"Foodies rejoice! Malcolm Gladwell's favorite food inventor offers a guide to the senses with advice on how to develop your palate and better enjoy the pleasures of eating. Featured by Malcolm Gladwell in a New Yorker magazine article about the quest to develop the perfect cookie, Barb Stuckey is the food developer that famed foodies--such as Michael Pollan--turn to when they need to understand the pyschology and physiology of taste. In Taste What You're Missing, Stuckey shares her professional knowledge in an engaging style that's one part Mary Roach, two parts Oliver Sacks, and a dash of Anthony Bourdain for spice.Taste What You're Missing serves up stories: seared, sauced, and garnished with humor and insight into our complicated experiences with food.…
"I would say Taste What You’re Missing is a much needed user manual on our own senses. Barb Stuckey is a food inventor who works for the lab Mattson, which creates potato chips and cookies and condiments for different food manufacturers. This book is a very science -heavy approach to the care, keeping and savouring of your senses. “We are really multisensory creatures, so all of our senses are acting on the others” It has everything from exercises that you can do to understand retro-nasal olfaction or become attuned to acidity on your tongue, to these explanations of why we perceive the world the way that we do. Going back to what we were talking about before, I think she does a very good job of diving into how we are really multisensory creatures, so all of our senses are acting on the others. I think the payoff of the book is instantaneous. Both, for sure. I think that the senses are our filter of the world. Stuckey’s book makes us understand the limitations and potential of those filters, so we can understand how we can get more out of life, why we pick up on what we pick up on, and how we are biased and influenced in ways that we don’t realise. I would say this is the manual on our senses that we always needed but may never have taken the time to read."
