In his lecture Primitive X Modern, Chef Alex Atala questioned our cultural interpretations of what is “edible” or “delicious” by feeding us Amazonian ants. It turns out that insects aren’t the only controversial “food” in the culinary world—Smithsonian Magazine uncovers an unexpected ingredient in beer, while NPR explores the world of in vitro (i.e. test tube) meat. Read more
Primitive X Modern: Cultural Interpretations of Flavors
Featuring Alex Atala
April 17, 2013
Chef Alex Atala joined Science & Food to discuss his approach to food, how his cooking has been impacted by science, and how cooking is fundamentally tied to larger issues of natural conservancy and humanitarianism. Atala is renowned for pioneering regional cuisine using indigenous Brazilian ingredients and works closely with anthropologists and scientists to discover and classify new foods from the Amazonian region. Watch the entire lecture or check out some of the shorter highlights below.
On creativity, innovation, and a vegetarian tasting menu
“For me as a chef creativity is something very, very, very important. In my personal perspective or professional perspective, creativity is not to do something that no one has done before. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s to do something that everybody does in an unexpected way. This is creativity. I make food, I don’t make miracles . . . It is almost impossible to make something new. It is possible to make something unexpected.”
On black rice and helping local producers thrive
Atala tells the story of a small rice producer in Brazil who, unable to compete with big agribusiness, turned away from traditional white rice and started growing black rice. At the time, black rice was thought to be “diseased,” and many laughed at the producer for growing such an undesirable commodity. But Atala disagreed – he met the producer, tried the black rice, and started cooking with it. He began sharing with other chefs and showing it to the media. By embracing black rice and using it in a new way, Atala was able to change the producer’s life.
“Sometimes creativity is not doing something that no one has done before, it’s doing something that you’ve known for your entire life in an unexpected way.”
On tucupi and making poisonous plants edible
Tucupi is a traditional Brazilian sauce prepared from lightly fermented manioc juice. Because yellow manioc contains high levels of poisonous hydrogen cyanide, it must be boiled for an entire day to make it safe to consume.
“In Brazil, we have manioc, yucca, it’s very important for us. We have two families: the white one who is friendly and the yellow one who is poisonous. Natives prefer the poison one . . . it tastes better.”
On mandioca and the challenge of being simple
“Being simple is a challenge for a chef, because being simple is not easy. It’s so complex. Having one dish with three ingredients is a huge challenge for a chef.”
On cultural interpretations and eating insects
“I was very deep in Amazonas, and I went to a tribe, and an old lady gave me a small sauce with a few ants inside . . . and I tasted it and said ‘Wow, beautiful. What herb do you put in here?’ And she looked at me and said, ‘Ants.’ . . . There’s this beautiful taste . . . cardamom, lemongrass, ginger. We didn’t have these flavors in Amazonas . . . I went back to Amazonas with my lemongrass, my ginger, and I made the same sauce, and I gave it to her to taste. And she tasted it: ‘tastes like ants!’”
On priprioca and discovering new ingredients
Atala has worked with scientists in the cosmetics industry to analyze the components of priprioca and evaluate its safety as an edible ingredient. He hopes that Amazonian natives will soon be allowed to produce and sell priprioca essence to restaurants and food companies.
“I was in the lab working, and I look at the analysis of priprioca, and I say ‘maybe this can be edible.’ … [we] put it in a chromatographer and made the analysis, and there are no alkaloids and no representative toxic levels . . . So we started to use it.”
On our relationship with food
“My prep doesn’t start in my kitchen, it starts with natural conservation. It’s clear protecting the river, the sea, the lands, the fields, the forests—but we can forget a natural being, called a human being. People from the forest, from the sea, from the lands, from the fields must be supported as well. Our relation with food must be reviewed.”
If you’ve ever wanted to take a class at Harvard, here’s your chance! Harvard is offering an online EdX version of its popular course “SPU27x: Science and Cooking – From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Physics.” Class starts October 8th and registration for the course is FREE.
During each week of the course, Ferran Adrià and other top chefs will reveal the secrets of some of their most famous culinary creations—often right in their own restaurants. Alongside this cooking mastery, the Harvard instructors will explain the science behind the recipe. Other guest instructors include David Chang, Wylie Dufresne, Dave Arnold, and Harold McGee.
Last month, the third installment of MAD took place in Copenhagen, Denmark. MAD—Danish for “food”—is an annual symposium that brings together world renowned chefs, scientists, writers, and other notable luminaries to discuss and share stories about all things food-related. Hosted by Rene Redzepi and the MAD and noma team and co-curated by Momofuku’s David Chang and Lucky Peach magazine, this year’s symposium focused on “guts,” both in a literal and metaphorical sense. Here are ten things (among many!) we learned from our visit to MAD 2013: Read more
It turns out that giving fruits and veggies a good night’s sleep isn’t the only way to make them better to eat. Researchers at Texas A&M have shown that carrots produce more antioxidants in response to the “stress” of being chopped or shredded, while scientists at the University of Florida are working hard to make a tastier and more nutritious tomato. Read more
Beauty rest isn’t just for people—cabbages also benefit from a good night’s sleep. (photobear/Flickr)
In 400 BCE, the Greek admiral Androsthenes wrote* of a tree that
“opens together with the rising sun . . . and closes for the night. And the country-dwellers say that it goes to sleep.”
Over the next 2000 years, researchers discovered that the daily cycles first observed by Androsthenes fall into 24-hour periods similar to our own cycles of waking and sleeping [1]. In plants, these circadian rhythms help control everything from the time a plant flowers to its ability to adapt to cold weather [2]. Plants can even use their internal clocks to do arithmetic calculations to budget their energy supplies through the night [3].
But what happens when part of a plant is harvested for food? In a recent study, researchers at Rice University and UC Davis showed that cabbages can exhibit circadian rhythms as long as a week after harvest.
As with any plant, cabbages experience circadian rhythms while growing out in the field; however, cabbages stuck in the constant dark of a delivery truck or light of a 24-hour grocery store will inevitably lose their sense of time. Like travelers adjusting to a new time zone, cabbages deprived of cyclic light conditions suffer a severe bout of veggie jet lag. And just as travelers overcome jet lag by readjusting their sleep cycles, cabbages can “re-entrain” their circadian rhythms by being exposed to cyclic light conditions. This also works with spinach, zucchini, sweet potato, carrots, and blueberries, suggesting that post-harvest circadian rhythms are a general characteristic of many, if not all, fruits and vegetables.
The ability to re-entrain circadian rhythms in produce presents an intriguing new way to improve the palatability and even nutrition of our fruits and vegetables. In the wild, circadian rhythms can help plants defend themselves against hungry herbivores. The researchers showed that cabbages with re-entrained circadian rhythms use a similar mechanism to avoid becoming an afternoon snack for plant-eating larvae—with less damage from hungry larvae, re-entrained cabbages appear fresher and tastier than cabbages kept under constant light or dark conditions.
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| Circadian rhythms help protect produce from herbivores. Samples from cabbages kept in (A) cyclic “in phase” light, (B) constant light, or (C) constant dark conditions were fed to larvae. Cabbages kept in constant light or constant dark sustained the most damage. |
Cabbages fight off larvae and other pests thanks to molecules called glucosinolates. Any cabbage can produce these molecules, but re-entrained cabbages produce glucosinolates in sync with their circadian rhythms. Because larvae also experience circadian rhythms, re-entrained cabbages get an extra boost of molecular larvae-fighting power just when they need it the most.
While glucosinolates are bad news for larvae, they have valuable anti-cancer properties when consumed by humans. In fact, the very molecules that plants create to defend themselves against their environment are often beneficial for our own health. Future research will show whether such phytonutrients in other types of produce can also be reconditioned to accumulate in predictable 24-hour cycles. Taking advantage of circadian rhythms in fresh produce could then give us more control over the way phytonutrients accumulate over time, helping us maximize the nutritional benefits of our fruits and vegetables. Improving the nutrition of our food could be as simple as giving our produce a good night’s sleep.
*The original Greek passage comes from Botanische forschungen des Alexanderzuges [4] with a very special thank you to Tovah Keynton for the English translation. The drawings (also from Botanische) depict the tree leaves transitioning into and then assuming their “sleeping position.”
References Cited
About the author: Liz Roth-Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in Molecular Biology at UCLA. If she’s not in the lab, you can usually find her experimenting in the kitchen.
Author Jo Robinson explores the agricultural history of phytonutrients, while Harvard researchers move us a step closer toward understanding how the resveratrol in red wine and chocolate could be hindering the aging process. Read more
Rachel Dutton is a Bauer fellow at Harvard University where she uses cheese to study microbial ecosystems. She has collaborated with chefs David Chang and Dan Felder of Momofuku, and her research has been featured in Lucky Peach Magazine, The Boston Globe, NPR, The New York Times, and on the PBS TV series Mind of a Chef.
Have you ever been offered a fancy cheese that smelled more like a used gym sock than something edible? Odor artist Sissel Tolaas and researcher Christina Agapakis took this idea and ran with it, with their project Synthetic Aesthetics. The duo used bacteria isolated from human hands, feet, noses, and armpits to generate cheese!
Many cheeses, like beer, wine, and yogurt, are the product of fermentation. Fermentation occurs when microorganisms such as yeast and bacteria convert carbohydrates such as sugar into alcohols, gasses, and acids to generate energy in the absence of oxygen. One common cheese-making type of bacterium, Lactobacillus, breaks down lactose, the primary milk sugar, to lactic acid. This results in lowering the pH of the milk, which as pointed out in a previous post, causes coagulation and solidification into cheese. The work of microorganisms in cheese also results in the creation of many other byproducts that give cheeses their unique smell, texture, and flavor profiles. For example, the bacterium, Propionibacterium freudenreichii, generates carbon dioxide gas in the process of making swiss cheese and causes its characteristic holes [1]. Penicillium roqueforti, which is related to the fungus that helps produce the antibiotic, penicillin, gives blue cheese it’s distinct aroma and look [1].
Microorganisms that use fermentation are found everywhere. Tolaas and Agapakis realized that the human body shared many characteristics with the environments for creating cheese. On a hot day or before a hot date, your armpits may be just as warm and moist as an industrial cheese incubator. Furthermore, cheese-making bacteria like Lactobacillus are common inhabitants in the mammalian gut [1]. With this information, they isolated bacteria from hands, feet, noses, and armpits and added them to whole milk to serve as starter cultures.
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| Figure 1. (A) Swabs from various human body parts incubating in raw milk. (B) Cheeses after solidifying. While no cheeses were consumed, they were evaluated with an odor survey and by DNA sequencing to identify the bacteria cultures present in each cheese. |
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| Figure 2. Samples prepped for the smell survey. Participants of the survey were asked to smell the samples and provide a description of the odors they detected. |
Here are the results:
| Source | Bacteria | Isolated Odors |
| Hand-1 | Providencia vermicola Morganella morganii Proteus mirabilis |
yeast, ocean salt, sour old cheese, feet |
| Foot-1 | Providencia vermicola Morganella morganii Proteus mirabilis |
sweat, big toe nail, cat feet, sweet, milky, orange juice in the fridge too long, fungus, buttery cheese, soapy, light perfume |
| Armpit-1 | Providencia vermicola Morganella morganii Proteus mirabilis |
Feta cheese, Turkish shop, nutty, fruity, fishy |
| Nose-2 | Providencia vermicola Morganella morganii Proteus mirabilis |
cheesy feet, cow, cheese factory, old subway station, toilet cleaner |
| Armpit-2 | Enterococcus faecalis Hafnia alvei |
neutral, perfumed, industrial, synthetic, fermentation, car pollution, burning, sharp, chemical |
| Armpit-3 | Micobacterium lactium Enterococcus faecalis Bacillus pumilus Bacillus clausii |
neutral, sour, floral, smooth, yogurt |
| Foot-5 | Providencia vermicola Proteus mirabilis |
yeast, jam, feet, putrid, sour, rotten |
| Armpit-4 | Enterococcus faecalis | yogurt, sour, fresh cream, butter, whey |
The cheeses displayed a diverse range of bacterial species and odors. Interestingly while some cheeses smelled like “old subway station” or “cat feet,” others exuded the familiar & appetizing flavors of “yogurt,” “feta cheese,” and “light perfume.” Furthermore, some of the bacteria isolated were common to various cheeses. For example, Enterococcus faecalis is a lactic acid bacterium found in raw milk and cheeses, like farmhouse cheddar varieties [2]. Proteus mirabilis is related to Proteus vulgaris, which is responsible for giving surface-ripened cheeses like Limburger and Munster a strong aroma [3].
While these bacterial cultures may not serve as the basis of a new type of artisan cheese, Agapakis notes:
“These cheeses are scientific as well as artistic objects, challenging us to rethink our relationship with our bacteria and with our biotechnology. . . . The cross-over between bacteria found on cheese and on human skin offers a tantalizing hint at how our bacterial symbiotes have come to be part of our culinary cultures.”
In the face of diminishing resources, we are reminded that untapped reservoirs, which may be literally under our noses, might contain hidden treasures that could change the way we generate and produce food.
Online Resources
References cited
About the author: Vince C Reyes earned his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at UCLA. Vince loves to explore the deliciousness of all things edible.
A science and food geek, Jeff Potter is the author of Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food, which the Washington Post called “one of the most useful books on understanding cooking.” He can be seen on TV engineering the world’s largest donut and is currently obsessed with the science of beverages. Check out more of Jeff’s food geekery at www.jeffpotter.org.
photo by John Zich, courtesy of www.zrimages.com | www.jeffpotter.org