Nicola Twilley, writing for MSN, from a story titled: “Hold the Sugar: An Interview with Food Scientist Beverly Tepper on Genetics, Taste, and Bitter-Blockers”
“”Food design” can mean very different things, depending on whom you ask. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve heard from a design critic, a corporate giant, a Jell-O entrpreneur, and a pair of design provocateurs about the possibilities and pitfalls of redesigning our food—and between them the conversation has ranged from the impossibility of inventing new pasta shapes to the need to rethink agricultural subsidies, and from DIY digestive system hacks to flavor-changing chewing gum.
The food scientist Beverly Tepper is director of the Sensory Evaluation Laboratory at Rutgers University. Her research combines nutritional science and psychology with the genetics of taste perception in order to better understand the links between flavor, diet, and health. We talked about some of the innovations she thinks will reshape our food in the coming years, where food scientists have gone wrong in the past, and what she thinks of molecular gastronomy.
GOOD: What kinds of things do you work on?
Beverly Tepper: At the moment, I’m working with a food ingredient company and we’re looking at some new types of flavors, but I can’t talk about them until we publish our research.
One of my past projects, which I can talk about, was looking into a compound that was intended to be a bitter-blocker. The notion behind the research is that if we could understand how bitter taste is perceived by receptors on the tongue, maybe we could put something in bitter food that interfered with that perception. That way we could decrease the perceived bitterness and reduce added sugar without actually making any changes to the actual compound that’s responsible for the taste. We tested several different kinds of compounds and molecules that taste bitter, and we were able to show a nice effect in caffeine.
In terms of possible real-world applications, there’s a certain chain whose coffee is known to be quite bitter. I’m not going to name any names, and many people like their coffee, but a lot of others complain that it’s too bitter. If the chain added this compound to their coffee, some people would still add sugar, but maybe they wouldn’t have to add as much as they did previously because they wouldn’t perceive the bitter taste.
Now, I don’t know if this specific compound will make it to market—probably not. But a couple of different companies are testing different kinds of bitter blockers on bitter compounds, so I don’t think it will be too long before we get mass-market products that have these compounds in them.
G: From your perspective, what’s the social value of this kind food industry investment in R&D?
BT: Technology has its ups and downs. I think that we as a society find our way through to the stuff that’s good and keep it, and we eventually get rid of the stuff that’s not.
I think a lot of people have the idea that food technology is inherently sinister. They hear the term and immediately think of things like GMOs or “Frankenfoods.” There are a lot of different points of view on genetic modification, but it’s undoubtedly true that a lot of people have a negative attitude toward it and that spills over into their feelings about food science and the idea of redesigning food in general.
But from within the field, I get to see a whole range of different approaches in food technology, and so it becomes a lot more nuanced. One area that I think holds a lot of promise is nanotechnology. We’re developing technologies that can be used in food that are so small that you can’t specifically see them or taste them but yet they provide some kind of benefit. Often these are in the sensory area, but there are also benefits in food safety, freshness, and so on. A lot of this is still at the research stage, but it is coming down the line.
To give you a specific example, the food industry often uses a technique called encapsulation to protect a flavor that they’ve placed in a food product. That means you coat it in some kind of material that allows the flavor compound to stay fresh and separate within the food product until you release it by eating it. The next generation of encapsulation uses nanotechnology, which will open up an entirely different dimension in the kinds of technologies that can be placed in foods and food packaging. For example, there are things that you can place on the inside of a food package that act as a sensor to tell you if the food is spoiled or release molecules into the package that fight bacteria.
G: Clearly, there are many reasons why people might feel as though these new technologies are suspicious or unwelcome. My own field—the media—needs to take some responsibility, I think, for the shortage of public, reason-based scientific discussion on the topic. But another thing that might contribute to that mistrust is the fact that so much food design research is conducted in-house at corporations or is funded by corporations. Do you think the fact that a lot of food R&D is not publicly funded and is not in the public domain leads to a lack of transparency?…”
The Bovine 