Alex was doing a workshop in Westchester last month and one of the chefs recommended this book: Why Humans Like Junk Food: The Inside Story on Why You Like Your Favorite Foods, the Cuisine Secrets of Top Chefs, and How to Improve Your Own Cooking Without a Recipe! That’s a mouthful right there and kind of a long, clunky title, which may be why so few of us have heard of this book. We should know about it because it’s pretty awesome. It’s very readable and chock full of information on sensory science. It breaks down most of our favorite foods and explains what makes them taste so good and how they interact with our bodies.
How many of us know that butter, like vanilla, has an aroma that is resistant to satiety, meaning that we can happily smell it for very long periods of time and that it has MSG and the nucleotides that boost our ability to perceive umami? Or that our stomachs and small intestines have their own sense receptors that analyze the food we eat and can have an impact on our food preferences? Or that spices really do make us feel good?
Everyone who works with food or cooks at home or loves to eat should read this book. It’s informative, conversational, and a great resource for your library. Now if only it was available for the Kindle.
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