourness. But as soon as you let the nose go, in rush the flavours, and now you realise just how much smell is contributing. Early on in the book, he points out that this is something you can do to confirm the contribution of smell to flavour or tasting. I think it’s a dipping-in-and-out-of book because it’s not written as a high-minded treatise, but is, rather, a lovely historical account with lots of anecdotes and good examples and lots of focus on particular details. You shouldn’t read it all at once but — tapas-like — you want to dip into it and just get these nuggets out of it."

"This book used to be described as the most famous book ever written about food. Aside from being a great read – and with [American food writer] MFK Fisher’s annotations it is even more enjoyable – Brillat-Savarin actually has several chapters on the cause and prevention of obesity. He says: I spent 25 years of my life talking to 500 stout or very stout people. Invariably their favourite food is bread, potatoes or pasta. To him, it’s very obvious that what makes people fat is what we would call carbohydrate-rich foods. Sugar on top of that makes everything worse. He says that if you want to be lean, you’ve got to give up these carbohydrate foods. They’re fattening, don’t eat them and get a good night’s sleep. Maybe be a little bit more active. That was his general advice. So it’s a dissertation from a very thoughtful, erudite Frenchman about how carbohydrates are inherently fattening. That’s an observation actually made by several observers of obesity in the 19th century. They also point out that carnivores never get fat. You don’t find fat lions, you don’t find fat tigers. It’s not because these animals are particularly active, because we know that male lions, for instance, do virtually nothing. They don’t even bother to hunt – they just come along afterwards and eat as much as they want. But they still don’t get fat. Animals that live on grain and vegetable matter do get fat. They don’t get obese, which is interesting, but they have massive fat deposits. So why isn’t that true for humans also? No, it doesn’t. The problem is that there are certain strains of rats that they can make fat by giving them fat to eat. I talk about this endlessly in Good Calories, Bad Calories . The experts decide that Americans get fat by eating fat. Then they find strains of rat that get fat eating fat, then they breed those strains. And now that they have found an animal model that confirms their preconceptions they argue that the preconceptions must be true too – obviously humans get fat on fat because the rats do. Then some journalist like me comes along, and says, “What about all the other animals that get fat on grains and vegetable matter?” And they look at you and say, “Oh, you’re one of those Atkins people aren’t you?”"