The Restaurant Guys

TEASER! Barb Stuckey: Taste What You're Missing! *V*

• The Restaurant Guys • Episode 128

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This is a Vintage Selection from 2012

The Conversation

The Restaurant Guys talk with Barb Stuckey, taste expert, about the difference between taste and flavor. They discuss why you need to contemplate what you eat and use all five senses when you taste. Hear about Barb’s UNfocus tasting group that tested how impairment impacts your perception of food.

The Inside Track

The Guys and Barb discuss analyzing food the way we dissect wine. 

Barb: We do a lot of critical tasting of wine, yet we don't necessarily do the same of food. I thought that that was pretty odd given that only about 35% of the population in America drinks wine, but a hundred percent of us eat food.

Francis: I would like to point out that that's our favorite 35%, but I get your point.

Barb Stuckey on The Restaurant Guys Podcast 2012

Bio

Barb Stuckey is a leading food developer, taste expert, and author of Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good. As Chief New Product Strategy Officer at Mattson (the largest independent food and beverage innovation company in North America) she’s spent over two decades helping create the products that shape how we eat.

Known as a “taste educator,” Stuckey translates the science of flavor into everyday language. Barb was instrumental in helping The San Francisco Cooking School integrate the science of taste into their curriculum by teaching the fundamentals of taste to each incoming class during the school’s 10 years in San Francisco. She spoke at the NextGen Restaurant Summit, gave a TED Talk on umami and has contributed articles about the food industry to Forbes.com.

Info

Barb’s book

Taste: Surprising Stories and Science about Why Food Tastes Good 

By Barb Stuckey

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Francis:

Hey there everybody, and welcome back. It's Mark France, the restaurant guys, and our guest today is Barbara Stuckey. She is a professional food developer. Uh, she is with Mattson North, America's largest independent developer of new foods, and she has written a book, it's called Taste What You're Missing by Barb Stuckey. Barb, welcome to the show.

Barbara:

Thanks for having me.

Francis:

Um, you are a food inventor.

Barbara:

That's right.

Francis:

Food's already been invented for, right?

Barbara:

Yes. We work for, um, for companies both large and small, some of the largest food companies in the world, restaurant chains, and then entrepreneurs who, um, want to get into the food business or in the case of the large companies want to get into new food businesses. And so we come up with the ideas and what opportunity they should be pursuing. Uh, what food format it should take, how they should market it. And then we do the prototyping here in our lab in Northern California, and we make the ideas come to life with edible prototypes.

Mark:

Barb, I want you, I want our listeners to know they don't think that we're doing something outside the box. You wrote an awesome book. Otherwise, with that particular resume, because you probably would not have been a guest on this, on this particular show, you deal in in an

Francis:

an area of the food world that's just. Something that we aren't concerned with. You know, we, we try, tend to stay away from processed foods and highly processed foods. Um, but there are a huge amount of the food that we eat and your experience, and I wanna talk about your experience because it has informed this really smart, really wonderful book that, uh, can help everyone appreciate the food that eat better. I mean, there were, there are things that I learned in reading the book that were fantastic. But tell us about, so you mostly you're dealing with in your professional life, processed foods, right?

Barbara:

Yes, I am. I, I think you could safely say that, but I also wanna remind you that some of the most famous, most delicious things in the world are processed. Cheese, for example, is processed wine is processed.

Speaker 3:

chocolate

Barbara:

is processed, coffee is processed.

Francis:

so it's

Barbara:

not necessarily a bad word.

Francis:

You know what? I would agree with all of those things, but, um. Pop-Tarts are also processed. And that's a little, and that's a, and that's in a different category of food. And I'm not saying don't ever eat a Pop-Tart. I'm saying that there's a, there's a distinction here what I was really amazed at is you talk in your book about some. You looked for a book to talk about taste. You looked for a book that you, you realized that you were talking to clients who really couldn't analyze tastes as well as you could, and this book is to help raise awareness overall. I mean, what, what led you to write this book? Realizing that most people don't understand what they're tasting.

Barbara:

That's primarily it. I mean, when I started 15 years ago in this, this world of food development, I was thrown into the lab here and, and our lab is staffed with 35 food technologists and eight chefs, and they were tasting foods in a way that I felt like I was unable to do. So there was something going on where they were able to get more sensory information from the food. When I use the word sensory, I mean. All five of the senses, how we experience food through all five of, of the senses, which is what I, I focus on in the book. So I started to think about, well, what is it that they're experiencing that I'm not, and why is the difference here? I mean, am I just not as well in doubted as they are in the tasting equipment department? Or it does it have to do with their training or their experience? And, and so I went out and I looked for a book that was just. Something that would explain for non-scientific people, which I am, uh, what is happening when you put food in your mouth and you chew and you swallow and you say you like some things and you hate others, like, what is going on? What is happening when we taste, and I wanted just a, you know, an easy reading book and I found that that book didn't exist. Mm-hmm. And so I decided I would write it.

Francis:

it's funny'cause you make some, uh, distinctions in, in your book when you were talking about your initial experience, realizing that people who are professionals in the industry, some of them don't have the, the vocabulary to understand. or understand the vocabulary to, to really analyze taste.

Mark:

and some of them talk on a level that, that the average lay person would never comprehend.

Francis:

Right. But, but we're not, when, when you, you talk about addressing a group of executives that, a, a client that had hired you and you said, you know, you realize that these, this group of food professionals who was selling foods knew more about the subtlety and complexity of wine than they did of food.

Barbara:

That's right. Well, and that makes sense, right? Because everybody's heard of wine tasting classes and wine comparisons and vertical tastings and horizontal tastings. We do a lot of critical tasting of wine, yet we don't necessarily do the same of food. Mm-hmm. And I, I thought that that was pretty. Odd given that only about 35% of the population in America drinks wine, but a hundred percent of us eat food. So

Francis:

I would like to point out, I would like to point out that that's our favorite 35%, but I get your point, but I get your point.

Barbara:

Mine too. I happen to be part of that 35%. But yeah, I, I wanted to really kind of give the same background, the same structure to someone who was interested in learning more about. The subtleties of taste in their food, and so I spend a lot of time in the book breaking it down into its very component parts, which is the first thing that they teach you when you start to taste wine. They'll teach you to look at the visual appearance of the wine. They'll teach you to smell the wine before you even taste it, and then they'll teach you to taste it and keep it in your mouth, swish, swallow, and breathe again. All of these are the same techniques that you should use when you're eating food, but we just don't approach food in the same way. And, and I really wanted to change this.

Francis:

Well, let now I couldn't agree more. And I think you say some things that are, are really reminiscent of, uh, another guest we have on the show in front of ours, Gail Green, who always equates sex and food, you know, as a, as using all the senses. And you, you do the same.

Barbara:

Absolutely. I mean, we take sex very seriously. I do as we should. I, I do as we should. And, and I'm gonna guess that when you are, um, engaged in the act that you're not doing something like watching TV or reading a magazine or driving. And yet we do all of these activities while we're eating. And so what it does is it distracts us from this incredibly sensual act of stimulating all five of our senses. So I, I just wish that we would take food more seriously and treat it more like sex. And if we did that, we'd get so much more pleasure out of it.

Mark:

And, and let's go back to the, to that wine analogy just for a minute. We don't drink wine to quench our thirst. Right. Okay. We eat food to to quell ourselves. To quell our hunger. Yeah. Okay. A lot of people eat food to quell their hunger, but if we took that the same amount of time that we took on tasting wine, because it's, it's something that we're not doing just to quench our thirst. If we did the same thing with food, if we didn't treat it as just something to sate our hunger, we could get a lot more enjoyment out of it.

Barbara:

Absolutely. And that is a really important distinction. I, I think that when you talk about eating critically and, and eating where it's not just to satisfy your hunger. Most people think about dining out in restaurants and find situations where you are. Paying very much attention to your food, but I am arguing that those other 99.9% of the occasions where you are eating at your desk or you're eating lunch at the office or you're eating breakfast at home or whatever, the, the occasion is that if you started to think about that occasion and that, that that ability and opportunity to suck more sensory pleasure out of your food, we might get more pleasure out of it, and as a result. Eat less of it and eat less of the crap that we eat in this country.

Francis:

You know? Let me ask you a question. I, I think this be, it begs an interesting question, do, because we, you know, there's this picture of a guy sitting on a couch watching a movie sort of mindlessly, you know, eating something out of a bag. Uh, do you think that, um. The, the culture that we have of constantly being entertained by either a television or a movie or the computer or at our desk while we're eating multitasking. Do you think that gives, um, some food makers who don't care so much about quality, do you think it makes it easier for them to pass off? Just the simplest, most garish flavors, you know, you gimme salt, gimme sweet, gimme crunchy, and you know, you don't have to pay much attention'cause the person who's eating, it's not paying that much attention.

Barbara:

You know, I think that's a really, really insightful thought. I, I've never really thought about that, but, but of course it's gotta be true. Um, yeah, I, I think if we were more discriminating in the foods that we choose and we had a little bit more education as