The Economics of Taste

Fiction has always fascinated human mind. Be it a story of lovers fighting against the evil society or story of the human race fighting against the aliens. Fiction is like exemplifying ones dream. After writing on all the serious things, I though I should try my hands on the matter of fiction. Fiction that would be as real as it would be imaginary, as inventive as it would be simple. What best could it be than blending science with economics?

From my childhood I have been taught about the 5 human senses. Vision, touch, smell, auditory senses and last but not the least taste. Through my readings and experiences I have always seen the first four senses being very popular among the fiction writers or in the scientific community. We have entire fields of specialization in the first four senses in the medical studies. Taste has always been the ignored one, though we use taste in the most artistic form possible, like taste for music…etc. This is the story of taste. When I was a kid I was once traveling to my native place, a remote village in one of India’s most economically undeveloped areas, Marathwada. While strolling through the farms one of my local companions gave me a dry leaf to chew and spit it. After going through this exercise he gave me some sugar and to my shock and disbelief I had lost the taste for sugar. Sugar tasted like ash. Fortunately the effect of the leaf was a temporary one and I regained my taste senses in an hour or so. Fast forwarding to the present, I live in the bay area work for a multinational bank and am constantly worried about the fat accumulation in my body. I try switching to the 0% fat substitutes just to realize that it tastes the same as the sugar after having the shrub leaf I had eaten during my childhood in the remote farms of India. This entire cycle of experience just made me realize one obvious fact, “duh, bad food tastes good” and good food tastes like Sh**. Well philosophically anything in excess is bad once we define excess. A logical extension to good food being not great to taste would be improving the taste of good food. Lot of research dollars today go in making the 0% fat food taste good but with limited success.

Well the question I have is why spend money on just changing how good food tastes than change the senses to make any food taste good. It is like regulating our taste buds. If there is a spectacle for our eyes, and hearing aids for our ears, why cant there be a taste bud regulator for our tongue? (I know it would not be to amplify the signals as the spectacles or hearing aids do but to change the nature of these signals entirely, think of the 3D cinema) It would be like eating the same content but making it taste like what I would like to eat in reality. It would be like eating the healthiest food available and making it taste like the unhealthiest food (by which I mean the tastiest) one can imagine. Only if man can conquer the sense of taste the way he has conquered (manipulated, I can’t help being sarcastic) the other senses. Imagine a world where you are not worried of how many grams of carbs you had for the day. A world where the food content does not dictate the taste rather you dictate the taste of the food content.

How would a simple taste bud regulator look like? It could be as simple as pre-eating the taste, which you want from the food you are going to eat. This pre-eating could be in different forms. The simplest being like the shrub I ate as a kid or a taste capsule that would dissolve in your mouth. The most sophisticated form would be by having an artificial layer of sensory material made of intelligent nano particles around your tongue that could produce the taste you like depending on the signals you send through a remote control in your hand. Imagine changing taste of someone else’s food with your remote control ;). It’s like the way my primary school teacher used to say, no invention is good or bad but depends on the way it is being used. There are innumerable ways of devising the mechanics of taste control. I would rather leave it to the real scientists when the get interested in this subject.

You might be wondering by now, where is economics in all this or did I just forget about it? If you thought that the idea of controlling the taste was wild (out of whack) you should stop here, as the next part gets even wilder.

Think about how the world would change if we could control our taste senses. Think about the different problems that would be solved, Obesity, to start with. Everyone eats same nutritious content but for some it is the tasty oily French fries and for some it’s the cuisine from the best chef in France. Industries that will suffer include pharmaceutical, restaurant businesses, hospital systems (less number of people will be unhealthy), etc. Farmers will grow the most nutritious food. Industry will put more money in researching more nutritious food without worrying about how it would taste. The decoupling of taste and nutrition would be a boon for the humankind. Be it the Prairies in the US or the Deccan plateau in India, everyone will have the same crop. Socialists will love this as taste will no longer be the function of the supply of a particular edible commodity. Capitalists will love the new form of change in the competitive landscape with many old big companies losing to new breed of lean and mean operations. To put it in a statisticians’ language the world would be an easy place to optimize meeting the needs of every human being. If you exaggerate more there would be no conflicts between young children that don’t want to eat because they don’t like the taste and their mothers trying to feed them. The options are innumerable.

This was indeed my silly experiment with fiction. I will never be able to express fiction like the expert story tellers as Yann Martel, but this at least this would complete my fantasy to fantasize about “The Economics of Taste”.

To end the fantasy I wish we could have something similar for human minds that would make everyone like every other person making the world a better place to live.