Tasty (28 page)

 
86
 
ambitious, or maybe just stubborn, project
: Ruth Bollongino, Joachim Burger, Adam Powell, Marjan Mashkour, Jean-Denis Vigne, and Mark G. Thomas, “Modern taurine cattle descended from small number of Near-Eastern founders,”
Molecular Biology and Evolution
29, no. 9 (2012): 2101–4, doi:10.1093/molbev/mss092.

 
87
 
enabling people to digest lactose
: Yuval Itan, Adam Powell, Mark A. Beaumont, Joachim Burger, Mark G. Thomas, “The origins of lactase persistence in Europe,”
PLoS Computational Biology
5, no. 8 (2009): e1000491, doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000491.

 
88
 
8,500 to 7,000 years ago
: Richard P. Evershed, Sebastian Payne, Andrew G. Sherratt, Mark S. Copley, Jennifer Coolidge, Duska Urem-Kotsu, Kostas Kotsakis, Mehmet Özdog˘an, Aslý E.
Özdog˘an, Olivier Nieuwenhuyse, Peter M. M. G. Akkermans, Douglass Bailey, Radian-Romus Andeescu, Stuart Campbell, Shahina Farid, Ian Hodder, Nurcan Yalman, Mihriban Özbas¸aran, Erhan Bıçakcı, Yossef Garfinkel, Thomas Levy, and Margie M. Burton, “Earliest date for milk use in the Near East and southeastern Europe linked to cattle herding,”
Nature
455, no. 7212 (2008): 528–31, doi:10.1038/nature07180.

 
88
 
separate curds and whey
: Melanie Salque, Peter I. Bogucki, Joanna Pyzel, Iwona Sobkowiak-Tabaka, Ryszard Grygiel, Marzena Szmyt, and Richard P. Evershed, “Earliest Evidence for Cheese Making in the Sixth Millennium,”
Nature
493 (2013): 522–25, doi:10.1038/nature11698.

 
88
 
the globes begin to clump together
: P. L. H. McSweeney, ed.,
Cheese Problems Solved
(Cambridge, UK: Woodhead Publishing Ltd., 2007), 50.

 
89
 
blue-green marbling
: Paul S. Kinstedt,
Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization
(White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2012). I drew on this book's thorough account of the evolution of cheese.

 
89
 
closest wild relative
: John G. Gibbons, Leonidas Salichos, Jason C. Slot, David C. Rinker, Kriston L. McGary, Jonas G. King, Maren A. Klich, David L. Tabb, W. Hayes McDonald, and Antonis Rokas, “The evolutionary imprint of domestication on genome variation and function of the filamentous fungus
Aspergillus oryzae
,”
Current Biology
22 (2012): 1403–9, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.05.033.

 
91
 
“something really delicious”
: Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin,
The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy
, trans. M. F. K. Fisher (New York: Vintage electronic edition, 2009), Kindle location 1838.

 
93
 
potatoes, meat, and sulfur
: Gerrit Smit, Bart A. Smit, and Wim J. M. Engels, “Flavour formation by lactic acid bacteria and biochemical flavour profiling of cheese products,”
FEMS Microbiology Reviews
29, no. 3 (2005): 591–610, doi:10.1016/j.femsre.2005.04.002.

 
95
 
flavor continually evolves
: Kirsten Shepherd-Barr and Gordon M. Shepherd, “Madeleines and neuromodernism: Reassessing mechanisms of autobiographical memory in Proust,”
Auto/Biography Studies
13 (1998): 39–59.

 
95
 
salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami
: Xiaoke Chen, Mariano Gabitto, Yueqing Peng, Nicholas J. P. Ryba, Charles S. Zuker, “A gustotopic map of taste qualities in the mammalian brain,”
Science
333 (2011): 1262–65.

 
95
 
ever-shifting quality of now
: A. D. (Bud) Craig, “How do you feel—now? The anterior insula and human awareness,”
Nature Reviews: Neuroscience
10, no. 1 (2009): 59–70, doi:10.1038/nrn2555.

 
96
 
process pleasure and aversion
: Morten L. Kringelbach, “The human orbitofrontal cortex: Linking reward to hedonic experience,”
Nature Reviews: Neuroscience
6 (2005): 691–702, doi:10.1038/nrn1748.

 
98
 
more powerful sensation
: Clara McCabe and Edmund T. Rolls, “Umami: A delicious flavor formed by convergence of taste and olfactory pathways in the human brain,”
European Journal of Neuroscience
25, no. 6 (2007): 1855–64, doi:10.1111/j.1460-9568.2007.05445.x.

 
98
 
response echoes that for sugar
: Christian H. Lemon, Susan M. Brasser, and David V. Smith, “Alcohol activates a sucrose-responsive gustatory neural pathway,”
Journal of Neurophysiology
92, no. 1 (2004): 536–44, doi:10.1152/jn.00097.2004.

 
98
 
makes tossing back a shot so bracing
: Alex Bachmanov, Monell Chemical Senses Center, interview.

 
99
 
similar to bell peppers
: Amy Coombs, “Scientia Vitis: Decanting the Chemistry of Wine Flavor,”
Chemical Heritage Magazine
(Winter 2008–09),
http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/media/magazine/articles/26-4-scientia-vitis.aspx
.

 
99
 
In a study
: Richard J. Stevenson and Robert A. Boakes, “Sweet and Sour Smells: Learned Synesthesia Between the Senses of Taste and Smell,” in
The Handbook of Multisensory Processes
, eds. Gemma A. Calvert, Charles Spence, and Barry E. Stein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 69–83.

 
99
 
colors associated with words or symbols
: Julia Simner, “Beyond perception: Synaesthesia as a psycholinguistic phenomenon,”
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
11, no. 1 (2007): 23–29, doi:10.1016/j.tics.2006.10.010.

 
101
 
flavor of the food they described
: Jamie Ward and Julia Simner, “Lexical-gustatory synaesthesia: Linguistic and conceptual factors,”
Cognition
89, no. 3 (2003): 237–61, doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(03)00122-7.

 
102
 
myths dating back thousands of years
: Julien D'Huy, “Polyphemus (Aa. Th. 1137): A phylogenetic reconstruction of a prehistoric tale,”
Nouvelle Mythologie Comparée
1 (2013): 1–21.

 
102
 
help themselves
: Homer,
The Odyssey,
trans.
Robert Fagles (New
York: Penguin Classics, electronic edition, 2002), Kindle location 5674.

Chapter 5: The Seduction

 
105
 
the sweeter it will taste
: Ayako Koizumi, Asami Tsuchiya, Ken-ichiro Nakajima, Keisuke Ito, Tohru Terada, Akiko Shimizu-Ibuka, Loïc Briand, Tomiko Asakura, Takumi Misaka, and Keiko Abe, “Human sweet taste receptor mediates acid-induced sweetness of miraculin,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
108, no. 40 (2011): 16819–24, doi:10.1073/pnas.1016644108.

 
106
 
Radiation damages them,
too
: Patty Neighmond, “Chemo Can Make Food Taste Like Metal: Here's Help,”
Morning Edition
, NPR, April 7, 2014,
http://www.npr.org/2014/04/07/295800503/chemo-can-make-food-taste-like-metal-heres-help
; Marlene K. Wilken and Bernadette A. Satiroff, “Pilot study of ‘Miracle Fruit' to improve food palatability for patients receiving chemotherapy,”
Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing
16, no. 5 (2012): E173–E177, doi:10.1188/12.CJON.E173-E177.

 
107
 
any other people in the world
: Credit Suisse Research Institute, “Sugar Consumption at a Crossroads” (2013), 4.

 
108
 
three-quarters of adults were obese
: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Number (in Millions) of Civilian, Noninstitutionalized Persons with Diagnosed Diabetes, United States, 1980–2011,”
http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/statistics/prev/national/figpersons.htm
.

 
110
 
exactly what it was
: Asvaghosha, “The Buddhacarita (Life of Buddha),” in
Buddhist Mah
a
ˉ
y
a
ˉ
na Texts
, trans. E. B. Cowell, F. Max Muller, and J. Takakusu (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 166; Sanjida O'Connell,
Sugar: The Grass That Changed the World
(London: Virgin Books, 2004), 9.

 
111
 
first dessert cuisine
: Tim Richardson,
Sweets: A History of Candy
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2002), Kindle location 1101–4.

 
111
 
“he becomes invulnerable”
: Richardson,
Sweets
, Kindle location 1125.

 
112
 
the means for refining it
: John Kieschnick,
The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 249–54.

 
112
 
sweet water, milk, wine, and honey
: Rachel Laudan,
Cuisine and
Empire: Cooking in World History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), Kindle location 3085–87.

 
113
 
found in the accounting rolls
:
The Oxford English Dictionary
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, Compact Edition, 1980), 3343–44.

 
114
 
used for food
: Sidney Mintz,
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
(New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 99, 82.

 
114
 
the first cough drops
:
OED
, 2120.

 
114
 
who began planting their own
: J. H. Galloway,
The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 63.

 
115
 
horses, cattle, or waterwheels
: Mintz,
Sweetness and Power
,
33–34.

 
116
 
handy for emergency amputations
: Matthew Parker,
The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies
(New York: Walker, 2011), Kindle location 1546–48.

 
116
 
obstructed the digestive tract
: Ivan Day, “The Art of Confectionery,” in
Pleasures of the Table: Ritual and Display in the European Dining Room 1600–1900: An Exhibition at Fairfax House
, eds. Peter Brown and Ivan Day (New York: New York Civic Trust, 2007).

 
117
 
reading Tryon's writings
: Tristram Stuart,
The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times
(New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007), 243–44.

 
117
 
ninety pounds in 1900
: Mintz,
Sweetness and Power
,
67, 143.

 
118
 
“King of Sweets”
: Daniel Carey, “Sugar, colonialism and the critique of slavery: Thomas Tryon in Barbados,”
Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century
9 (2004): 303–21.

 
118
 
corn syrup became a standard food additive
: Richard O. Marshall and Earl R. Kooi, “Enzymatic conversion of D-glucose to D-fructose,”
Science
125, no. 9 (1957): 648–49; James N. BeMiller, “One hundred years of commercial food carbohydrates in the United States,”
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry
57 (2009): 8125–29, doi:10.1021/jf8039236.

 
119
 
the evolution of complex life
: John H. Koschwanez, Kevin R. Foster, and Andrew W. Murray, “Sucrose utilization in budding yeast as a model for the origin of undifferentiated multicellularity,”
PLoS Biology
9, no. 8 (2011): e1001122, doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001122.

 
120
 
“don't you take to drink on that account”
: William James, “To Miss Frances R. Morse. Nanheim, July 10, 1901,” in
Letters of William James
, ed. Henry James (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920).

 
120
 
Olds wrote
: James Olds, “Pleasure Centers in the Brain,”
Scientific American
195, no. 4 (October 1956): 105–17, doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1056-1105.

 
121
 
stimulate itself by pressing a lever
: James Olds and Peter Milner, “Positive reinforcement produced by electrical stimulation of septal area and other regions of rat brain,”
Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology
47, no. 6 (1954): 419–27.

 
122
 
flick of a switch
: Morton L. Kringelbach and Kent C. Berridge, “The functional neuroanatomy of pleasure and happiness”
Discovery Medicine
9, no. 49 (2010): 579–87.

 
122
 
as if licking their lips
: Dallas Treit and Kent C. Berridge, “A comparison of benzodiazepine, serotonin, and dopamine agents in the taste-reactivity paradigm,”
Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior
37, no. 21 (1990): 451–56.

 
123
 
“pleasure, euphoria, or
‘yumminess
'
”
: Roy A. Wise, “The dopamine synapse and the notion of ‘pleasure centers' in the brain,”
Trends in Neurosciences
3 (1980): 91–95.

 
124
 
alleviate their symptoms
: Alan A. Baumeister, “Tulane electrical brain stimulation program: A historical case study in medical ethics,”
Journal of the History of the Neurosciences
9, no. 3 (2000): 262–78.