It seems like any color or sound can be accurately encoded (and recreated) with just a few numbers. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the case with smell or flavor. You can take a photo or sound recording and it’ll be a faithful recreation, but there’s no way to do that with smells or flavors. Is it a technology limitation or is there something fundamental to them that makes it harder to encode?
In: Physics
An important aspect here is that flavour isn’t a real sense – it’s a composite experience.
Taste is what is picked up by taste buds, but taste is very boring – just a handful of simple tastes like sweet and savoury. Flavor is also largely defined by the smell of the food – even when it’s in your mouth it’s interacting with your sense of smell. That’s why plugging your nose can mute the sense of flavour.
The total experience of eating a food also relies a lot on texture (basically the sense of touch within the mouth), the temperature of the food, and some extra flares like spiciness or mintiness (which comes from chemicals that cause certain pain receptors to register your body as burning or freezing at normal body temperature) or even agitation (like horseradish which isn’t actually spicy, rather it releases a vapour that agitates mucus membranes).
A recipe is basically the same a .jpeg, though, in the sense that both a recipe and a jpeg tell you how to manipulate ingredients in the case of a recipe, and any light-emitting screen in the case of a jpeg, to replicate a previous sensory experience.
A recipe is generally imperfect, sure, but in theory if someone were sufficiently precise in a recipe (Ex: instead of calling for 1 potato, call for a precise mL measurement of a particular breed of potato grown in a specifically prescribed way that’s kept within specific temperature ranges) and someone sufficiently careful at following that recipe you could reproduce flavours reliably.
It’s just impractical.
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