The War on Taste

Tech’s quest to delete the tongue

Photo by Mgg Vitchakorn on Unsplash

When will flavor be digitized? Ever since technology platforms began to emerge as the dominant way humans experience the world, I’ve been wondering how our sense of taste would eventually be conquered. For a while it seemed like it might survive — this last bastion of direct interaction with the natural world. How else do you explain over the course of the tech revolution the parallel boom in foodie-ism?

There may be millions of food websites, and hundreds of millions of instagram feeds devoted to the look of food, but none can convey the actual experience of taste

Unlike the visual environment which nowadays we increasingly take in secondhand through photography and photo manipulation, food we actually directly experience. We crush biological constructions in our very mouths, rub sweetnesses and savories against receptors on our tongues and use our minds to shape all that stimuli into a gustatory picture we call taste.

Sound, too, we increasingly experience secondhand. Instead of being delivered directly to the ear through the singing of a familiar human voice or a virtuoso’s bowing on catgut echoed across the spruce and willow of a string instrument, we get auto-tuned…