Print and Eat the Food of the Future

One of the best parts of the pseudo-Freudian space fantasy Forbidden Planet is when Robby the Robot obliges the poor space sailor who's been left to guard the ship with a heap of liquor. Robby scans and chemically analyses the spaceman's bottle of whiskey, and then duplicates it... and duplicates it... and duplicates it... until he has a lovely pile of whiskey bottles -- at least until the invisible Monsters from the Id come and annihilate his fun.

All matter is chemicals, after all, and all chemicals are elements, and elements are just atoms, and atoms are everywhere, so why not? Anything can become anything else; stuff can be made out of no stuff.

The wait is over (maybe): why cook, when you can print your food and eat it? Sadly, there's no gracious Robby to butler our meal for us out of thin air. This is basically a modified 3D printer, the "revolutionary" technology that keeps threatening to transcend mere novelty, one of these days, maybe. 

I mock, but this article on the print-and-eat food from the IEEE Spectrum is really fascinating. At first, 3D food printers were limited by the material it used: a paste that hardened into different shapes, pretty much the edible equivalent of the standard 3D printer's plastic. (yum!) 

But then a breakthrough: Daniel Cohen, a grad student at Cornell, had the idea to treat the printer's materials as a set of miscible components, the way the three RGB printer cartridges in a color printer can produce a full-color reproduction of a multi-hued image. That is, he proposed a standard basic palette of food materials, reimagining food's basic components as though there are edible equivalents to the primary colors, which can additively produce any hue in the visible spectrum. This itself is not a novel idea: sensory taxonomers from Linnaeus to Arthur D. Little Consulting Company (and many more) have proposed systems that attempt to break the smellable-tastable world into irreducible elements. However, It's important to note that the color spectrum is a metaphor; it translates imperfectly unto the much different (chemosensory, multisensory) system of flavor perception.

Jeffrey Lipton, the article's author and an engineering student intimately involved in the development of commercial 3D-printing technology and its applications, is concerned with making the food printer's products not only palatable but desirable. The "uncanny valley" of "mushroom shaped bananas" is too "artificial", and thus likely to be rejected by the "home cook." He also dismisses proposals to use 3D food printing as a sort of hedge against a Malthusian crisis (by making palatable foods -- like "steak" -- out of cheap or repulsive proteins -- such as insects) as off-trend: today's savvy consumers reject "highly processed foods." (Incidentally, in my research on the history of flavor additives, I've found this "socially useful" application of flavor additives cited by the flavor industry starting in the 1950s and 1960s -- that synthetic flavor chemicals will help forestall a malnutrition crisis by making cheap nutritive substances (combinations of carbs-proteins-fats manufactured, perhaps, from industrial waste) edible and acceptable). 

Instead of working from basic components, Lipton says, they've taken a "top down" (rather than "bottom up") approach with the printer, working with chefs to produce fried scallops shaped like space shuttles and Austrian cookies with writing on the inside. (How this addresses purported consumer desires for "less processed" foods is not really clear...) The most exciting result is a new form of fried corn dough, impossible to achieve without a 3D printer; the dough forms "a porous matrix that allowed the frying oil to penetrate much deeper into the food. The result was something delicately crispy and greasy, like a cross between a doughnut, a tortilla chip, and raw ramen noodles."

In this incarnation, the 3D printer becomes an exquisitely refined tool for the production of highly processed food. A tool that doesn't just replicate what already exists in the world from a basic color palate, the way a camera reproduces visible reality, but something that makes new, unforeseen things possible -- maybe. Can we use this to imagine and create new flavors, or just to dress up familiar things in fancy, unfamiliar, space-ship forms?  

The Bird Climate

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported on eBird, a network of bird observers using smartphones to collaborate on the vast project of making a global picture of bird populations. Launched in 2002 by the venerable Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the network has already compiled nearly 150 million reports of bird sightings, and the amount of data it receives each year continues to grow. Poignantly, eBird is also promoted as a way to prevent the diligent observations of disaggregated bird-watchers from being lost -- to science and, by extension, to eternity. 

Dr. John W. Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, comments on this in the article:  

“People for generations have been accumulating an enormous amount of information about where birds are and have been.... Then it got burned when they died.”       

The eBird network saves this information from the fire, so to speak, by converting it into data - accumulated, centralized, and brought into sensible communion with other data.

The dynamics of this data, the constant addition of new information about bird sightings, and the scope of the eBird database distinguish it from previous efforts, such as the Audubon Christmas Day Bird Count, which also organized amateur birders, bird lovers, and pro ornithologists (initially in the Northeastern US, later across the North America) for a one-day extravaganza of bird watching, identifying, and tallying. In contrast to this "static" one-day count of these moving objects, what eBird makes possible is a conception of birds as a phenomenon like climate -- global, interconnected, dynamic. If the Audubon Christmas Bird Count is the local bird weather report in various locations on a particular day of the year, eBird is the global bird climate: the patterns and moving fronts, with concomitant capacity to make predictions about future local bird weather. The scientists who use the program even call their records of particular species a "heatmap." 

The birders who participate in eBird aren't just ordinary birders, they are -- in eBird's words -- "biological sensors," nodes in a technosocial network to produce knowledge of the bird climate.

But as in any case where bodies and machines come together, there are ticklish issues at the interface. Though humans may be the best bird detectors, they lack some of the qualities of machine parts: consistency, reliability, regularity, standardization. And so the biological sensors' information, entered via the eBird smartphone app, has to filter through other humans - the Cornell Lab of Ornithology - to be sanctified as data. The information has to pass through the experts. These experts may also avail themselves of machines: the Times reports that eBird's creators are trying to make up for the variations among its biological sensors by using "machine learning" to "train" their program to distinguish signal from noise, to flag and discredit false or misreported or misidentified sightings. And they are also curbing bad data the old-fashioned way: by sending scientists out to refine the capacities of the biological sensors, training non-scientist eBird users to make the correct calls.

One thing the article gets a bit wrong: the Times article claims that prior to eBird, one-day counts were the only source of information about bird populations. The archetypal example of this is the Audubon Christmas Day Bird Count, which began in 1900. I'd also argue that bird banding, which was first used as a scientific method of tracking birds around the same time the Bird Count began, is another major source of information about bird populations, migration, and behavior. It's no coincidence that both the bird count and bird banding appeared at a similar time. If bird migration had long been a phenomenon of scientific interest, at the turn of the twentieth century, organized networks of ornithological observers (proto-eBird) affiliated with institutions like natural history museums, national governments, or conservation groups, made viable the vast data collection project entailed by the study of migration.

Illustration of birds dead on the pavilion below the Statue of Liberty's torch, from Duluth Daily News, November 8, 1887

There's yet another, lesser-known, source of information about migration that was also used at this time: birds that collided with human-built structures. The Statue of Liberty's electric torch first blazed in 1887; the statue of William Penn which crowned Philadelphia's city hall (briefly, the world's tallest building) was floodlit in 1898. Under certain weather conditions -- drizzle, low cloud cover -- hundreds of migratory birds were killed on certain nights in collisions with these or similar structures, other monumental electric-lit structures in the still largely gas-lit city. As one 19th-century article describing the avian casualties at the Statue of Liberty put it, these "victims of liberty and their love of light."

Moreover, these were not urban birds - sparrows and pigeons - they were migratory birds passing along ancestral flyways, forest dwellers and waterbirds rarely seen in the city's vicinity.

What happened to the bodies of these birds? 

At a time when feathers for ladies' hats were a hot commodity, these bodies could have been plundered for their valuable plumes. Colonel Augustus Tassin, who was in charge of the Statue of Liberty grounds, did not allow this to occur. He told a newspaper reporter in 1887:   

“I have heretofore received many letters from all sorts of people offering to buy the birds which were killed in this way. But I believed they were public property, and that I had no right to dispose of them.... When I have collected about 200 specimens, I send them to the Washington National Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and other scientific institutions, where I know that they are wanted.”

Indeed, the Smithsonian's 1888 Annual Report records the receipt of 260 birds of 40 species "in the flesh" from Tassin, recognized as one of the "more important accessions during the year." Government regulations required Tassin to record data about avian fatalities at the Statue of Liberty, which was technically a lighthouse and thus subject to this requirement. But the practice of scientific collecting at bird collision sites was adopted at other late 19th- and early 20th-century urban civic sites that saw similar mass fatalities.

The tale thus becomes a sort of redemption narrative, a conversion of meaningless death to meaningful data – and reclaiming the specimens as public, scientific property rather than private commodities.  

Further, the data produced by bird collisions had certain advantages over information from bird sightings during migration. What you had were the real bodies of birds, material specimens. This allowed ornithologists to make note of things that a sighting cannot provide a clue to: the bird's final meal, its sex, its approximate age, its weight. At the turn of the 20th century -- a time when the issue of "scientific collecting" (killing birds for research) was drawing sharp scrutiny and criticism from emergent conservationist groups like the Audubon Society -- bird collisions provided specimens that illuminated the phenomenon of migration while evading the question of whether killing wildlife was justifiable on scientific grounds.

This practice continues to this day. Birds that die after colliding with buildings in New York, in Chicago, in Philadelphia, and other urban areas are collected by bird collision monitors, bagged and tagged and incorporated into natural history collections and also used to raise awareness about the vast fatal scope of glass and architecture on bird life in, above, and around cities and other places where people live and build shiny or disorienting things. (Not every collision is fatal; many of these groups also save and rehabilitate wounded birds.)

Which brings me back to Dr. Fitzgerald's quote at the beginning of this post, that the collection of data is a way to prevent loss, to stave off the fire of oblivion.

Bird specimens lead productive afterlives in natural history collections, and continue to yield information about population genetics, historical ecology, behavior, and physiology, among other things. But making a bird a specimen entails loss - things that are discarded in the process of bringing the bird's body into conformity with the other bodies in the regimented drawers in the back rooms of natural history museums. Likewise, eBird certainly allows the birdwatcher to give her or his observations a rich and productive afterlife. But that shouldn't stop us from asking: what might be lost here? What does not pass into the eBird data set? And does that absence matter?

Kasugai Mangosteen Gummies, or, What is a New Flavor?

How do you describe a flavor to someone who has never tasted it before?

Most of us would probably first reach for an analogy: there's a reason "it tastes like chicken" is a cliché to describe things like alligator or rattlesnake or other "weird" meats. Almost everyone (in the US, at least) can be assumed to have eaten chicken; it's a cute way of downplaying the allure (or disgust) of the exotic. But this statement only works because we can't adequately explain what chicken tastes like. It, like most of the foods that we are familiar with, has become a cipher.

And really, what is a new flavor? Are there any really unprecedented flavors still out there?

As a case study, I offer this bag of Kasugai Mangosteen Gummy Candy, purchased for $3.59 at the Japanese bodega.

What is a mangosteen? I can tell you what it looks like if you've never seen one. It fits in the palm of your hand; it has a leathery purple peel capped by a crown of three or four tough green leaves; the fruit itself is segmented like an orange, milky-colored.  

But what does it taste like?

The package offers few clues:

"The Mangosteen has the perfect balance of sweet and sour taste, known as the 'Queen of Fruit'. Enjoy its delicious flavor in Kasugai Mangosteen Gummy Candy."

R.W. Apple confronted the problem of describing the taste of the mangosteen when he wrote about it for the New York Times in 2003. Apple is an enthusiast, a lover, an avid apostle for mangosteen. His readers, however, must be presumed largely ignorant of the fruit, its flavor, and its reputation. At that point, mangosteens were forbidden fruit in the U.S. Native to Southeast Asia, the fruit was host to a pernicious type of fruit fly that the USDA wanted to keep away from American crops.  

How does Apple confront the problem of describing the mangosteen's flavor? He writes: "I could tell you that the flavor reminds me of litchis, peaches and clementines, mingled in a single succulent mouthful, but words can no more describe how mangosteens taste than explain why I love my wife and children. Merely typing the name makes my mouth water. Whenever in my travels I spot a mound of those precious orbs in a marketplace, my heart pounds."

Does Apple tell us what a mangosteen tastes like? Instead of giving us a portrait of the flavor, he describes the effect it has on him and on other people; he provides us with the evidence of its value. A chef he knows bursts into tears at her first taste of mangosteen. Queen Victoria pledged to knight anyone who could bring her a mangosteen, ready to eat (no one was able to meet this challenge). Apple himself claims to prize a mangosteen above even a hot fudge sundae. Simply listing the things the mangosteen tastes like does not do justice to the experience of the fruit; what vouches for its deliciousness is its desirability, its valuation above all other fruits (of which it is the queen) and other delectable things.

When I read this article way back in 2003, the mangosteen seemed to me the most marvelous thing I could imagine. I wanted it as much as Rapunzel's mom wanted the cabbage from the witch's garden; I would trade a baby for one, no question. Robbie and I searched for a source online, coming across all kinds of other fascinating fruits, such as miracle berries - but no mangosteen. In Chinatown, we bought the mangosteen's co-regent, the spiky durian, "king of fruits," and one memorable evening, split it open and managed to eat only a few spoonfuls of its custardy flesh - which reeked of corpses, oniony sweat, and gasoline - before we threw it out with the trash.

Not long after, we did indeed find mangosteen, quite by chance. We were in Victoriaville, a small town in Quebec, for the annual festival of "musique actuelle;" the sweet smell of cow manure pervaded the landscape. Shopping for provisions at the chain supermarket in this unlikely locale, we discovered a pyramid of mangosteens displayed unassumingly besides bananas in bunches and fat green pears from Chile. We were with two American friends, who were singularly unimpressed by our discovery; they had traveled in Southeast Asia and dined on fresh mangosteen at outdoor markets. Robbie jumped up and down; I wept among the produce. We bought a half-dozen at a nearly extortionary price, and hurried to our rented house to tear open the purple hulls and taste the jewel-like white fruit inside.

But the flesh was livid grey and mushy, its flavor was sour and musty. There was nothing delicate about it. No litchis, no tangerines, no alpine strawberries. The thick rinds left a unpleasant maroon residue underneath my fingernails, the color of old blood.  

We had mangosteen in Victoriaville, but we did not taste its flavor. This disappointing experience couldn't be the flavor of mangosteen, precisely because it was sour and soft and kind of gross. A mangosteen is by definition delicious, exceedingly delicious, the queen of fruits.    

Subsequently, I noticed that mangosteen began to feature in nutritional supplements and in energy drinks. Along with goji berries or acai, it was touted as a new "superfood" with an antioxidant payload that would annihilate the toxins of industrial living. (It's interesting that potency, enhancement, comes from elsewhere - either "exotic" parts of the world, or the past ("traditional knowledge") - realms that have "escaped" modernity.)

But these supplements don't promise the flavor of mangosteen. What they offer is some other virtue of the fruit, another way of having it without tasting it.

More recently, now that mangosteen (imported from Puerto Rico, or from Southeast Asia irradiated against fruit fly pests) has been available for import, I've seen some sorry looking specimens at supermarkets, for sale at an astronomical price per pound. The fruit seems hardly worth it: their purple husks dented, their bonny green crowns dingy, a rind of white fuzz where the fruit was separated from the tree. Evidently much the worse for wear from their long voyage from the antipodes. I have not splurged on any of these specimens.

So, what do the Kasugai mangosteen gummies taste like? And do they taste like mangosteen?

In three days, I have consumed more than half the bag, but the more gummies I eat, the less specific the flavor becomes. The gummies are sweet. They are a little sour. They are monotonal. Maybe a bit like pineapple?

Am I learning what mangosteen tastes like, what is meant by mangosteen flavor, by eating them? Or will it change my experience of "real" mangosteen, when the day finally comes that I get to eat an perfect fruit, at the peak of its flavor? Will it be like Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein, where when he was told that it looked nothing like her, he replied, "Ah, but it will"? Will it just taste like Kasugai mangosteen gummy?