CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat

meet tastes great and all, but I wonder where science is at (if at all) on making original food that tastes good. How about food that doesn't taste like any natural food we've had, but still tastes really good?

Jell-o (gello?) is a good example, nothing tastes like it naturally. Why aren't there tasty food that are original in terms of taste and texture but good for health and the environment? I suppose part of the struggle is that food is entrenched into culture so much. burgers and bbq are inextricable from july 4th and memorial day for example.

Like you said I think it's culture, particularly ones that are food oriented. It's gonna be hard to get buy-in if people think it's too weird.

> doesn't taste like any natural food

Remember the target audience - people would rather drink and die from raw milk than get a shot for a completely preventable sickness.

The trouble is that “tastes good” isn’t a blank canvas. It’s built on hardwired signals plus learned associations. Our basic tastes evolved as nutritional indicators: sweet signals energy, umami signals protein, bitter warns of potential toxins. And our brains are rather insistent about finding flavors more pleasant when they match patterns we’ve already learned are safe.

Jell-O actually proves this rather than refuting it. It succeeds because it hits that hardwired sweet preference, not because it invented some novel taste dimension. A truly new taste that doesn’t map onto the existing five basics would likely register as “off” rather than delicious. Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.

So you’d have to either work within those existing taste channels while creating novel combinations and textures, or somehow condition people to associate genuinely new sensations with safety and reward. The latter is slow going. We’re quite literally built to be suspicious of unfamiliar foods.

Your question is rather ambiguous. Do you mean using chemistry to develop new techniques or combine unusual ingredients to create food that has novel flavors or textures? That would fall under Molecular Gastronomy, which has been highly influential within fine dining in the last few decades.

Do you mean processing ingredients with the goal to take cheap ingredients and make a product as hyper-palatable as possible? That would generally be called "ultra-processed food"; you're not going to find a Doritos chip in nature.

Do you mean developing completely completely new flavors via chemical synthesis? I don't think there's much possibility there. Our senses have evolved to detect compounds found in nature, so it's unlikely a synthetic compound can produce a flavor completely unlike anything found in nature.

Also, I think you're overestimating jelly. Gelatine is just a breakdown product of collagen. Boil animal connective tissue, purify the gelatine, add sugar and flavoring and set it into a gel. It's really only a few of techniques removed from nature. If you want to say it's not found in nature, then fair enough, but neither is a medium-rare steak.

There are plenty of "synthetic" flavours - Takis, Twinkies, and bubblegum drinks spring to mind.

There are also a wide variety of textures that are heavily industrialised. If you go to some fine dining restaurants, you'll find smells and colours which you simply cannot replicate at home - let alone make from scratch.

Most synthetic meat and fish is really just a flavour carrier for whatever sauce people like. I've had imitation chicken, shrimp, beef, crab, etc. They all taste great - but that's mostly because the sauces are the same as their meaty counterparts.

I'd argue that Jell-o tastes good because sugar tastes good and that it's just the novel texture coupled with sweetness that is the attraction. I doubt many people know what unsweetened gelatin tastes like or if that even tastes good.

The taste/texture of jello is just collagen (roughly, "meat stew flavor"), fruit juice, and (tons of) sugar. It’s just an extremely heightened version of natural flavors. There is nothing new under the sun.

Right. Chicken is more of a texture than a flavor. When you buy a Spicy Zinger Burger from KFC you're tasting more of the zingy than the cluck-cluck.

The chicken that KFC uses, sure. There’s a huge difference between that and a chicken that’s been raised well and allowed to get to a sensible age before slaughter.

I have all my shots and drink pasteurized milk, and I prefer familiar chicken-like substances over experimental cuisine.

I find this highly annoying. Here we've had very tasty wheat based slices that can serve the same purpose as sliced salami/meats on bread, and didn't try to muck anything in particular. But they disappeared from the shelves while the stuff branded as Vegan Salami seemingly does well.

I guess for casual buyers having a familiar reference point is just crucial.

> A truly new taste that doesn’t map onto the existing five basics would likely register as “off” rather than delicious. Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.

We have five taste receptors, so it's it's actually impossible to get something that doesn't map unto those five. Instead, what we call the taste of food, and what GP was referring to, is actually the smell of food, or more commonly, its aroma, which we can detect both from the outside by sniffing it with our noses, and while it is in our mouths via molecules wafting up to our respiratory tract.

Unlike the simplicity of taste, we have a huge array of smell receptors, with most of them having much more indirect associations, if any, with any specific survival need. It's very much possible, and in fact quite common, to synthesize novel smells/aromas which don't resemble any natural food.

Jello doesnt really have much taste by itself. what youre tasting is mostly sugar.

Plus small amounts of perfumes similar to fruits or other bits of plants, usually.

> Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.

At first. If the food has nutrients that are important to the brain, it will recognize that in the future. There are animal experiment confirming this.

> Unlike the simplicity of taste, we have a huge array of smell receptors, with most of them having much more indirect associations

Slightly unrelated, but what I find very cool is thinking about your taste sense as a hyper-sensitive molecule detector. Individual aromas are just the signal your brain generates for different kinds of molecules, and it's very good at that. That's why at wine tastings, for example, people come up with all these elaborate terms for specific aromas—it's a way to name the molecule composition.