WHEN I TOLD people I was traveling to Food Valley, I described it as the Silicon Valley of eating: fifteen thousand scientists dedicated to improving or, depending on your sentiments about processed food, compromising the quality of our meals. At the time I made the Silicon Valley comparison, I did not expect to be served actual silicone. But here it is, a bowl of rubbery white cubes the size of salad croutons. Andries van der Bilt brought them from his lab in the brusquely named Department of Head and Neck, at the nearby University Medical Center Utrecht.
“You chew them,” he says.
Van der Bilt has studied chewing for twenty-five years. If a man can be said to resemble a tooth, van der Bilt is a lower incisor, long and bony with a squared-off head and a rigid, straight-backed way of sitting. It’s between meals now in the camera-rigged Restaurant of the Future. The serving line is unstaffed, and the cash registers are locked. Outside the plate-glass windows, it’s snowing again. The Dutch pedal along on their bicycles, seeming daft, or photoshopped.
The cubes are made of a trademarked product called Comfort Putty, more typically used in its unhardened form for taking dental impressions. Van der Bilt isn’t a dentist, however. He is an oral physiologist. He uses the cubes to quantify “masticatory performance”—how effectively a person chews. Research subjects chew a cube fifteen times and then return it in its new, un-cube-like state to van der Bilt, who pushes it through a set of sieves to see how many bits are fine enough to pass through.
I take a cube from the bowl. Van der Bilt, the cameras, and emotion-recognition software called Noldus FaceReader watch me chew. By tracking facial movements, the software can tell if customers are happy, sad, scared, disgusted, surprised, or angry about their meal selections. FaceReader may need to add a special emotion for people who have chosen to have the Comfort Putty. If you ever, as a child, chewed on a whimsical pencil eraser in the shape of an animal, say, or a piece of fruit, then you have tasted this dish.
“I’m sorry.” Van der Bilt winces. “It’s quite old.” As though fresh silicone might be better.
The way you chew is as unique and consistent as the way you walk or fold your shirts. There are fast chewers and slow chewers, long chewers and short chewers, right-chewed people and left-chewed people. Some of us chew straight up and down, and others chew side to side like cows. Van der Bilt told me about a study in which eighty-seven people came into a lab and chewed an identical amount of shelled peanuts. Though all had a full complement of healthy teeth, the number of chews ranged from 17 to 110. In another project, subjects chewed seven foods of widely varying textures. The best predictor of how long they chewed before swallowing wasn’t any particular attribute of the food. The best predictor was simply who’s chewing. Your oral processing habits are a physiological fingerprint. As with the finger kind, most of us have no idea what ours look like.* We couldn’t pick our own chewing mouths out of a lineup, although it would be interesting to try.