NEW YORK, Oct 21 — The first show at the Museum of Food and Drink’s new home in Brooklyn is “Flavour: Making It and Faking It,” and it wastes no time in getting to the point.
“What makes your favourite food so delicious?” the text on a large free-standing panel near the entrance asks. The one-word answer: “Chemicals.”
The word is deflating. It’s a little like being told that the human soul has a specific atomic weight. Chemicals? Yuck.
But maybe not. Flavours come in two varieties, natural and artificial, but what do the words really mean? This is the looming question in an exhibition about food and culture that opens next Wednesday, in a museum that until now has been a free-floating idea rather than a building with an address. The show follows the history of lab-created flavours from the middle of the 19th century, when German scientists created artificial vanilla, to the present day, when the culinary spin doctors known as flavourists tweak and blend the myriad tastes found in virtually every food product on supermarket shelves.
Flavour is a complex, beguiling subject. At one of several “smell machines” throughout the exhibition, where specific aromas are emitted through silver hoses at the push of a button, visitors learn that coffee gets a little lift — the je ne sais quoi that makes it irresistible in the morning — from a sulphur compound also found in skunk spray. Tiny edible pellets distributed from gumball machines send the message in tactile form. This is an exhibition that is not just hands-on, but tongue-on and nostrils-on.
Vanilla, originally a rare and highly expensive flavour extracted from the bean of a Mexican orchid, became a standard ingredient in ordinary households when organic chemists found that they could summon forth its chemical twin, vanillin, from pine bark. Further experiments showed that it could be found in the petrochemical compound guaiacol, in clove oil, in paper waste and in rice bran.
About a decade ago, scientists discovered that the lignin in cow dung could yield vanillin, a breakthrough that food manufacturers have not exactly trumpeted. The Food and Drug Administration has taken note, however. As one of the exhibition’s wall panel explains, reassuringly, “Vanillin made in this way cannot be labelled natural, because cow dung is not considered edible.”
The point is, vanillin made in a lab is chemically identical to the vanillin produced in a vanilla bean, just as Dolly the sheep was genetically identical to the donor sheep that supplied her DNA. Another flavour component, citral, makes lemons taste lemony. The citral in lemons is chemically the same as citral derived from lemongrass and lemon myrtle, both of which are labelled “natural.”
The list goes on and on. There are thousands of lab-created flavour compounds identical to their natural counterparts, which leads to a series of existential questions and conceptual opposites embedded in the discourse here: natural versus artificial, authentic versus ersatz, pure versus adulterated.
“Flavour” ponders all of these as it guides viewers through the mysteries of the human tongue and its 10,000 taste receptors, the dark arts of the flavourists, and the chemical replication of “umami,” the Japanese concept often translated as “deliciousness,” in monosodium glutamate, or MSG.
In the end, it all comes down to flavour and aroma, both of which the exhibition offers in abundance. At stops along the way, the complexities of flavours and their infinite variants are illustrated at the strawberry smell machine, the cola smell machine, the coffee smell machine and a Wurlitzer-like console, the Smell Synth, that allows visitors to mix 19 aroma compounds in any combination. — The New York Times
