Van Vliet is nodding. “People eat physics. You eat physical properties with a little bit of taste and aroma. And if the physics is not good, then you don’t eat it.”
Crispness and crunch are the body’s shorthand for “healthy.” The snack-food empires have cashed in on this fact, producing crisp, crunchable foods that appeal to us but fail to deliver in terms of health and survival.
A good amount of thought appears to have gone into designing optimal crunch. “People like it most when it is around 90 to 100 decibels,” says van Vliet. To achieve that, you need about a hundred bubbles bursting in rapid succession. “An avalanche of cracks in your mouth! To the ear it sounds like one sound, but in fact it is made up of more than one hundred sound bursts.” This is achieved by messing around with the bubbles and beams—their size, their brittleness.
It’s a marvel: such sophisticated physics in the service of junk food. I ask van Vliet which crispy-crunchy snack foods he has helped design. He wears a look that conveys both amusement and something dimmer. “Oh, the food companies are not using this science. They just make a product, give it to somebody, and say, ‘How do you like it?’”
René confirms this. “They are so low-tech. They have no clue.” It takes five to ten years for the discoveries of food physics to find their way into industry.
What is the point, then? For van Vliet anyway, the point is physics. Earlier, when I’d complained that the food-texture journals were “just a lot of physics,” van Vliet seemed taken aback. “But physics is so nice!” It was as though I’d insulted a friend of his.
René cranes his neck toward the steam tables. “Can you stay for lunch, Ton?” It’s 12:30 and all we’ve had are cassava chips. With his tongue, René works some free from a molar.*
Van Vliet considers this. “Well, I would have to tell my wife. You see I’m a good Dutch man, I go home for lunch every day! On my bicycle.” In his eight years at Wageningen University, he adds, he has never tried the food in Restaurant of the Future. We are unable to tell if this is a yes or a no. René asks him whether he has a cell phone, to call his wife.
“Yes, we have one at home.”
We let it drop. Later, walking to the parking lot, we glimpse van Vliet on a campus bike path, pedaling into the slanting snow.
* * *
* Fingerprints come in three types: loop (65 percent), whorl (30 percent), and arch (5 percent). Oral processing styles for semisolid foods come in four: simple (50 percent), taster (20 percent), manipulator (17 percent), and tonguer (13 percent). Thus the millions of variations that make you the unique and delightful custard-eater and fingerprint-leaver that you are.
* I nominate Rhode Island.
* Assuming equal terrain and baggage count, about as fast as a tortoise—.22 miles per hour.
* Its full medical name, and my pen name should I ever branch out and write romance novels, is palatine uvula.
* Technical term: toothpack.
8
Big Gulp
HOW TO SURVIVE BEING SWALLOWED ALIVE
IN THE COLOR plate that illustrates the Jonah story in my mother’s Bible, the fisherman is halfway in the mouth of an indeterminate species of baleen whale. He wears a sleeveless red robe, and his hair, just starting to recede around the temples, is slicked back with seawater. One arm is outstretched in an effort to swim free. Baleen whales are strainer feeders. They close their mouth on a large gulp of ocean and use their tongue to push it forward through the vast comb of baleen, expelling the seawater and retaining small fish, krill, anything solid. It is a gentle, perhaps even survivable, way to be eaten. The prey is rarely much larger than a man’s foot, however, and the whales are built accordingly.
“Baleen whales have very small gullets,” says Phillip Clapham, a whale biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “They could not possibly swallow a hapless victim of God’s wrath.” But a sperm whale could. Its gullet is wide enough, and though it has teeth, it doesn’t, as a matter of course, chew its food. Sperm whales feed by suction. Evidently quite powerful suction: in 1955, a 405-pound giant squid—six foot six minus the tentacles—was recovered intact from the stomach of a sperm whale caught off the Azores.