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

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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Episode Transcript

Francis (00:58):
Hey there everybody, and welcome back.
It's Mark France, the restaurantguys, and our guest today is
Barbara Stuckey.
She is a professional fooddeveloper.
Uh, she is with Mattson North,America's largest independent
developer of new foods, and shehas written a book, it's called
Taste What You're Missing byBarb Stuckey.
Barb, welcome to the show.

Barbara (01:18):
Thanks for having me.

Francis (01:19):
Um, you are a food inventor.

Barbara (01:23):
That's right.

Francis (01:23):
Food's already been invented for, right?

Barbara (01:28):
Yes.
We work for, um, for companiesboth large and small, some of
the largest food companies inthe world, restaurant chains,
and then entrepreneurs who, um,want to get into the food
business or in the case of thelarge companies want to get into
new food businesses.
And so we come up with the ideasand what opportunity they should
be pursuing.

(01:49):
Uh, what food format it shouldtake, how they should market it.
And then we do the prototypinghere in our lab in Northern
California, and we make theideas come to life with edible
prototypes.

Mark (02:01):
Barb, I want you, I want our listeners to know they don't
think that we're doing somethingoutside the box.
You wrote an awesome book.
Otherwise, with that particularresume, because you probably
would not have been a guest onthis, on this particular show,
you deal in in an

Francis (02:15):
an area of the food world that's just.
Something that we aren'tconcerned with.
You know, we, we try, tend tostay away from processed foods
and highly processed foods.
Um, but there are a huge amountof the food that we eat and your
experience, and I wanna talkabout your experience because it
has informed this really smart,really wonderful book that, uh,
can help everyone appreciate thefood that eat better.

(02:35):
I mean, there were, there arethings that I learned in reading
the book that were fantastic.
But tell us about, so you mostlyyou're dealing with in your
professional life, processedfoods, right?

Barbara (02:44):
Yes, I am.
I, I think you could safely saythat, but I also wanna remind
you that some of the mostfamous, most delicious things in
the world are processed.
Cheese, for example, isprocessed wine is processed.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
chocolate

Barbara (02:59):
is processed, coffee is processed.

Francis (03:01):
so it's

Barbara (03:02):
not necessarily a bad word.

Francis (03:03):
You know what?
I would agree with all of thosethings, but, um.
Pop-Tarts are also processed.
And that's a little, and that'sa, and that's in a different
category of food.
And I'm not saying don't evereat a Pop-Tart.
I'm saying that there's a,there's a distinction here what
I was really amazed at is youtalk in your book about some.
You looked for a book to talkabout taste.
You looked for a book that you,you realized that you were

(03:25):
talking to clients who reallycouldn't analyze tastes as well
as you could, and this book isto help raise awareness overall.
I mean, what, what led you towrite this book?
Realizing that most people don'tunderstand what they're tasting.

Barbara (03:38):
That's primarily it.
I mean, when I started 15 yearsago in this, this world of food
development, I was thrown intothe lab here and, and our lab is
staffed with 35 foodtechnologists and eight chefs,
and they were tasting foods in away that I felt like I was
unable to do.
So there was something going onwhere they were able to get more

(04:01):
sensory information from thefood.
When I use the word sensory, Imean.
All five of the senses, how weexperience food through all five
of, of the senses, which is whatI, I focus on in the book.
So I started to think about,well, what is it that they're
experiencing that I'm not, andwhy is the difference here?
I mean, am I just not as well indoubted as they are in the

(04:23):
tasting equipment department?
Or it does it have to do withtheir training or their
experience?
And, and so I went out and Ilooked for a book that was just.
Something that would explain fornon-scientific people, which I
am, uh, what is happening whenyou put food in your mouth and
you chew and you swallow and yousay you like some things and you

(04:46):
hate others, like, what is goingon?
What is happening when we taste,and I wanted just a, you know,
an easy reading book and I foundthat that book didn't exist.
Mm-hmm.
And so I decided I would writeit.

Francis (05:00):
it's funny'cause you make some, uh, distinctions in,
in your book when you weretalking about your initial
experience, realizing thatpeople who are professionals in
the industry, some of them don'thave the, the vocabulary to
understand.
or understand the vocabulary to,to really analyze taste.

Mark (05:14):
and some of them talk on a level that, that the average lay
person would never comprehend.

Francis (05:19):
Right.
But, but we're not, when, whenyou, you talk about addressing a
group of executives that, a, aclient that had hired you and
you said, you know, you realizethat these, this group of food
professionals who was sellingfoods knew more about the
subtlety and complexity of winethan they did of food.

Barbara (05:34):
That's right.
Well, and that makes sense,right?
Because everybody's heard ofwine tasting classes and wine
comparisons and verticaltastings and horizontal
tastings.
We do a lot of critical tastingof wine, yet we don't
necessarily do the same of food.
Mm-hmm.
And I, I thought that that waspretty.
Odd given that only about 35% ofthe population in America drinks

(05:57):
wine, but a hundred percent ofus eat food.
So

Francis (06:01):
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 (06:06):
Mine too.
I happen to be part of that 35%.
But yeah, I, I wanted to reallykind of give the same
background, the same structureto someone who was interested in
learning more about.
The subtleties of taste in theirfood, and so I spend a lot of
time in the book breaking itdown into its very component

(06:27):
parts, which is the first thingthat they teach you when you
start to taste wine.
They'll teach you to look at thevisual appearance of the wine.
They'll teach you to smell thewine before you even taste it,
and then they'll teach you totaste it and keep it in your
mouth, swish, swallow, andbreathe again.
All of these are the sametechniques that you should use

(06:48):
when you're eating food, but wejust don't approach food in the
same way.
And, and I really wanted tochange this.

Francis (06:55):
Well, let now I couldn't agree more.
And I think you say some thingsthat are, are really reminiscent
of, uh, another guest we have onthe show in front of ours, Gail
Green, who always equates sexand food, you know, as a, as
using all the senses.
And you, you do the same.

Barbara (07:10):
Absolutely.
I mean, we take sex veryseriously.
I do as we should.
I, I do as we should.
And, and I'm gonna guess thatwhen you are, um, engaged in the
act that you're not doingsomething like watching TV or
reading a magazine or driving.
And yet we do all of theseactivities while we're eating.

(07:31):
And so what it does is itdistracts us from this
incredibly sensual act ofstimulating all five of our
senses.
So I, I just wish that we wouldtake food more seriously and
treat it more like sex.
And if we did that, we'd get somuch more pleasure out of it.

Mark (07:48):
And, and let's go back to the, to that wine analogy just
for a minute.
We don't drink wine to quenchour thirst.
Right.
Okay.
We eat food to to quellourselves.
To quell our hunger.
Yeah.
Okay.
A lot of people eat food toquell their hunger, but if we
took that the same amount oftime that we took on tasting
wine, because it's, it'ssomething that we're not doing
just to quench our thirst.

(08:09):
If we did the same thing withfood, if we didn't treat it as
just something to sate ourhunger, we could get a lot more
enjoyment out of it.

Barbara (08:16):
Absolutely.
And that is a really importantdistinction.
I, I think that when you talkabout eating critically and, and
eating where it's not just tosatisfy your hunger.
Most people think about diningout in restaurants and find
situations where you are.
Paying very much attention toyour food, but I am arguing that
those other 99.9% of theoccasions where you are eating

(08:40):
at your desk or you're eatinglunch at the office or you're
eating breakfast at home orwhatever, the, the occasion is
that if you started to thinkabout that occasion and that,
that that ability andopportunity to suck more sensory
pleasure out of your food, wemight get more pleasure out of
it, and as a result.

(09:02):
Eat less of it and eat less ofthe crap that we eat in this
country.

Francis (09:07):
You know?
Let me ask you a question.
I, I think this be, it begs aninteresting question, do,
because we, you know, there'sthis picture of a guy sitting on
a couch watching a movie sort ofmindlessly, you know, eating
something out of a bag.
Uh, do you think that, um.
The, the culture that we have ofconstantly being entertained by
either a television or a movieor the computer or at our desk

(09:30):
while we're eating multitasking.
Do you think that gives, um,some food makers who don't care
so much about quality, do youthink it makes it easier for
them to pass off?
Just the simplest, most garishflavors, you know, you gimme
salt, gimme sweet, gimmecrunchy, and you know, you don't
have to pay much attention'causethe person who's eating, it's
not paying that much attention.

Barbara (09:49):
You know, I think that's a really, really
insightful thought.
I, I've never really thoughtabout that, but, but of course
it's gotta be true.
Um, yeah, I, I think if we weremore discriminating in the foods
that we choose and we had alittle bit more education as