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

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171 points rguiscard | 2 comments | 12 Dec 25 00:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.495s | source
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notepad0x90 ◴[12 Dec 25 04:25 UTC] No.46240860[source]▶
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.

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awestroke ◴[12 Dec 25 05:35 UTC] No.46241189[source]▶
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.

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1. tsimionescu ◴[12 Dec 25 08:03 UTC] No.46241912[source]▶
> 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.

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2. 9dev ◴[12 Dec 25 09:33 UTC] No.46242421[source]▶
> 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.