The AI That Knows Exactly What You Want to Eat
Can an app lead to better-tasting food by digitally measuring flavor?
by Amos Zeeberg
Dec 04, 2018
4 minutes
Flavor, the conjunction of taste and smell, is not a sensation that yields easily to analysis. Unlike sights and sounds, which can be captured by cameras and microphones, there is no widespread way to measure flavor. What people experience when they eat has heretofore been largely ineffable and uncomputable.
“If I go to a farmers’ market, I can take a picture of a really lovely mushroom, but I cannot take an exact ‘flavor image’ and show it to someone and have them understand,” says Tarini Naravane, a doctoral student at the University of California at Davis who studies flavors. This goes right to an age-old philosophical question. “How do I know what I call red is what you
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