WHY DO WE LIKE SOME FOODS AND WHY IS IT SO HARD TO RECREATE GRANDMA’S COOKING, EVEN IF WE FOLLOW THE RECIPE STEP BY STEP? THESE QUESTIONS SEEM TRIVIAL BUT ARE REALLY COMPLEX AND REFER TO NEUROBIOLOGY

Why do we like some flavors a lot and why is it so difficult to recreate any of grandmother’s dishes, even if we follow the recipe step by step? These questions seem trivial but the answers are complex and involve the branch of science neurobiology.
One of its most illustrious representatives, Professor Gordon Shepherd, who teaches neurobiology at Yale School of Medicine, and was the manager of the "Journal of Neuroscience", has recently wrote a book, which for some is the foundation of a new scientific discipline: "Neurogastronomy", or how the brain creates flavors. According to Shepherd, as stated in the Italian edition of the U.S. magazine "Wired" (www.wired.it), we do not use our taste buds for about 80% of flavors, but rather our sense of smell.

Every time we taste food, we are using our sight, touch and hearing senses. It was an Italian, Massimiliano Zampini, who in 2008 proved that the perception of fragrance (smell), and therefore of goodness, can be strongly altered by changing the sound of jaws during mastication (which earned him an IgNobel, the award for useless scientific discoveries). Also the areas related to memory, emotion, motivation, language and expectation tell us what we are eating tastes like”.

“The creation of flavor”, explained the scientist, who is trying to model the neuronal microcircuits involved, “requires more brain work than do many other activities; there is the urge to eat, remember feelings, emotions related to what we like or we do not like, the sense of gratification, so different parts of the brain work together. We can therefore easily see that taste and quality are not only in the food, and we are only at the beginning of the journey that can lead us to understand why some people develop an addiction”.
Maybe that's why we cannot quite make grandmother’s ragout to taste like hers, even if the ingredients are the same and we even use the same old pan. “While grandmother is cooking and while you are setting the table, your brain begins to be influenced by the expectation of the flavor that is being created, so that when you sit down and the pasta with ragout sauce is put on the table, the areas that involve memory, expectation, emotions and language are already activated”.

"Talking specifically about basic taste (and not flavor)”, continued Shepherd, “we must consider five characteristics: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami. Every human group has developed preferences for certain tastes, and transmitted them culturally, from generation to generation, and that is why today we can ask why different populations have different tastes. But how many differences are there when we think of the nose that has hundreds of different types of receptors and is sensitive to thousands of molecules?”
This brings us to junk food, "junk food works in the brain just like drugs. Walking through an airport I have been bombarded by images of attractive salamis and sweets. Where were the vegetables? Meanwhile, the newspapers are full of statistics on childhood obesity and health problems related to food. It is not the children’s fault. Put a plate of chips and one of broccoli in front of a little boy and he will choose chips, but what would his parents do? We are faced with a challenge that is often dealt with only in school cafeterias: nutritional re-education, which will take a very long time”.