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    Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat
    Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat
    Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat
    Audiobook8 hours

    Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat

    Written by John McQuaid

    Narrated by Tom Perkins

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Taste has long been considered the most basic of the five senses because its principal mission is a simple one: to discern food from everything else. Taste is a whole-body experience, and breakthroughs in genetics and microbiology are casting light not just on the experience of french fries and foie gras but the mysterious interplay of body and brain.


    Tasty explains the scientific research taking place on multiple fronts: how genes shape our tastes, how the mind assembles flavors from the five senses and signals from the body's metabolic systems, why something disgusts one person and delights another, and what today's obsessions with extreme tastes tell us about the brain.


    Brilliantly synthesizing science, ancient myth, philosophy, and literature, Tasty offers a delicious smorgasbord of where taste originated and where it's going-and why it changes by the day.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJan 13, 2015
    ISBN9781494577025
    Author

    John McQuaid

    John McQuaid is the author of Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat and his journalism has appeared in Smithsonian magazine, The Washington Post, Wired, Forbes.com, and Eating Well magazine. His science and environment reporting for The Times-Picayune anticipated Hurricane Katrina, explored the global fisheries crisis and the problems of invasive species. His work has won a Pulitzer Prize, as well as awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute for Biological Sciences, and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. McQuaid is a graduate of Yale. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife and two children.

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    Reviews for Tasty

    3.5/5

    19 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Entertaining but really light and fluffy and not going into detail on any subject.
    • 5/5
      Really interesting book! I have to admit I was a bit skeptical going in that a book about our sense of taste would be enough to keep me interested. The author does an excellent job of explaining the biological roots of taste and how much this taken for granted sense impacts our world.
    • 4/5
      “Tasty” claims itself to be a “brief biography of flavor” and indeed it is. McQuaid shows how taste was possibly the first sense to develop in life- 500 million years ago, sea anemones, who are restricted to eating whatever the water brings them, needed a way to tell food particles from non-food particles. Whoever evolved a method of doing this first had a distinct advantage over critters that didn’t have that ability. The sense of taste is not just confined to our tongues we have taste receptors in other parts of our bodies- including in our intestines. That wasn’t an image I wanted to dwell on. Speaking of tongues, that diagram they show everyone in science class, with the tongue divided into bitter, sweet, salty, and sour? It’s bogus, and they knew it was almost as soon as it was made up, but somehow it just won’t die. Also, there is a fifth flavor- umami- which is meaty and yummy and the epitome of it is monosodium glutamate. Fat *may* be a sixth flavor. Different people have different taste sensitivities. Some people are very sensitive to bitter-the author posits that they might have been able to detect poisonous foods back when humans were first learning what was safe to eat. Other people enjoy a touch of bitter, and revel in broccoli, coffee, and dark chocolate. Some have a much higher tolerance for capsaicin than others. Everyone is born liking sugar, but other food preferences are learned, like being able to tolerate that revolting (to most of us) rotten shark that is eaten in Iceland. Flavors can be perceived differently depending on things like the color of the plate the food is eaten off of. When a recipe is put together, different flavors build together to create a sensation of deliciousness that is greater than the sum of the parts. This is a very good book that covers the subject well. It’s well researched and well written. It’s written in terms that the average reader can understand but isn’t dumbed down. It touches on both the science and history of food and flavors. Interesting for both the foodie and the science buff.
    • 4/5
      A special thank you to Scribner and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. TASTY, The Art and Science of What We Eat, by John McQuaid, is an exploration of taste, mysteries of flavor, senses, and a blend of culinary history from our ancestors to today’s “foodie” revolution. Taste is often dismissed as the most primitive of the senses, yet it’s really the most complex and subtle sense of them all. The author explores flavor and where it came from and where it is going. Readers learn taste is a whole body experience, and breakthroughs in genetics and microbiology are casting light not only on the experience of French fries and foie gras, but on the mysterious interplay of body, brain, and mind. Reporting from kitchens, supermarkets, farms, restaurants, food corporations, and science labs, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John McQuaid tells the story of the still emerging concept of flavor and how our sense of taste will evolve in the coming decades. The author also explores how deliberate manipulation of flavor influences virtually every aspect of the human experience. I am very fascinated by foods, as have severe allergic reactions to many foods, additives and preservatives, so on a very strict diet. To the point, I am unable to drink wine, eat sugars, no processed foods, no meats, or gluten, or dairy; a strict vegan. In addition, am unable to dine out due to the preservatives in foods, highly sensitive to chemicals and allergic to most medications. Was very intrigued, unlike smell, the sense of taste is less emotional than existential. The author compares the unity of taste and smell in flavor is like a good marriage. The differences are profound, but each partner has complementary strengths and weaknesses. Flavor is only one in its array of sophisticated cognitive responsibilities, which include decision making. It’s the brain’s food critic, connecting to areas governing emotions and judgment, and anatomically structured to process pleasure and aversion. Some of this may explain our tendency to rank favorite or most-hated foods; our brains are literally organized this way. From flavor cultures, the tongue, the birth of flavor, to seduction, flavor sits at the intersection of all the sciences. “It is driven more by forces outside kitchens than in, but chefs and artisans do have one thing working for them: the mystery at the heart of flavor has never truly been cracked. Science has still not explained how flavor can encompass the whole range of human experience—pleasure, joy, disgust, pain, memory—continually hammering these into something new with each new dish, each sip.” A very informative book and analysis of food production, DNA, flavor manipulations, and how such motivators and chemicals affect the brain and body, as well as our overall health.