Is It Real?

Applying New Food Thinking to an Increasingly Artificial Foodscape

Feb 21, 2025

Dear readers, what fun to read your disgusting food experiences!

As promised, this is the paper I submitted for our Food Philosophy and Ecological Perception module in the Master of New Food Thinking Program at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy.

There weren’t a lot of guidelines, essentially we needed to demonstrate that we are putting in the work. Hopefully for you, also, it will explain a bit about what I have the glorious opportunity to study here.

We haven’t recieved grades or specific feedback yet, but feel free to share your thoughts. Thanks for reading, and for your support!

Classes and lectures and food labs and field trips, of course, but much of what I’ve learned has been from my sister-classmates, especially when we cook for each other.

“He was conscious of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares, long, long, forgotten.”

― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Even in a dream, Ebenezer Scrooge, in the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol, sensed aromas that triggered important memories. Significantly, Dickens described the widely experienced phenomenon that odors are connected closely to memory. I’ve long known this, before knowing the neurological reason, in the immediate recollection of my grandmother’s kitchen whenever I smell fresh-baked bread.

In studying osmospheres — roughly, our personal smelling space, as described in class by Elena Mancioppi — we saw deeper connections than just odor and memory. We learned how we perceive our surroundings in part through aroma; how we have precious little control over our personal osmosphere, such as when an overly perfumed person walks by; and how we become accustomed to familiar scents that help us define our sense of place. In this way, Scrooge was not connected through aroma with food, but through “thoughts, hopes, and joys, and cares.” When I started paying more attention to this, not just by being mindful to it but by truly focusing on it, I could easily — if surprisingly — begin to see these connections. I was startled when, after just a few weeks of living in Italy, I returned to my flat after a busy day, breathed in the aroma, and immediately felt a much-relieved sense of “I am home now.”

While osmopheres comprise all aromas, the most powerful scents for many come from food. For me, that fresh-baked bread, or melted chocolate or simmering caramel, or a spicy curry sauce, or a bubbling cassoulet on a cold winter’s day — all of these bring me back to the exact place and time I first encountered them.

But as our cultures get further away from our cooking roots and consume more highly processed foods, we — as capitalists, of course — find ways to package, “improve” and particularly monetize scents. I was once contacted by a “scent marketer” who promised to make my chocolate store smell more like chocolate, a challenging feat given our retail shop and confectionary kitchen have long been infused with a deep chocolate aroma. At the time I laughed, and yet, several years later when I opened a new store that only sold and did not make confections, I immediately began using artificial chocolate scents (along with videos of the chocolate-making process from the kitchen) in an attempt to recreate the feeling of “locally handmade” for customers.

In a more extreme example, fast food giant KFC recently introduced the Bucket of Chicken Candle, “with notes of chicken and browned flour paired with peppercorn and celery, and a base of oregano, sage, and garlic,” and the Buttery Biscuit Candle, featuring “notes of honey and baked flour with hints of caramel, butter, and salt, as well as buttermilk and toasted vanilla.” The company has previously marketed chicken-scented sunscreen and fire logs, for people to enjoy the aroma of their foods at home, anytime, without even coming close to the actual food.

Are the aromas of chocolate and fried chicken more, or less, real if they aren’t in the place where they usually occur? What is real, then, and what is artificial?

These lines blurred further when our class learned virtually all truffle-scented shelf-stable foods are artificial, and yet in many ways still natural, or at least virtually identical to natural. Black truffles are usually imitated with two chemicals, dimethyl sulfide and 2-methylbutanal. Meanwhile, white truffle scent is typically mimicked with the molecule bis(methylthio)methane. These chemicals — along with many others — occur naturally in the truffles that actually come from the ground, but the scent diffuses within a week, rendering the specks of dried truffle in many of these products purely visual and aromatically useless. In the same way the “artificial” chemical vanillin recreates the main aroma and flavor — but not the full and fully aromatic complexities — of a vanilla bean, the “natural” but long-lasting aroma of truffles can be best, and most cost-effectively, produced in a lab.

What is real, and what is artificial?

While people who appreciate good food can be led to believe their pricey truffle oil or potato chips are made with real fungi, non-cooks can similarly be influenced by strong, if unfamiliar, aromas. Last summer, as I started to prepare a giant vegetarian paella for a food festival in Maplewood, Missouri, several passersby enthusiastically inquired about the “amazing” smell, which was simply olive oil and button mushrooms. I kept wondering, as I simmered these two common ingredients down to a flavorful essence, do these people not ever cook food? How far have we gone away from real food, and the resulting real aromas?

As Riccardo Migliavada told us in the Food Psychology course, perception helps us make sense of the world, so the scent of dimethyl sulfide/truffle informs an experienced gastronome that the experience they are about to have would be rich, and justifies the price paid. Food psychology, as defined by Migliavada, gives us tools to understand, predict, and improve the way people make decisions about food. So if food is the single largest lever to optimize both human health and the environment, we need to learn how to adjust it.

This is exactly the lever I’ve tried to pull over the past 16 years as the owner of Kakao Chocolate and co-owner of Tale to Table LLC, a confectionary shop and specialty food store/cooking school. I’ve touted Kakao as “all natural, with no artificial flavors, colors, sweeteners, or preservatives,” and shared many simple but delicious European foods and recipes at Tale to Table. Even before I was aware of the Slow Food movement, I was trying to promote real foods made with many Slow Food values.

Our storytelling takes place at chocolate tasting parties and cheese and wine pairing dinners, where we shared the origins of each item tasted: the inspiration for and simple ingredients used in the confections; the local family farm raising and milking Jersey cows to make award-winning cheese; the Spanish pigs raised on acorns and the long process that results in succulent jamón de Bellota. We made every attempt to connect the foods we were tasting to their geographic origins, how they were made, and the stories behind them. We constantly try to put meaning behind what our guests were eating.

I have experienced significant meaning, for example, when I enjoyed sherry and jamón on a restaurant patio in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain, the only area in the world those two delicacies are produced. Is it then as “real” to experience that sherry, with jamón taken out of a vacuum-sealed bag and served on a plastic plate, at a picnic table in Missouri?

As I try to differentiate the real from the artificial, I must consider when Andreas Weber taught us we cannot separate our personal search for meaning from the world, which of course I’m learning to better understand with Migliavada’s lever. If we use that lever to change eating habits — of ourselves or others — we can also consider Nicola Perullo’s concept of “haptic taste,” where taste is not a singular one-way sensory experience, but a mutual relationship, with a back-and-forth as we experience ourselves in a relationship with the world that is ever-changing. Additionally, Lisa Heldke introduced us to the philosophy of eating as “an activity in which one (freestanding) substance ingests another (freestanding) substance and turns it into parts of itself.” In this way, we take each element of food — both artificial and natural — and use them as nutrients or building blocks, even as the lever moves back and forth.

And so we take the natural and the artificial, the real and the fake, the locally produced and the packaged-and-imported, and we consume it, we interface with it, we relate with it, we become one with it. And so we become, as physical entities, both real and artificial.

Heldke also introduced us to the idea that problems are solutions, and that we ourselves are parasites of a sort. And Gabriele Volpato asserted that human beings are the most effective invasive species the world has produced. How then can we reconcile the real and the artificial, the good (if there is any) with the bad (if there is any)?

In the 1997 movie The Fifth Element, the antagonist Zorg pushes back the idea of life as good and destruction as bad. “Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder and chaos. Now take this empty glass. Here it is: peaceful, serene, boring. But if it is destroyed,” — he pushes the glass off the table and it shatters on the floor, even as several machines appear to clean up the mess — “look at all these little things! So busy now! Notice how each one is useful. A lovely ballet ensues, so full of form and color. Now, think about all those people that created them. Technicians, engineers, hundreds of people, who will be able to feed their children tonight, so those children can grow up big and strong and have little teeny children of their own, and so on and so forth. Thus, adding to the great chain of life. You see, father, by causing a little destruction, I am in fact encouraging life.”

So it is with our Western diet, with tens of thousands of people employed by companies participating in various stages of what we call food production, contributing in their own way to eventually create food that nutritionists deem healthy, even though they are mass-produced, mostly artificial, and highly processed.

Several years ago I attended a presentation at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis ,Missouri, where food scientists presented to our group a “healthy” protein bar. I read the label and asked, “Does this have any real ingredients in it?”

“No, it’s made completely from things we’ve created here,” he answered proudly.

Similarly, I recall eating at a casual chain restaurant in the United States and receiving an entrée that was still partially frozen, apparently having been manufactured at company headquarters or elsewhere, packaged, frozen, transported, and (partially) reheated before being plated and served.

What is real?

Are we changed by these artificial, highly processed foods? They may certainly change our bodies, but they also might change our minds, our desires, and our cravings. As a child and even a young adult, my favorite sweet treat was Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. When I opened a chocolate shop I knew I needed to make something similar, and so I created what we call a Peanut Butter Bonbon, proudly made with only milk chocolate, peanuts, and salt as ingredients. Yet still I find myself drawn to the familiar orange packaging (and, when I infrequently succumb to the temptation, I immediately regret it).

To counter these cravings, many Americans have taken to drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, which flood the body with artificial GLP-1 neurotransmitters. These, as we learned from Migliavada, communicate to our brain that we are satiated, calming our cravings to eat — both the good and the bad — for weeks at a time. Our osmopheres can be flooded with aromas that previously induced cravings, yet we are unaffected and we do not succumb to the cravings. The result is that people using these pharmaceuticals, as they meet their goal of losing weight, spend about 6-9% less on groceries, and up to 11% less on savory snacks. (Surely the snack food industry is working furiously to to counteract this.)

Perullo spoke of Haptic Taste as an ongoing process that changes us, so as the artificial neurotransmitter helps combat the artificial craving of the artificial food in an ongoing process where everything is affected, everything changes. Heldke’s parasites, including humans, and perhaps the artificial foods and drugs we create, survive and thrive, even as the real problems are entangled as artificial solutions.

So what is real? How can we tell?

To start, as Perullo suggested, rather than trying to become “experts,” we should work toward building “gustatory wisdom,” and truly participate when we eat. We should be aware, pay attention, feel and understand, and interact in our the back-and-forth relationship with food, with the ongoing experience. We need to apply our toolkit of New Food Thinking to keep our senses alert, stay intellectually curious, ask many questions, and hesitate just a bit before accepting nutrition and health claims at face value.

Meanwhile, we still have our joys and hopes, and the very real memories of old stories and freshly baked bread.

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