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The Current Transcript for July 11, 2017

Host: Mike Finnerty

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

[Speaking in Spanish]

MIKE FINNERTY: Venezuela's embattled president Nicolas Maduro – vowing never to be complicit in the use of violence and condemning it. It's a message that is not getting through. There's been plenty of violence and intimidation on all sides and the number of Venezuelans fleeing the country for the safety of Canada has exploded. Coming right up, Venezuela's unpredictable future and a plea from Venezuelans here for Canada to do more. Also today, what makes something you're eating or drinking taste really good? It is not at all as simple as you think.

SOUNDCLIP

I think we're all kind of under the delusion, you might say, that what we kind of taste is really the stuff that’s in our mouth. But in fact, taste is really a flavour. It really involves all the senses.

MF: Charles Spence—he's spent years testing how we experience what we eat and drink. And his insights could make your next meal or even your takeaway coffee really pop. I'm Mike Finnerty. Welcome to the summer edition of The Current.

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'We need help': Venezuela crisis forces many to seek asylum in Canada

Guests: Stephen Gibbs, Anonymous Woman, Orlando Viera-Blanco

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Crowd cheering]

MF: Something to cheer about in Venezuela over the weekend, as the country's most famous dissident, Leopoldo Lopez, was released from prison, and taken into house arrest. Last weekend marked 100 days of protest by opposition groups in the South American country and at least 91 people have died in clashes with security forces in that period. The release of Leopoldo Lopez—an opposition leader and former presidential candidate, who had been sentenced to 13 years—may be a glimmer of hope for those protestors. But Venezuela remains a state on the brink today. Food and medicine are in short supply and the economy, hobbled by triple-digit inflation, is in free fall. Stephen Gibbs is a journalist with the Times of London. He is in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. Stephen, hello.

STEPHEN GIBBS: Good morning.

MF: Over the weekend, opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez was released into house arrest. What's your take on that? It seemed like it came out of the blue.

STEPHEN GIBBS: Yeah, in a way it did seem to come out of the blue, partly because the government had been saying for many years really, that there's no way that Leopoldo Lopez is going to be released. Diosdado Cabello, one of the sort of hard line spokesmen for the government said you know he's a monster and he should rot in jail. But if you look back at the last few weeks, what has been going on is a degree of what we could almost call negotiation and there have been two other senior figures in the government who've been meeting with Leopoldo Lopez. And a month ago, they did say that he was offered house arrest and he said no, he's going to be the last political prisoner in Venezuela to come out. But in fact, I think alongside that, a deal was done, an agreement was done that he would likely be released. But when it happened, yeah, I was surprised and a sort of turning point in a way it has seemed here in Venezuela.

MF: So what changes now that he's out?

STEPHEN GIBBS: Well, it sort of shakes things up a bit. If we look at from the opposition point of view, it means that they now have an additional figure who's not totally free, but he's sort of closer to being free and is a very ambitious man who has been clear that he is interested in becoming president one day. From the government's point of view, yeah, it's divided some within the government. There have been some hardliners who say, as I said earlier, that never should this man be released. They regard him as a monster who is responsible for deaths in anti-government protests in 2014. And yet there are moderates or more moderates people within the government that have been accepting what's happened. So sort of divisions all around.

MF: And the government seems to have lost an ally in the attorney general Luisa Ortega, who's now I suppose been barred from leaving the country, but seems to have turned on Maduro.

STEPHEN GIBBS: Yes. This is the other sort of dramatic thing that's going on here. Again, one of the things that Chavismo has managed to achieve is publicly give an impression of total unity over the last 18 years. Few of us have completely believed it, but this which began in March really, the attorney general Luisa Ortega criticized an attempt by the Supreme Court to take over national assembly here and she said that she thought that was a sort of break in the Constitution. Since then, she really has gone rogue really, actively attacking really from a legal basis, many things that the Maduro government is doing including saying that some appointees in the Supreme Court shouldn't be there. A constituent assembly that Maduro is trying to do to rewrite the constitution here is illegal. And the problem Maduro has is he can't get rid of her. She's an appointee of the National Assembly, not a presidential appointee. So much as he would like to, he can't just dismiss her.

MF: To what extent is she, the attorney general, symbolic of a movement, a shift in some of the supporters, former Chavistas even, who have gone over to the opposition side?

STEPHEN GIBBS: She's a very, very important figure and a dangerous figure for the Maduro government because her sort of credentials as a leftist politician here—absolutely loyal to Hugo Chavez—are impeccable. And she represents what some have portrayed as sort of the Democratic Chavistas, those that feel that what Maduro is doing, going as many see it towards a dictatorship, that is unbearable for them and they are therefore rebelling. And she is a very, very powerful leader of that movement right at the top of the Maduro government.

MF: And what about the streets, Stephen? What are we seeing with protest?

STEPHEN GIBBS: The protests are ongoing. We're now over 100 days of protest. You don't see in recent weeks the massive numbers we got at the beginning of April.

MF: President Maduro's accused the opposition and the United States of waging economic war on the country. And we spoke with economist Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. They've done some work with the Union of South American Nations and have in turn tried to advise the Maduro regime. Here's his take on the turmoil.

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Well, I think the main problem is the exchange rate system. And as a result, you've got very high inflation over 500 per cent. The economy's in a very deep recession. And I think there is a certain amount of attempt successfully to undermine the economy from the United States and its allies. In other words, they make it more difficult for the country to borrow.

MF: Stephen, is it fair to say that the right wing, the opposition and outside powers like the US have tried to worsen things, the economic situation?

STEPHEN GIBBS: I think that’s a difficult argument to support. I mean the main thing is the United States buys more Venezuelan oil than anyone else in the world. There is a sort of argument that the Maduro government puts—it was slightly being echoed there—that there's a sort of embargo by the US on Venezuela. That's not true at all. There are people in the opposition that perhaps feel that what's happening to the economy might be what triggers the end of the Maduro government. Whether they're actively making that happen, it's something that the Maduro government says but there's very, very little evidence of it. Instead, we see the Maduro government saying there's light at the end of the tunnel. You know, this is going to get better for everyone soon but it hasn't really happened at all. It's got far worse. Inflation is through the roof here. So it's difficult to really pin this on anyone, I have to say, apart from the management of the economy by the government here in the light of a crash in the oil prices in 2014. The way that's been managed and the fact it's exposed that this is a country without a sovereign reserve for example, is really may be well what ultimately undermines the government.

MF: Stephen Gibbs, thank you very much. Stephen Gibbs, journalist with the Times of London and we reached him in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. As political and economic chaos engulfs Venezuela, more and more Venezuelans are making their way out of the country as refugees and Canada is among their destinations. According to the Immigration and Refugee Board, the number of asylum claims from Venezuelans is more than doubling every year from just two dozen in 2013 to hundreds last year. Francisco Rico-Martinez is co-director of the FCJ Refugee Centre in Toronto.

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Last year, almost 50 per cent of all the intakes that we did in a week, were Venezuelans. And it's very frustrating for a person like me, or our office to advocate for the rights of refugees, not to have an answer for them. They were very frustrated because they said look what happened in Syria, the Canadian government is doing something especially for them. Look at the situation in Venezuela.

MF: Well, we're joined in our Toronto studio now by a Venezuelan woman who is trying to get refugee status in Canada. We've agreed to withhold her name while her refugee application is being processed and because she fears reprisals against family members in Venezuela. Hello.

WOMAN: Hi, Mike. Thank you so much for having me.

MF: It's a pleasure to have you. Could you explain why it is you no longer feel safe in Venezuela?

WOMAN: Yeah. There have been like multiple factors that makes you feel that. The first and the most important is the insecurity. People go out of their houses and we don't know if we're coming back. The Colectivos are in charge of the streets.

MF: Explain what the Colectivos are.

WOMAN: The Colectivos is like the group of people that they were armed by the government for this moment.

MF: They're thugs.

WOMAN: Exactly. And they were waiting for this moment to defend what they call their revolution. So these people are very, let's call humble people, and most of them they don't receive any education, so they receive a lot of help from the government. They give them money. They give them food. They give them anything that they need. Also they give them guns. So right now everyone is repressed by them.

MF: What do you hear from people who still are back in Venezuela on day-to-day life? What do they tell you?

WOMAN: Well, I have been here since January last year.

MF: So a bit more, about a year and a half.

WOMAN: In one year and a half, the situation of the food especially has become very poor because people are really trying to seek for help, trying to seek for food. We don't have any chicken, milk, eggs. Kids, they don't have their special milk. People are losing even until four kilos by month.

MF: What do people have to do to get the food they need?

WOMAN: They have to wait maybe since one night before to get their food and there is not anything for sure. They can’t get any.

MF: Lining up overnight?

WOMAN: Exactly.

MF: What about for people who fall ill or become sick?

WOMAN: Well, that’s still their issue. We have a lot of people regarding the health care. Before we call, approach two hospitals and before you go get that. But right now people are dying from the most simple sickness and people dying because they don't have any medicine. The most simple medicine for maybe a grandma’s [unintelligible]. They can’t find. So they suffer from heart attacks because they don't have their medicines and kids, they suffer from malnutrition too. There is a lot of cases of kids dying just from anemia.

MF: This was not a poor country.

WOMAN: No, it’s not. We have a lot of oil. We have a lot of resources. We have a lot of mineral, how you say?

MF: Mines.

WOMAN: Exactly. So we have a lot of things we can get money off. But there has been so much long time that people are trying to fight this now and there is too many aspects that we need help. We need to be fixed.

MF: Your mom is still in Venezuela. Why is she staying?

WOMAN: Well, she's afraid to lose everything that she had work all her life. My mom was, she was divorced so we grow up together. She had me when she had 19 years. But even though she went to college, she got her lawyer career and right now she's like trying to protect what she have there.

MF: How does she feel about you speaking out publicly?

WOMAN: She's afraid. She told me not to come here. And today, she told me like make sure you don't say our names. Remember your family is still here. So it's really getting deep into our minds, into our way of being. It's like normalizing not to talk about it.

MF: She worries too when you post on Facebook.

WOMAN: Of course. She made me delete everything when I came out the country because she was afraid they will hold me in the airport just because checking my Facebook or anything because I told my mom: We need to speak up. And I told everyone. That's why I got in trouble because we needed to speak up.

MF: You feel strongly about coming in today to speak.

WOMAN: Of course. We need to release all the information because it's 2017. I know there is a lot of a horrible stuff happening around the world, but it is just unnecessary. Venezuelan people, it's happening for these. Just for a couple of people, there is business for them.

MF: What's happening with your refugee claim for here in Canada?

WOMAN: Well, everything is going well. I came to Canada because I came here six years ago when Venezuelan situation was so-so, okay. And I know this is a good country to confront this situation. So my hearing is going to be August 21. My lawyer feels very strongly about my case. So I'm just waiting.

MF: Our guest is seeking refugee status in Canada. Thank you very much for coming in.

WOMAN: Thank you, Mike.

MF: Thanks for having the courage to speak out.

WOMAN: Thank you.

MF: We have agreed to withhold her name during her application process and to protect her family in Venezuela as you just heard. Orlando Viera-Blanco is the president of the Canadian Venezuelan Engagement Foundation. It's based in Montreal and he wants to see the Canadian government do more to help Venezuelans. He joins us today from Miami. Orlando Viera-Blanco, hello.

ORLANDO VIERA-BLANCO: Hello. Good morning, Mike. Thank you for having me.

MF: It's a pleasure. And when you listened to our last guest speak, how common are those types of cases in Canada now?

ORLANDO VIERA-BLANCO: Well, as you can hear, we have a human rights situation in Venezuela which became worse and worse. We have a total absence of the state institution. We have a situation of political persecution, political imprisoners, [unintelligible]. We have a high index of criminality in the world. We're talking about 25,000 people died in Venezuela because of criminal homicide. We have like in the last 100 days, we're talking about more than 1,400 people detained and imprisoned by political repression. We're talking about 15,000 people. We're talking about a hundred people died, most of them young people between 17 and 20 years old.

MF: It feels like society is breaking down.

ORLANDO VIERA-BLANCO: Of course it's breaking down. So our concern as a foundation and NGO and rescue in United States, in Canada is trying to spread out the information about what's going on in Venezuela because there’s some kind of contradiction between the rule of law in Canada on the immigration basis and the human right protection. So taking in consideration, you have like assisting treaties and human and international treaties in which Canada is a party. So we have to promote some kind of integration of such conventions and treaties with a normal rule in Canada, not just to residents, not just to refugees. I'm talking about residents. I'm talking about students. For example, with people who is residents and maybe for any reason is not—they are [unintelligible] the days they have in Canada. And they need to stay in Canada because it's not a possibility to get back to Venezuela. So we need to promote and we need to spread out the information about what's going on in Venezuela in order that the official immigration know that any decision to suspend or revoke or [unintelligible] have to be suspended because human rights bodies and human rights treaty must be applied.

MF: So you want the Canadian government to take special measures in cases that have to do with, as you say not just refugee claims, but immigration claims from Venezuela. What kind of response do you get from the Canadian government? What are you hearing?

ORLANDO VIERA-BLANCO: Well, in the last three years we have been making many testimony before the parliament in Canada. And the answer has been very positive. The parliament has made many statements asking for the Venezuelan government just to release the political prisoners and to open the humanitarian help to Venezuela. On the other hand, I noticed that some kind of changes in the immigration law, for example, I recently noticed [unintelligible] removal reassessment from Venezuela. That means that we could have some kind of delay in the process of removal of any Venezuelan citizens who live right now in Canada to Venezuela. So the acceptation, the support and the help from the Canadian government has been very well.

MF: In terms of those who are applying now, clearly opposition supporters are seeking refugee status. But has it now gone beyond that?

ORLANDO VIERA-BLANCO: No, not too much. I confess to you the information is still a little bit, let’s say, no—the mass media for example. We need the mass media in Canada make more news about what's going on in Venezuela. So we have some cases in the region that again, it’s some kind of contradiction. Just to give you an example, it's not just about to stay in Canada and to make and to achieve the number of days that you need to preserve in order to obtain your residence or your renewal resident status. It’s about human rights. So as long as the officials of immigration have the capacity and the discretion to research [unintelligible]. If you live in the United States, between the United States and Canada, for any reason you're working in both countries and for any reason you do not have the complete days to stay in Canada and suddenly the official of immigration decide to revoke your immigration status. Why? Because days? Just because the days do not count enough days to stay there?

MF: Understood.

ORLANDO VIERA-BLANCO: So we need to integrate the human rights groups.

MF: Orlando, we have to leave it there. Thank you very much for speaking to us.

ORLANDO VIERA-BLANCO: Thank you very much, Mike.

MF: Orlando Viera-Blanco, who's the president of the Canadian Venezuela Engagement Foundation based in Montreal. This morning he was in Miami. We did request an interview with the Venezuelan ambassador to Canada but we have no reply from him. We also requested a statement from Canada's Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen and are waiting for a response. This is the summer edition of The Current.

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Gastrophysics explains how potato chips can taste even better

Guests: Charles Spence

MF: Hello. I'm Mike Finnerty. You're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MF: Up next, it's a feast for the senses—all of the senses.

SOUNDCLIP

We've had guests actually tear up when they smell the aromatic from this cocktail because it reminds them of particular experiences at their grandmother's house, where their grandmother lived, that backed onto a particular ravine or forest. This young lady was actually tearing up just because it reminded her so much of that experience at her grandmother's house. And that literally just sums up the exact reason I do what I do is because you know, how powerful is that, if you're able to kind of conjure up those most powerful and positive emotions and memories of experiences in your childhood in your past? I think it goes well beyond the cocktail experience.

MF: So that's a cocktail with a dash of something extra. Frankie Solarik, co-owner of Toronto cocktail venue BarChef, wants his patrons to get a lot more out of his drinks than just the taste of the ingredients. Plenty of today's chefs and bartenders are thinking more about all the senses when it comes to shaping a flavour experience—smell, colour, sound, how it feels in your mouth, as well as where you're drinking and who's drinking with you. Our producer Karin Marley went to BarChef to sample one of Frankie Solarik’s beverages.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: This whole cocktail is called the Spring Thaw. So right away off the bat from this presentation, you see that this isn't your standard cocktail. Okay?

VOICE 2: Yeah, this would normally be like a centerpiece.

VOICE 1: Exactly, right? Yeah, like all fresh, beautiful live flowers. We have Ontario moss as well here at the bottom. It's presented to the guest. The guest is able to reach in and then you have that texture of the fresh greens and the flowers on the hands. So we kind of create an amphitheatre if you will, of the fresh florals and the greens because the idea is that you want to almost fall into the Alice in Wonderland mirror if you will, a looking—I think they call it the looking glass, I think? Yeah. So it’s the idea of falling into another reality. In the centre of your service piece in the glass, you have a spherified Campari and vanilla granite. We have that orange blossom, grapefruit and vanilla air. Fresh basil sprouts. Edible flower petals. The cocktail itself, we have a blend of gin, chamomile syrup and sparkling wine. We're just going to pour that directly over the ice here.

[Sound: Liquid being poured]

VOICE 1: Like so. We have here dry ice.

[Sound: Bubbling]

VOICE 1: It kind of envelops and engulfs the entire table with this beautiful white hue, which smells of soil, lilac, cedar and grapefruit. And if you can smell it…

VOICE 2: Wow.

VOICE 1: As you can see like with all these different individual components, it kind of creates this overall experience which is very transformative.

VOICE 2: Can I try it?

VOICE 1: Absolutely.

VOICE 2: Oh, that is so good.

MF: If taking in everything that influences a food's flavour sounds fun, you will envy Charles Spence. He's the head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford, working with everyone from high end chefs like Heston Blumenthal to big food and drink companies in creating a deeper understanding of our sense of taste. Charles Spence is the author of Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating and he joins us from Oxford in England. Hello.

CHARLES SPENCE: Hello.

MF: What do you make of that cocktail? Lots going on there.

CHARLES SPENCE: Certainly a lot going on. What kind of [unintelligible] for me was on the one hand, the kind that brought to tears through nostalgic aroma smells. When you start to get into multi-sensory design around food and drink, if you do it the right way, quite often your diners or your drink can be brought to tears as kind of the ultimate maybe success you might say. Through the feel of the moss in the hands, the theatre of the pour and the smoke and the developing flavour profile, I think it had pretty much everything that you'd find in the book.

MF: How much of it though is the actual taste of the drink?

CHARLES SPENCE: Oh, taste is important. Sure. And I think we're all kind of under the impression, the illusion you might say, that what we kind of taste is really that stuff that's in our mouth we feel swilling around as we take a mouthful of that drink. But in fact, taste is really flavour. It really involves all the senses. It’s about the anticipation, the expectation. When you see that drink in front of you, what does your mind predicting it's going to taste like? It's about the smells, the moods, emotions, the sounds of the bubbling that we heard. All senses come together to give rise to kind of great flavour experiences and it’s as much of what's going on in your mind I think is really what's going on in your mouth.

MF: For $30. It really is too, the direction things are going in.

CHARLES SPENCE: That's right. If you're charging top dollar for your food or beverage, then it can’t just be about the food. There are some of those restaurants out there. When you’re looking at 1,500 euros, which is about two and a half thousand dollars a head for a tasting menu, but it's about the environment in which you're surrounded and maybe different projections, different sounds. A plate ware, glassware can't just be the stuff that we normally eat and drink from. It's got to be attention grabbing. It's got to be something you want to share on social media. And if you do that, you will create a sticky memory that will stay with you for a long time I think.

MF: Sticky is an important part of it too, isn't it, because we tend to forget the tastes of foods.

CHARLES SPENCE: The moment in the bar or the restaurant might last for an hour, maybe two or three, if you're lucky a whole evening. But then that's it. It's over. Most of the pleasure I think resides in the anticipation of going somewhere you've been looking forward to going to for ages, and the memories and the stories you tell afterwards. And those memories and stories aren't just like the real thing but a bit fainter. And when the chefs I work with, some of them who are passionate about the food they serve, when they send out questionnaires two or three weeks after people have been to the restaurant, being Jozef Youssef in particular, then people remember. I went, I remember I really enjoyed that dish. And when he probes into what was the flavours that went together in that dish that you enjoyed so much, you'll say something but it will be a complete fabrication, nothing to do with the actual flavours in the dish. And what really sticks in mind is the moment when the waitress comes out and sprays some aromatic essential oil over the dish and that theater is a really kind of sticky part of the experience.

MF: Charles, let's turn to something a lot more basic and a sound that's much more familiar to people just every day and something that's actually had quite a big influence on your professional career. Have a listen.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Chip bag being opened]

[Sound: Crunching on potato chips]

MF: Those are some potato chips. You may well have heard how crunchy the first was—crisp and crunchy—and the second one was a little bit soggy. You have a lot of relevant experience in this, don't you?

CHARLES SPENCE: [Chuckles] I’ve done more gastrophysics research on the potato chip as you call them than anybody else on the planet, I think. Not deliberately, not with forethought, but really accidentally. The first time I got interested in food and drink was with the sonic chip. Back in 2003 when we had hungry undergraduates here in Oxford and I was feeding them two tubes of potato chips. And each time they brought one to the lips to bite into it, I would change the sound, cutting just certain frequencies of the crunching sound. And what we found was that even though all we were changing the sound as you bit into the potato chip, we could make these things taste about 15 per cent fresher and crunchier simply by the particular sound properties that you heard.

MF: So whether the chip was—in fact the chip was always exactly the same, but because you changed the sound, the experience, it tasted differently to people?

CHARLES SPENCE: The multisensory experience, it is in all the senses and we all know I think how much we like the crispy, crunchy, crackly, creamy, carbonated, squeaky maybe even, these sort of properties and foods that define many of our snack food consumption. It’s really about the sounds.

MF: Even the opening of the bag which you heard so clearly there.

CHARLES SPENCE: Even opening the bag. And we find in Oxford if you rattle it really loud, a crisp packet, before we give you one to eat, then you were right—the crisp was that little bit crunchier than you would have done with a quiet or a silent packet instead.

MF: What about music? How much does music influence?

CHARLES SPENCE: A lot more than any of us think, I believe, and it influences all stages of experience from when we're sitting in a restaurant or walking down the aisles of the supermarket and thinking what shall I buy for dinner tonight? Through to when we're actually tasting, there's a whole new world of research out there, very surprising stuff kind of called sonic seasoning, which is the idea that you can bring out a certain taste, bring out a sweetness or bitterness or sourness or creaminess, even spiciness by playing particular kinds of music that seem to match or correspond to those taste experiences.

MF: When you're in for instance—and I know this was an experiment you've written about—in the wine section of a store, if they play Italian music, you go toward the Italian or French to the French.

CHARLES SPENCE: That's right. And these effects sometimes are not small. Sometimes they’re very dramatic. And yet when people are asked when they come away from the till, why have you bought Italian wine today? Then you say well, it was just going to go perfectly with the olives I've got and whatever else. And virtually no one realizes or admit that the sounds playing in the background have such an impact on the choices. The sales data tell a very different story. But also if someone is putting on some classical music, you better hold on to your wallet pretty tight because the evidence suggests that we'll spend more with classical music than say with top 40 hits.

MF: What is Kiki and Bouba?

CHARLES SPENCE: These are utterly meaningless words but they come out. They set up expectations about tastes and about shapes. Bouba and Kiki really originated back in the 1920s when a German psychologist drew a fluffy cloud-like shape and angular star-like shape and then he asked people okay, which of these two shapes is Bouba? The majority of people said Bouba, that's got to be the round fluffy cloud-like shape, and Kiki, that's just got to be the angular star-like shape. And back in 2006, we took that to the world of food and thought I wonder: do tastes, do flavours have shapes as well? Is something sweet like honey, is that Bouba-esque or is it Kiki-esque? Is it round or is it sharp? And most people when you ask them will intuitively say it's round, whereas bitter tasting food, sour tasting foods, most people will reach for an angular shape. Bizarre. But we all seem to make these associations and if you know about them, then you can design them into the shape of the chocolates you serve.

MF: Or why you see a star on a label for certain products like a beer.

CHARLES SPENCE: That’s it. For lots and lots of the beers that we find, we find that bitterness is angular, that carbonation is also angular, and most of those top brands from Heineken to Stella to Mahou to Estrella even—Star in Spanish—all have the angularity and very often redness as the label.

MF: You write a lot about utensils and the importance of what it is we eat with and you use a passage from Yann Martel that I'd like to play for you in a small reading now in your book. And this is a passage from Life of Pi from the Indian narrator’s perspective.

SOUNDCLIP

The first time I went to an Indian restaurant in Canada, I used my fingers. The waiter looked at me critically and said fresh off the boat, are you? I blanched. My fingers, which a second before had been the taste buds savouring the food a little ahead of my mouth, became dirty under his gaze. I didn't dare lick them. I wiped them guiltily on my napkin. He had no idea how deeply those words wounded me. I picked up the knife and fork. I had hardly ever used such instruments. My hands trembled. My sambar lost its taste.

MF: How does what we eat with affect what we're eating and how it tastes?

CHARLES SPENCE: Again, hugely I think. Does eating with hands make food taste different? The narrator thought so. And research that it really does at the first taste is with the hand and I see more chefs at the high end starting to deliver two, three, four, five, even a whole menu of 25 courses only to be eaten with the fingers. While plates and plating have evolved radically in the last few years, people are now serving food off slates and bricks and tiles, out of flat caps. The knives and forks we use to eat, they haven't really changed for a century. And when you think about it, they're really kind of boring and cold and hard and smooth—stainless steel or silver—with no thought to designing for the brain, for the taste buds and for the lips. I know now from the research that we've done in a restaurant in Scotland that food does taste better, you’re willing to pay more for it if you have a heavy knife and fork in your hand then a light canteen cutlery. Make that cutlery furry, it'll change the taste even more.

MF: Furry?

CHARLES SPENCE: Furry, indeed. I don't think we'll all be rushing out to buy furry spoons anytime soon, but I'll bet five to 10 years from today, we'll look back on 2017 and think god, wasn’t it so boring? Why did no one think about different ways of moving food from the plate or table to our mouth?

MF: And the plates and bowls—the crockery affects how much we eat. How does it do that?

CHARLES SPENCE: In a couple of different ways. On the one hand, there is research to suggest that if you serve the same amount of food from a smaller plate so it kind of overflows the edges, it would look like there's more than if I take exactly the same amount of food and put on a big white American plate where there’s lots of white space. It also effects that if you're eating snack foods, then if you put them on a red plate rather than a white plate, you'll just end up eating a little bit less than you would otherwise. It’s some sort of prime, some sort of notions of avoidance motivation, we think.

MF: Why do we drink more tomato juice when we're in an airplane flying?

CHARLES SPENCE: It has been a mystery for a while. But I think it has been resolved. There are about a quarter of people who fly who will only ever drink tomato juice in the sky. I would never ever order it when on the ground. Turns out that the dry air in the cabin, the kind of lowered cabin pressure and the loud sound of the engines, these things suppressed your ability to taste sweetness in food. They suppress your ability to taste the saltiness in food. So you have to add about 20 to 30 per cent more to a dish to make it taste the same up there as it would down here. But umami—the mysterious fifth taste beyond sweet, sour, salty and bitter that you find in tomatoes, mushrooms, anchovies—this fifth taste is enhanced under the conditions of loud background noise. Tomato juice tastes better in the air. It tastes brighter than it does on the ground and people are just sort of self-medicating in a way by going for that drink only in the skies.

MF: And you do it instinctively because I'm one of those people. I don't buy tomato juice. Never. But when I'm flying, I will order a tomato juice or I'll order a Bloody Caesar, Bloody Mary.

CHARLES SPENCE: Mhm.

MF: But that's going on as an instinct.

CHARLES SPENCE: As an instinct. And the question is how can you use those insights moving forward? Well, if you're providing the food for the passengers, you might think okay, isn't it time we started to move towards a more umami rich food on our menu?

MF: How important is it, who we eat with?

CHARLES SPENCE: At one end, what we're sort of seeing is that many people have most of their meals alone and that has really negative consequences in terms of the kinds of food behaviours one gets into. So having somebody there is good, but one has to be a bit careful as the number at the table go up because one of the strongest relationships that comes out of the research is that for every extra person at the table, you're going to eat a bit more. And by the time they're at six or seven other people at your dining table, you’re going to eat twice as much as you would have done by yourself and you can all imagine what the consequences of that might be.

MF: You get funding from the food and beverage industry. One of the things that surprised me from reading the book is that there's the feeling that the food industry is trying to make us fat or get us addicted to food. But actually there are a number of instances where they're trying to make things healthier, but they can't tell you that because it leads to sales going down.

CHARLES SPENCE: That's right. I think in the past maybe there have been those who have been trying to almost trick the brain by ramping up sugar, salt and fat in our foods to get us hooked. But these days there are more and more, I think, food companies out there who are—because of their own volition or because of government kind of enforcement—trying to reduce sugar, salt and fat in food. But when they do that to our favorite brands, you can guarantee people will write in and complain immediately, saying what have you done? You've changed my favorite product. Put it back the way it was. So what's the solution here? Maybe a one way forward is by using some of these insights from the gastrophysics by thinking about the colour, about the shape, all of these kind of product extrinsic cues can be modified, enhanced in order to perhaps deliver a little psychological sweetness say, while at the same time reducing actual sugar and leave the perception in the mind of the consumer the same. And one of the classic examples I really love from the book is we predicted in 2011. We said if you're a confectionery manufacturer or a chocolate manufacturer and you want to reduce sugar, why not make your product rounder because that will make it taste a little bit sweeter? And in 2014, Dairy Milk, kind of the classic British milk chocolate bar, just rounded off the edges of their pieces of chocolate and people wrote in and complained. What have you done? You’ve changed it. American takeover—you’ve changed our chocolate. It’s become sweeter. It’s become creamier. And in fact, the guys wrote back and said nope, we have done nothing to the formulation. All we have done is change the shape. So if they had actually reduced the sugar, they could have been onto a real winner there.

MF: But don't they want to use your research as well for nefarious purposes or just to get people hooked on things that maybe you know not necessarily good for them?

CHARLES SPENCE: I suppose all this research showing how easily our behaviour can be biased in different directions, must potentially be open to nefarious ends as you say. I won’t really do much about that. I mean the research, the evidence is just that. It's there. It can be used for good or for ill. We focus our research and those we choose to work with on the more positive end. And in fact, that's where most of the food and drink companies will come to us, with that very end in mind. And I think one can stick one's head in the sand and say I don't want to know about this because it could be used for bad ends. I think that's not the way to go. We should try and understand as much as we can about the factors that influence taste and flavour perception, what makes things memorable and enjoyable, and then use them wherever possible in order to try and nudge people towards a healthier and more sustainable diet, both for themselves and for the planet in the long term. That's where I see that part of the book is about, entomophagy, eating insects. One of the biggest kind of long term challenges is how to sort of nudge us all away from a meat-dense diet. There’s other sources of protein—insects are a great idea—but it is the one food you know that most people are adverse to in the West, couldn't imagine eating insects.

MF: Exactly.

CHARLES SPENCE: And if so gastrophysics can help make those critters tasty, desirable, then I think that would be a real success story and would have long-term benefits for us all.

MF: There are quite a lot of practical tips in the book as well about how you as a home cook might use this research to your advantage to making a better, more memorable dinner party. What tips could you give?

CHARLES SPENCE: So I guess people have different aims and objectives at home. It could be about how can I eat a little bit less but not be hungry, how could I create the most memorable dinner party for my guests they've ever experienced, that they're talking about for years? The tasting menu can be thought of as in fact creating lots of small bites and dishes, lots of different flavour experiences. That's more likely to stick in memory than just having a one course or a three course meal where your brain is switched off after the first mouthful.

MF: People kind of forget the middle. The middle dishes.

CHARLES SPENCE: That’s right.

MF: And you often spend a lot of time and a lot of money. And one of your big tips is like focus on the last thing and the first thing.

CHARLES SPENCE: And also try and if you surprise your guests with an amuse-bouche—that's what again many restaurants will do and that's a kind of surprise gift—and then any way of bringing a bit of theatricality into proceedings. Why not get a little atomizer around, put some of the essential oil, spray it over the dish and they will remember and they will be talking about it for a long time to come.

MF: There are other uses of course, any number of them, but I'm thinking as well for instance, our senior population that could benefit from your research.

CHARLES SPENCE: Indeed. There's a lot of opportunity. And with a mother myself who is just in middle stage dementia now, I can see has gone into care and I can see some of the problems with the food provision. It’s not taken seriously. It's not deemed important. And yet from something as simple as changing the color of the plate ware, going from white plates—which can make it hard to see this creamy mashed potatoes, white chicken—to more high contrasts, blues or red plates, can actually enhance the contrast and make it easier for those who are late stage of life who find it harder to see their food, to identify it and then they will consume more. And I point to a study from a Salisbury District Hospital here in the UK show that many of these patients who are underfed when they go into hospital and if not when they go in, they’re almost guaranteed to be underfed by the time they come out. By serving these patients from blue plates led to a 30 per cent increase in consumption. That increase in consumption can lead to enhanced recovery, reduced hospital stays and so potentially could lead to a reduction in expenditure in the long term.

MF: That is a lot to think about there. If you're having a takeaway coffee—a lot of people do here—you should take the lid off.

CHARLES SPENCE: Absolutely. And inhale the aroma [sniffs] the nasal sniff is such a key part of the experience, especially for coffee, one of those drinks where people very often say it smells so good, but then when I taste it, sometimes it can be a little disappointing. By having a lid on that prevents you from being able to sniff the contents seems like such a bad design decision. Really it's the nose it's doing 75 to 95 per cent of the work.

MF: Ice water with your dinner?

CHARLES SPENCE: No, no, no, no. All bad. [chuckles] So water before your dinner can be good to help sort of swell your stomach and you may eat a little bit less if you're a middle-aged man, but iced water is a really bad idea. And it has been suggested by some that it may be part of the cause of the growing obesity crisis in North America that so many North Americans are fond of iced water put at the table wherever you go out to eat. What does that do? It's going to turn off your taste buds effectively, chill the tongue down and we all know with say, a cola drink if it's cold, it's just about the right level of sweetness. But when it's been sitting there for a while and it warms up, suddenly it tastes sickly sweet.

MF: Sickly sweet. It’s true.

MF: Same drink. It’s just a function of the temperature and your taste buds and how well they work. So iced water is probably the worst thing you could have if you’re wanting to enhance your experience of food and be satisfied with things that are a little bit less of the healthy stuff in there.

MF: So many of these things make so much sense when you just say them or explain them.

CHARLES SPENCE: All common sense kind of. [laughs]

MF: But it doesn’t occur to you at all in the moment. Sort of as a conclusion, what do you think gastrophysics tells us about the human pleasures of eating?

CHARLES SPENCE: Ultimately I think it should be about fun, to be about playing with one's food. We're told not do it as a kid, but I think it's up for grabs and I think it’s about kind of constant process of experimentation. Try things out for ourselves. Sometimes when we do these little experiments, they back up our intuition, but very often by having the evidence to hand, that can help you make better informed decisions I think about what you serve, how you serve it, where you serve it, that will hopefully lead to benefits for us all.

MF: Charles Spence, a fun surprising read. Thanks very much for speaking to us.

CHARLES SPENCE: A pleasure. Thank you.

MF: Charles Spence—he is the head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford and the author of Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating. And do send us your insights into what makes your food and drink taste better. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for the summer series, On Drugs. Finally today, a few minutes ago you heard our lucky producer Karin Marley sampling that multi-sensory cocktail called the Spring Thaw. So let's put a soundtrack to it to complete the multisensory experience. Here is Ella Fitzgerald with “It Might As Well Be Spring”. I'm Mike Finnerty. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current. We'll see you tomorrow.

[Music: “It Might As Well Be Spring” – Ella Fitzgerald]

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July 11, 2017 full episode transcript

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