Cooking shows have always had one flaw: you can see the biryani, you can hear the presenter say it is perfect, and you have to take their word for it. A team at Ohio State University has built the first serious attempt at fixing that. Their system, e-Taste, records what a food tastes like as a set of electrical signals, sends them anywhere, and recreates the taste in a person’s mouth.
How it works
At the sending end, sensors measure the chemical profile of a food — how salty, sweet, sour and bitter it is, and in what proportions — and turn the readings into a digital signal. At the receiving end, the user wears a small device attached to the lower teeth. It holds tiny reservoirs of flavour chemicals in gel form and, on command, releases precisely measured amounts of each onto the tongue. Mix the right doses of the four basic tastes and the brain reads them as a particular food. The report is published in the journal Science Advances.
Did it work?
In laboratory tests with 16 volunteers, participants could distinguish different intensities of a single taste and different combinations, and — the striking result — correctly identified cake, fried egg, fish soup and coffee from the signals alone. Nobody claims it is the same as eating; smell, texture and temperature are absent, and those carry much of what we call flavour. But the four fundamentals arriving over a wire is a genuine first.
Who would use it
The researchers suggest online shopping (taste the mango before you order the crate), distance education for culinary students, weight management through taste without calories, and sensory testing. The most serious application is medical: people recovering from brain injuries, strokes or the loss of taste after illness could use a controllable taste stimulus in rehabilitation. For an ordinary viewer of a Bangla cooking channel, the honest timeline is long — the device is a laboratory prototype, the flavour reservoirs need refilling, and nobody has yet encoded the taste of a proper kacchi.
Source: Daily Mail, via Prothom Alo.
