Which product the sensory evaluator prefers, by the way, is irrelevant. He or she may not like any of them, or even the general category. (Langstaff, for instance, rarely drinks beer for pleasure.) “You don’t ask your gas chromatograph if it likes the olive oil it’s analyzing,” Langstaff told us at the tryouts. The goal is to be as neutral, as analytical—as “Mr. Spock”—as possible.
This perhaps explains how it was possible for a team of Canadian researchers to find nine men and women willing to create a canned-cat-food flavor lexicon and a set of tasting protocols. For humans. Tasting cat food. And they couldn’t be shy about it. The protocol for evaluating the “meat chunk” portion (“gravy gel” having its own distinct protocol) stipulated that the sample be “moved around mouth and chewed for 10 to 15 seconds, [and] a portion of the sample swallowed.”
The idea was to come up with a sort of code, a way to translate the mute preferences of cats. In theory, companies could use human tasters and sensory profiles of the foods cats like in order to predict the success of new formulations. In practice, the technique never really took off.
Because there was a concern that people with a “strong negative attitude” toward tasting cat food would drop out before the project ended, panel applicants at the initial screening were asked not only to describe the cat foods but also to rate them according to how much they liked them. (The average rating, I am gobsmacked to report, fell between “like mildly” and “neither like nor dislike.”) Thanks to this unusual data set, we now know that humans prefer cat food with a tuna or herbal flavor over cat food with the flavor descriptors “rancid,” “offaly,” “cereal,” or “burnt.”
But humans, as we are about to see, are not cats.
* * *
* A few words on sniffing. Without it (or a Harley), you miss all but the most potent of smells going on around you. Only 5 to 10 percent of air inhaled while breathing normally reaches the olfactory epithelium, at the roof of the nasal cavity.
Olfaction researchers in need of a controlled, consistently sized sniff use an olfactometer to deliver “odorant pulses.” The technique replaces the rather more vigorous “blast olfactometry” as well as the original olfactometer, which connected to a glass and aluminum box called the “camera inodorata.” (“The subject’s head was placed in the box,” wrote the inventor, alarmingly, in 1921.) * An Internet search on the medical term for nostrils produced this: “Save on Nasal Nares! Free 2-day Shipping with Amazon Prime.” They really are taking over the world.
? “Skunky” is between “rotten egg” and “canned corn” on the Defects Wheel for Beer. (Langstaff designed diagnostic wheels for off-flavors in wine, beer, and olive oil.) In the absence of skunks, a mild rendition of skunkiness is achieved by oxidating beer, that is, exposing it to air, as by spilling it or leaving out half-filled glasses.
* In 2010, inventor George Eapen and snack-food giant Frito-Lay took the comparison beyond the realm of metaphor. They patented a system whereby snack-food bags could be printed with a bar code allowing consumers to retrieve and download a fifteen-second audio clip of a symphonic interlude, with the different instruments representing the various flavor components. Eapen, in his patent, used the example of a salsa-flavored corn chip. “A piano intro begins upon the customer’s perception of the cilantro flavoring. . . . The full band section occurs at approximately the time that the consumer perceives the tomatillo and lime flavors. . . . A second melody section corresponds to the sensation of the heat burn imparted by the Serrano chili.” U.S. Patent No. 7,942,311 includes sheet music for the salsa-flavored chip experience.
* It could be worse. In 1984, goat-milk flavor panelists were enlisted by a team of Pennsylvania ag researchers to sleuth the source of a nasty “goaty” flavor that intermittently fouls goat milk. The main suspect was a noxious odor from the scent glands of amorous male goats. But there was also this: “The buck in rut sprays urine over its chin and neck area.” Five pungent compounds isolated from the urine and scent glands of rutting males were added, one at a time, to samples of pure, sweet goat milk. The panelists rated each sample for “goaty” “rancid,” and “musky-melon” flavors. Simple answers proved elusive. “A thorough investigation of ‘goaty’ flavor,” the researchers concluded, “is beyond the scope of this paper.”
* Probably more. The Handbook of Fruit and Vegetable Flavors includes a four-page table of aroma compounds identified in fresh pineapple: 716 chemicals in all.
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I’ll Have the Putrescine
YOUR PET IS NOT LIKE YOU