Taste of Place

Episode 4

Heat and Flavor

[00:00:00] Anna Sulan Masing: A Taste of Place, of time, of space, of memory. How do we find a way to belong, a way to look at the past and to build a future. My name is Dr. Anna Sulan Masing, and I hope to answer those questions as we explore taste and memory throughout this series. Welcome to Taste of Place, a Whetstone Radio Collective podcast.

[00:00:34] Anna Sulan Masing: In our last episode, we learned about the trade route of Sarawak Pepper from the contemporary farm to the metropolitan table. In this episode, Heat and Flavor, we explore the chemistry behind what flavor is, what flavor means to us culturally, and how Pepper is able to tantalize our tastebuds. I speak with food scientist, Dr. Arielle Johnson and food writer Ligaya Mishan to find [00:01:00] out about the science and the romance behind pepper and flavor.

[00:01:12] Anna Sulan Masing: Now that we are familiar with the commodity of pepper and the way this ingredient and plant has been essential in forming a global structure of trade, it's time to delve into the core question of Taste of Place. How does the past, our idea of nostalgia shape our concept of ourselves and the world around us? To begin answering this question, we need to start defining pepper as a flavor.

[00:01:40] Anna Sulan Masing: How does understanding the mechanics of flavor provide insight into our personal relationships with each other. To look at the science behind it all, I sought out an expert on flavor. 

[00:01:54] Dr. Arielle Johnson: Hi, I'm Dr. Arielle Johnson. I'm a scientist and scholar [00:02:00] of flavor. It's something I both study, teach, and apply creatively to food innovation at restaurants.

[00:02:07] Dr. Arielle Johnson: I'm calling from Brooklyn, New York. 

[00:02:09] Anna Sulan Masing: What does pepper mean to you? 

[00:02:12] Dr. Arielle Johnson: Where to begin? The interesting thing is absolutely everything about it. But the first thing that comes to mind is that pepper has one of my favorite flavor molecules in it, that's a Sesquiterpene called Rotundone. It's super potent. It was discovered actually in red wine, in Syrah wine, which often has black pepper notes.

[00:02:34] Dr. Arielle Johnson: They had for a long time not been able to identify where they came from until they got instrumentation sensitive enough to find this molecule and then immediately found it in black pepper as well. Special flavor, special molecule, definitely. 

[00:02:48] Anna Sulan Masing: Is there any other food or drink that comes to mind? 

[00:02:51] Dr. Arielle Johnson: I guess I put pepper on just about everything savory, but it probably plays the biggest flavor role just in terms of [00:03:00] how much it stands out to me when I make Cacio e Pepe and when I make scrambled eggs.

[00:03:05] Dr. Arielle Johnson: Yeah, just really good eggs with a lot of black pepper. Pepper is almost like an equal with eggs. 

[00:03:13] Anna Sulan Masing: As for myself for a long time, pepper was one of those things I used to find overpowering. That I only used as a base in cooking; onions, salt, pepper, but almost avoided at other times except for on scrambled eggs.

[00:03:30] Anna Sulan Masing: Peppercorn steak was never an order I would make. I only tried Cacio e Pepe in the last few years, but as I started looking into pepper and finding the various flavors and senses of different peppers, I truly fell down a rabbit hole. Despite spending the last decade researching pepper, I still can't wait to try more.

[00:03:54] Anna Sulan Masing: I now get very excited about cracking pepper whilst cooking. The idea of learning to [00:04:00] love something and understanding the inner workings of flavor is something Arielle explains to me in our conversation. But first, I needed to know what is flavor? 

[00:04:11] Dr. Arielle Johnson: Flavor to me is a multisensory perception, mostly constructed from our senses of smell and taste.

[00:04:22] Dr. Arielle Johnson: Our chemical senses, we create perceptions of smell and taste based on sensing molecules. It is this intimate relationship between. Smell molecules, taste molecules, and different perceptions and connotations in our brain. We use a lot of our brain to process flavor. I mean, we have initial input areas of our brain that process smell as its own sense and taste as its own sense.

[00:04:49] Dr. Arielle Johnson: Those recruit areas from the limbic system to give us kind of our emotional memories and shadings to those perceptions. And then [00:05:00] we also use our language centers. Lots of cognitive sort of higher parts of the brain as well. We understand flavor as almost unconscious or pre-conscious emotions and memories,

[00:05:13] Dr. Arielle Johnson: as well as references to other things we've tasted and smelled before, in addition to our emotional connections to those things. And then finally, as tertiary levels of language and description, understanding comes at bunch of different levels when it comes to flavor. 

[00:05:33] Anna Sulan Masing: Arielle has such a unique approach to the idea of flavor.

[00:05:37] Anna Sulan Masing: I was curious how she got into this research, how that affected her understanding of food and what makes a flavor taste good. Arielle tells me that she became interested in food whilst she was doing a bachelor's degree in chemistry at New York University. At the time, there was a set of collaborative lectures between the chemistry [00:06:00] department and the food studies department and some downtown New York chefs, and that's where it all began.

[00:06:07] Dr. Arielle Johnson: I sort of talked my way into their meetings and hung around until they were like, yeah, sure, you can research with us for your bachelor's thesis. I got super into it, into thinking about molecules and mechanisms and how that did stuff for cuisine and gastronomy. I moved to California and started doing a PhD and tried out a few different areas, but became very, very into flavor, both perceptually and chemically.

[00:06:37] Dr. Arielle Johnson: So I did a PhD where I was doing a lot of gas chromatography, mass spectrometry to essentially count smell molecules, and then a lot of formal descriptive sensory analysis. Essentially using a panel of trained humans as sensors to say what flavors were in things and at what intensities, and then building multivariate statistical models to figure [00:07:00] out which molecules were most correlated to which flavors and build this chemical sensory joint understanding of the flavors of things. 

[00:07:11] Anna Sulan Masing: But what makes flavor good?

[00:07:15] Dr. Arielle Johnson: The scientist in me would say that good flavor is an aesthetic question, and so science cannot really make any determinations about the nature of what that is. What we can do is identify things that we think are good, and then use chemistry or sensory science to figure out what properties of things correlate to that, and the less academic part of me will say that I've, just by my own sense of pattern recognition, trying to draw connections between what people tend to say is good flavor.

[00:07:51] Dr. Arielle Johnson: I think it tends to relate to intensity of flavors, so things with a lot of flavor at the forefront. Complexity of flavors, so things with a [00:08:00] more broader suite of of flavor molecules in them. Flavor tied to the original processes that usually create it. So using techniques at least on the molecular and biochemical level with heat or with enzymes or microbes that we've always used to create flavors. A lot of the way that I work with flavor in restaurants is making connections between what cooks intuitively know about flavors and compliment that with chemistry or microbiology or some other discipline that has looked at the same thing in a slightly different way and can bring a little bit of like mechanistic understanding to things.

[00:08:39] Dr. Arielle Johnson: One example might be fermentation. Fermentation, microbiologically defined is the transformation of ingredients by microbes. But from a flavor perspective, you are coaxing certain microbes to grow, and then in exchange they create new flavors for you on a molecular level, which is quite exciting in the kitchen because typically you [00:09:00] don't create flavors unless you are browning or roasting something.

[00:09:04] Dr. Arielle Johnson: Your ingredients come in with a certain amount of flavor and it's on you not to lose that flavor. but when you ferment stuff, you are creating acids and umami and different funky and floral and other flavors. I tend to talk to chefs about what flavor profiles they like and then figure out which conditions we need to tweak or dial in to get there, to get like more acidity or less acidity or a fun or flavor or less funky flavor, or like more umami or a better balance if we're like trying to get a certain flavor in a resturaunt,

[00:09:34] Dr. Arielle Johnson: it needs to be amazing, but we need to be able to get to it multiple times and then also communicate how to get there to others who can execute on it and do their jobs. When I'm cooking at home, I tend to be a lot looser and tend not to do the same thing twice. 

[00:09:54] Anna Sulan Masing: When we are eating and trying to understand the food that we eat,

[00:09:57] Anna Sulan Masing: is there a framework with which [00:10:00] we can understand flavor and how to talk about it? If we were to do a tasting of pepper, how do we go about understanding the sensation, what we are experiencing? 

[00:10:09] Dr. Arielle Johnson: There's two halves of that for me. So if we're talking about pepper specifically, one of the first things we can do is separate things that we are sensing by taste and touch versus things we are sensing by smell. Most of flavor is actually smell. The things that come from taste are really just sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. And there's probably taste sensations for lipids and other things. With pepper, bitter will come into it.

[00:10:32] Dr. Arielle Johnson: The other one's not so much. Spicy is actually not a taste. It comes from our sense of touch. So there are molecules, one of which is called piperine in the pepper, that stimulate one of our pain receptors. So we are physically experiencing pain when we're eating something like pepper or chilies or ginger.

[00:10:52] Dr. Arielle Johnson: All have molecules like that. So besides differences of intensity and bitterness and difference of intensity in spiciness, most of the [00:11:00] differences and nuance and characteristic interesting stuff in pepper is gonna come from smell. What I'd like to tell people is that when I say smell, we think of sniffing having something in front of your face and smelling it, but there's actually a secondary route by which we can smell with food in our mouths.

[00:11:14] Dr. Arielle Johnson: We're able to smell breathing in because the nasal cavity in the back of the throat are all connected. It's like one open space. So while you're eating, you have food in your mouth and those smell molecules are actually wafting up the back of your throat and being sensed inside your nasal cavity as smell. Your brain just plays a kind of translocating trick on you that it feels like it's coming from inside your mouth, but it's actually coming from your nose.

[00:11:38] Dr. Arielle Johnson: It's weird. Fascinating but weird. Both by sniffing and having food in your mouth, we're experiencing smells. And so for pepper, most of the differences in like dryness and woodiness or like floral or spicy aspects are gonna come from aroma. Once we've had that established and we're kind of separating, well, is this a taste sensation or is this a smell sensation?

[00:11:58] Dr. Arielle Johnson: Humans are [00:12:00] extraordinarily good at sensing flavor differences, but humans are extraordinarily bad at naming flavor differences. A lot of it is cultural. We don't, at least in Euro, British American culture, especially Anglo American culture, just don't talk about flavors a lot. Maybe in wine we'll discuss flavors, but it's not something we're discussing in a lot of detail besides like, is it good or is it bad?

[00:12:22] Dr. Arielle Johnson: We all pretty much have the capacity for noticing differences. It just gets tricky to put words to that. Fortunately, that almost all comes down to exposure and practice. So if we were tasting a bunch of different peppers, tasting side by side is cool to have two or three or four examples of something and smell them side by side and you'll be able to tell that they're different

[00:12:43] Dr. Arielle Johnson: and if you sit and marinate on it for a while, you can usually find some words that bubble up to describe what that is. And then the more that you do that, the better you get at it. So you might be able to sit down, smell something and say, I definitely get cedary and dry kind of resonance notes from this one is much more floral.

[00:12:59] Dr. Arielle Johnson: [00:13:00] The way to get there is definitely by paying attention and comparing. Some people literally produce more taste buds than others, so they have more sensitivities to those things. People have genetic variabilities in which smell receptors and how many of them they produce. With taste we have five types of receptors.

[00:13:19] Dr. Arielle Johnson: It's not like a crazy landscape. It's fascinating. With smell. We have between 250 to 400 different olfactory receptors, so there's a huge patchwork of what you might be more or less sensitive to. And some people that identify Rotundone, the pepper flavor molecule. There's some people that basically can't smell it except enormous quanties.

[00:13:39] Dr. Arielle Johnson: Everyone's hardware setup is going to be slightly different, but generally there's a common core of flavor to things that we can like agree on. 

[00:13:48] Anna Sulan Masing: This idea of positive association with food to develop flavor memory is really fascinating to me. How can we change our ideas around flavor? [00:14:00] Arielle contextualizes it for me by explaining the science behind the flavor of coriander.

[00:14:06] Dr. Arielle Johnson: A famous example, especially like in the US, is cilantro or coriander. I think cilantro is delicious. One of the freshest and grassiest and best herbs we can have. But to a lot of people, it tastes essentially like repellingly soapy. Two things contributed to it. One is some people just have way too much of one receptor that responds to some of the smells in cilantro.

[00:14:27] Dr. Arielle Johnson: So to them it is actually like far more intense than to other people. But also if you haven't tasted cilantro and formed positive associations to those flavors, the closest thing that you would commonly have a similar association to is soap, or like soapy flavors. These aroma molecules called aldehydes, and they're actually biosynthesized as breakdown products of fats and soap is a breakdown product of fat.

[00:14:50] Dr. Arielle Johnson: So if you don't have a reference point, that's where your brain goes. Smell, especially at the smell parts of flavor, are this open ended guide to fill in for [00:15:00] each of us or regionally to be able to find food that is good for us and avoid food that's not good for us. So we fill that in with experience

[00:15:07] Dr. Arielle Johnson: and when a aroma molecule docs with your receptors and a signal gets sent to your brain, that signal gets passed through the amygdala and through a lot of our emotional processing centers, even before it rises to the level of consciousness. So there's this very tight tie between both positive or negative emotions and smells and flavors.

[00:15:29] Anna Sulan Masing: The concept of reference points and flavor being so much a part of culture resonates with me and represents my pursuit in exploring a Taste of Place. As someone who grew up in both a Western and a Southeast Asian setting, what I find delicious has been very different to others around me. Over the years, I've also witnessed racism in the UK and New Zealand around food from outside of a Western context, with flavors unique to certain [00:16:00] parts of the global south being referred to as disgusting or worse.

[00:16:05] Anna Sulan Masing: What this does is denigrate a culture and therefore people who find these foods delicious. As my good friend and fellow writer, James Hansen often quotes to me when we see such things, "Don't yuck my yum." With this in mind, in an article that Arielle wrote for Mold Magazine, she says, "Cuisine is one of the most potent ways that cultural groups perform and define themselves and their history."

[00:16:34] Anna Sulan Masing: Here she tells me more about what she means by that. 

[00:16:38] Dr. Arielle Johnson: Very broadly speaking, anthropologically food is a huge part of culture. Cuisine and cooking and meals are sort of like a ritual that you perform over and over. It ties you to location through what ingredients you have access to. It's highly sensory, but it's something that you're literally taking into your body, so that level, it's like very intimate and repetitive.

[00:16:57] Dr. Arielle Johnson: And if people assimilate [00:17:00] to other cultures, foods are often, flavors are one of the things they'll often hold onto the longest. My grandmother will still cook Lithuanian pastries for Easter, even though she has not kept up the language or crafts like embroidery or traditional clothing, which I think her mother was doing, but didn't continue, but the food did. On a perceptual, biological, neurobiological level

[00:17:24] Dr. Arielle Johnson: besides nourishment, the main experience that you're having when you eat something is flavor, perception of flavor. When you are eating and perceiving flavor, you're constantly both recalling emotional connotations that you formed before to those flavors and sensations. Which if those are, Oh yes, this is what my mother always cooked for me, or, Ah, yes, this is what we always eat on this holiday,

[00:17:54] Dr. Arielle Johnson: the pleasantness and the, you know, intricacies of the flavor are one thing, but every time you take a bite calling up these memories and [00:18:00] these emotions, you're also adding to those. So through repetition or through emotionally loaded or emotionally comfortable situations, family situations, community situations, it's like a constant feedback loop

[00:18:14] Dr. Arielle Johnson: of sensory situations and then emotional connections to those sensory situations. What perceptually happens while you're eating a cuisine for your family or your people is that you are experiencing and tightening all these emotional ties every time that you do it. Through observation we know that food is very important, but what is culture?

[00:18:34] Dr. Arielle Johnson: You could define it as things that you do a lot that you have positive associations to with people that are near you. So on a more like macro level, there's thousands or millions of people doing the same thing. So they form same positive associations, but from person to person, you cook a dish, you create an aspect, an instance of a culinary item, and then share it with someone.

[00:18:57] Dr. Arielle Johnson: And then they're both drawing [00:19:00] up their positive connotations to that and building them stronger. In terms of our personal histories, histories within families or other like close ties, you can't really recreate a feeling, but you can recreate or create another instance of a flavor and communicates something to somebody that goes beyond words, right to their emotional centers.

[00:19:24] Anna Sulan Masing: I love the phrase instances of flavor. It is so hard to find the right way to articulate these binding relationship forming moments, and yet flavor and food can do just that. Understanding history or indeed building histories and creating a culinary landscape of flavors and memory is something I explore further.

[00:19:47] Anna Sulan Masing: So I reached out to food writer and journalist Ligaya Mishan. While Arielle investigates and studies flavor, Ligaya communicates flavor through her writing, which closely [00:20:00] follows what Arielle spoke about how we understand flavor through the use of our language centers. 

[00:20:06] Ligaya Mishan: I'm Ligaya Mishan and I write for the New York Times for T Magazine and also for the food section.

[00:20:13] Ligaya Mishan: I write about food and culture and sometimes the arts. 

[00:20:18] Anna Sulan Masing: What does Pepper mean to you?

[00:20:20] Ligaya Mishan: I just wrote a piece about chili peppers, which got that name because people from the west wanted them to be pepper, because pepper was the key to fame and fortune at the time. But I think that because of that, I often first think of chilis.

[00:20:36] Ligaya Mishan: Pepper, I just think of as an essential. It's in everything. Why wouldn't you put it in everything? Why wouldn't you always want that little hum? I do automatically think of black pepper because for me, growing up, white pepper wasn't something that I was aware of being in food that I ate. My background is that my mother's from the Philippines, my father's from England.

[00:20:55] Ligaya Mishan: And I grew up in Hawaii, so there were just a lot of different influences going on. [00:21:00] I didn't really think about where things came from, and at the same time, I knew where everything came from. I'm half Filipino and most of my friends were Chinese and, and I lived in a state where there were lots of Japanese and all of these foods, all of these ingredients were present.

[00:21:15] Ligaya Mishan: I knew that the origins of many of the things I ate came from somewhere else. They were also just the, the daily things I ate. So this idea, they seemed to belong in the West because they were in the west. I was in the west, but I always had a sense that, oh, in the West we just have stuff from all over the world, everywhere.

[00:21:32] Ligaya Mishan: And also when I would travel, you would see your stuff from the west that was in Asia. So I, I just felt like everything was mingling all the time. Only later did I learn how ugly some of the history of that mingling is.

[00:21:47] Anna Sulan Masing: Ligaya wrote a column in the New York Times called Hungry City that featured eating spots and cuisines that were underrepresented in mainstream media. Which means that some of her readers would've been unfamiliar with the flavors she was writing [00:22:00] about. I want to know how she conveys flavor, what that process is for her, and also how she engages with foods and flavors that are new to her.

[00:22:09] Anna Sulan Masing: I also want to know how she approaches the myriad of ways cooking presents itself in New York City. 

[00:22:17] Ligaya Mishan: I often think that the particular restaurants that I wrote about, were less formal, sometimes closer to what home cooking could be, or at least that was always the dream. The flavor can be so many things in this context.

[00:22:28] Ligaya Mishan: We have so many ways of approaching it. The purity of really great ingredients, grown naturally. There might even be a connection to the person who grew them. Different cultures where they talk about the flavor of somebody's hands that you know that this person made this dish. But just a home cook. But there's something so special to the way that they make that.

[00:22:49] Ligaya Mishan: And then the chefs who are making food that we've never seen before, introducing us to flavors that we might never understand otherwise. So there's such a range, and that's part of what's [00:23:00] exciting about eating. Sometimes we wanna eat simply and sometimes we want to eat something I have no idea and never be able to replicate it.

[00:23:07] Anna Sulan Masing: I really love that idea of the flavor of someone's hands. Flavor is such a personal thing, how someone interprets that ingredient or combining things to create a specific thing is their hands. It's lovely. So visual. Do you think there is such thing as good flavor? 

[00:23:24] Ligaya Mishan: People are drawn to so many different things, which is part of the fun.

[00:23:29] Ligaya Mishan: There are gonna be things that we are perhaps predisposed not to like, and someone could change our minds. That's the exciting possibility. Not every flavor is universal, but somebody could change your mind about it. 

[00:23:40] Anna Sulan Masing: That's lovely. And obviously language is your key into flavor. How do you use language to convey flavor?

[00:23:47] Anna Sulan Masing: When you encounter a flavor that is new to you, how do you start to try and unpack those flavors to then explain it to other people? 

[00:23:57] Ligaya Mishan: Because I write for the New York Times, we are writing for [00:24:00] everyone. Now, of course, everyone includes many different groups of people. For some of whom the food I'm writing about is totally ordinary, something that they eat every day and to others is a total unknown.

[00:24:12] Ligaya Mishan: Part of my approach is balancing those things to give enough information that the person who knows nothing will learn something, but also not to treat the food as if it is in any way, wait a minute, this forbidden word exotic. To whom is it exotic? 

[00:24:28] Anna Sulan Masing: Ligaya explains to me that most of the things she eats are outside the traditions that she is most familiar with.

[00:24:36] Anna Sulan Masing: She's always trying to learn the perspective of the person from who the food or dish is ordinary, and to understand and write about it on those merits. And to try and teach a little bit to those who are new to it. 

[00:24:49] Ligaya Mishan: We have to write about a sensory experience, but all we've got is words, and we're constantly trying to communicate things that are amorphous and they end up as just these lines on a page.[00:25:00] 

[00:25:00] Ligaya Mishan: So I think that there's the problem of describing the food in a sensory way, and I think this is why food writers are, at least I fall into this trap of overwriting sometimes because how do you convey this sensory experience and you're grasping at analogies and metaphors and adjectives, and it's so easy to pour it on, to do it too much because you really want someone to know, Well, this is what it tasted like, but it's impossible.

[00:25:26] Ligaya Mishan: I did have an editor give me some fantastic advice very early on when I was complaining that I was running out of words, and he said, stop writing about the food, which was brilliant. Stop just describing it. Learn about the people who made it. Also, knowing the history of a dish can change the language you used to describe it.

[00:25:44] Ligaya Mishan: I do a lot of research because I feel like my palate might lead me astray. My palate's only familiar with a certain set of flavors. So I'll read to see how to somebody who eats this all the time, how would they describe this? And it's just fascinating the vocabulary out there that exists for describing food. And so [00:26:00] then I think about whether my own response fits in with that and whether it makes sense.

[00:26:04] Ligaya Mishan: And what does it really mean? Like when somebody says something is floral or woodsy or herbal, you know, what are those notes? For one piece, I talked to a flavor scientist and it was very interesting because of course for her, things really do break down into these very specific compounds. She said something interesting about pepper, which is that for her, as she'd grown up in the Midwest and she said the first time that she tasted cracked black pepper it, she said, It's just another universe.

[00:26:30] Ligaya Mishan: Why would you ever go back? 

[00:26:32] Anna Sulan Masing: When it comes to pepper and especially talking about Sarawak pepper, words such as woody and floral have come up a few times. It wasn't until Ligaya mentioned it here, and Arielle's explanation linking creation of culture with repeated instances of flavor, that made me think. What does woody even mean? Is my meaning of woody with my Malaysian and New Zealand, and now British reference points the [00:27:00] same as someone else's?

[00:27:02] Ligaya Mishan: I would try to look at specific trees and obviously then fragrance is part of it. Obviously musky is often said there is dusty, which sounds negative or musty, but means something slightly different. When I think of it in terms of food, it's not negative, but it gives you a sense. There is something like the pages of an old book.

[00:27:22] Ligaya Mishan: I just remember having a box made of mahogany when I was a kid and the smell, or maybe it was cedar. These are slightly different, so I, I think that's where I would try to go deeper. 

[00:27:31] Anna Sulan Masing: We then discuss flavors and ingredients that are familiar to our backgrounds of Southeast Asia and the complex ways non-western foods fit into the dining landscapes in cities like New York. Cosmopolitan hubs, but also powerhouses of trends. 

[00:27:48] Ligaya Mishan: Whenever I've had to describe what pandan tastes like, for example, you can't describe it, and I have all of these crazy phrases I've used over time to try to describe what pandan tastes like. And then it just becomes fun.[00:28:00] 

[00:28:00] Anna Sulan Masing: I love durian, trying to explain to people, durian is a delicious flavor. It can be quite difficult, but then I think that does sort of tap into this idea of value and where we place value on food and flavor. 

[00:28:13] Ligaya Mishan: This is a complicated issue. In the West, we're accustomed to thinking of a certain set of flavors as being worthy of commanding high prices.

[00:28:21] Ligaya Mishan: French cuisine, we'll do it for Italian. We also think of pasta as a comfort food. So we allow this range for Western cuisines that we don't always in the west allow to non-Western cuisines, right? We're starting to see higher end restaurants succeeding Chinese and Indian food. There is still, I think, a prejudice against that because people in the West are familiar with that

[00:28:47] Ligaya Mishan: food from early immigrant restaurant renditions of it as just being cheap. But I've thought about this a lot in terms of, people talk about also how they love, they love the little restaurants, the little [00:29:00] cheap restaurants. But loving those restaurants requires this sort of permanent underclass, right? These restaurants can never charge more, even if the pricing of ingredients and labor goes up.

[00:29:11] Ligaya Mishan: But to have them, we need them not to make money. And at the same time, of course, not all of us can spend a lot of money when we go out to eat. So it becomes this very complicated thing where it can be hard to judge food outside 

[00:29:23] Ligaya Mishan: of that rubric. 

[00:29:25] Anna Sulan Masing: We then discuss the idea of the other, the exotic, which is of course, what pepper was to Europe and the medieval times and beyond, and many spices still occupy that space within the western world today.

[00:29:38] Ligaya Mishan: Throughout history, we've constantly been drawn to the other. In some ways, everything is other to us. Every encounter is an encounter with another. Just some others are more familiar. But I remember reading, and I can't remember which philosopher this was, but it was someone who was specifically saying, This moment of eating, it's a moment of possible danger.

[00:29:57] Ligaya Mishan: Every time you eat, something comes inside [00:30:00] you that could kill you theoretically, but you also need it. You need food for survival. Eating becomes a constant encounter with the other, and so we're always drawn to throughout history, right? The moment spices appeared in the West. They were like, Why did we not know about this?

[00:30:16] Ligaya Mishan: We need more of this. 

[00:30:19] Anna Sulan Masing: You're right, we are so drawn to the others. There is so much storytelling there that some of it isn't negative or sometimes it isn't a power play that otherness isn't a power play. Black peppercorns does definitely give a heat. 

[00:30:31] Ligaya Mishan: Pepper has become our word for all kinds of heat, right? So Sichuan peppercorns are not pepper either,

[00:30:36] Ligaya Mishan: that's a berry of some kind. I actually just wrote a piece that hasn't come out yet, which is about how during the pandemic in America, sales of hot sauce went through the roof. Everybody suddenly wanted to eat this and it's something that's been a while coming. You know, there are all of these TV shows that celebrate people eating chilies. In terms of heat,

[00:30:56] Ligaya Mishan: a lot of it is about how much can you take. So there's a macho [00:31:00] approach and breeding ever hotter chili peppers. But at the same time, people for whom heat was not a natural part of their diet are becoming more adventurous. This is true of flavors in general. There are things that are a step too far.

[00:31:12] Ligaya Mishan: Maybe Americans will never embrace jellyfish or tendon, but they have started eating things that few generations to go would've been beyond the pale. So the hope would be that the more broadly we eat, the more interconnected we are. This is very, a very hopeful thing to say. 

[00:31:29] Anna Sulan Masing: This is a good spot to talk about what isn't pepper.

[00:31:33] Anna Sulan Masing: On our first episode we talked about how pepper corns white and black come from the plant, Piper nigrum, but there are a lot of other plants that are also swept into being labeled as pepper. There are chili peppers that are part of the capsicum family and our indigenous to Central and South America thought to have been first cultivated in what we now know is Mexico, around 7,000 BCE.

[00:31:57] Anna Sulan Masing: In Caz Hildebrand’s book, “An Anarchy of [00:32:00] Chillies”, the word chili is from the Aztec Nahuatl language and pepper was added because Christopher Columbus and his gang thought it was related to the black pepper we're discussing in this season. Columbus's journey to the Americas was in hope of finding a way to the Spice Islands of Indonesia and other spiced riches in the East.

[00:32:21] Anna Sulan Masing: The Chili's migration story is woven with its own stories of colonialism, including Columbus's raping and pillaging of the Americas and the pursuit of capital. After Columbus brought a chili plant back to Spain in their 1490s, it moved through to the Ottoman Empire via Hungary in the early 1500s and arrived in other parts of Asia via Portuguese merchants.

[00:32:45] Anna Sulan Masing: Then there is Sichuan pepper, which is part of the wider Rutaceae family, also known as a citrus family. It is a shrub native to China and Taiwan, and most commonly associated, as you can guess by its common name with [00:33:00] Sichuan cuisine. When eaten, it gives a numbing sensation called mala. And pink peppercorn is more closely related to cashew and mango than the black peppercorn and is from the Andies.

[00:33:11] Anna Sulan Masing: The fruit are from the Peruvian pepper tree and are dried looking a lot like peppercorns. To quote Caz Hildebrand in her book, The Grammar of Spice, "dried the hollow berries can be used in the same way as pepper, bringing a pleasing fruitiness and a note of pine to a dish." There are other peppers too, including ones within the peppercorn family.

[00:33:33] Anna Sulan Masing: The desire for flavor that gives heat seems to be in so many cultures. This desire has traveled the globe many times over, and each of these plants deserve their own space to tell their own stories. With all this in mind, I wanted to know how Ligaya brings in various histories into her writing. 

[00:33:54] Ligaya Mishan: If I'm writing about a restaurant, I'll see what seems most important for the story.

[00:33:58] Ligaya Mishan: You can do all the [00:34:00] historical research and then talking to historians who then have their own take. But then when you interview people, other things come to the fore. You think you're going in one direction, then you learn something different. There was a restaurant in Singapore that is dedicated to

[00:34:15] Ligaya Mishan: food history. Their lab looks at the cultural history of recipes. I want to know more about that project because how would a restaurant incorporate that? I recently went to a restaurant in Barcelona that uses all of these old recipes. One of the things I ate was this omelet from a recipe from the first century AD.

[00:34:32] Ligaya Mishan: How do you translate? So the other side of it, hoping that readers will respond to that. These might be things they start thinking about. How is this something that chefs or people who are making food, how is this something you could possibly incorporate into the way you cook? And that in turn, we will reach the audience as well.

[00:34:53] Anna Sulan Masing: The Singapore restaurant Ligaya is talking about is Nouri. Fun fact, on the trip to Sarawak I took with my friend, [00:35:00] chef and restaurant owner, Mandy Yin, that I mentioned in the last episode, we were also accompanied by another friend, Kaushik Swami-nathan, who at the time was the head of the lab of Nouri. If you're curious about Kaushik's response to Kapit and Sarawak pepper, you can read all about it in Whetstone Magazine, Volume Six.

[00:35:21] Anna Sulan Masing: This multifaceted approach to how we think about eating, of considering the flavor, the chemistry, the sensations in the mouth, these are all part of my journey investigating pepper. What does pepper mean to me when I eat it? How can I interpret and share those experiences through language or through creating new taste memories?

[00:35:45] Anna Sulan Masing: And why is it important? It is important to me because of the many hands that are involved in bringing me the sensations I am experiencing from pepper and knowing that my eating is part of a [00:36:00] wider landscape and narrative.

[00:36:10] Anna Sulan Masing: Thank you for listening to episode four of Taste of Place. Thank you to my guests, Dr. Arielle Johnson and Ligaya Mishan who have helped unravel the scientific and cultural concepts behind flavor and how and why we pursue certain taste experiences. Flavor is not just a single aspect, simply about a meal, but part of a larger cultural story.

[00:36:38] Anna Sulan Masing: I'd like to thank my producer, Catherine Yang, audio editor Dayan Capulong, researcher Caroline Merrifield and intern Ashley Choi. I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder Stephen Satterfield, Whetstone Radio Collective executive producer Celine Glasier, sound engineer Max [00:37:00] Kotelchuck, Music Director Catherine Yang,

[00:37:03] Anna Sulan Masing: managing producer Marvin Yueh, Associate Producer Quentin Lebeau, Production coordinator, Shabnam Ferdowsi, production assistant Maha Sanad and publicist Melissa Haughton. Theme Music created by Catherine Yang and cover art created by Whestone Art Director Alex Bowman. You can learn more about this podcast on WhetstoneRadio.com, on Instagram and Twitter @WhetstoneRadio, on TikTok @WhetstoneMedia, and subscribe to our Spotify and YouTube channel, Whetstone Media for more podcast content.

[00:37:38] Anna Sulan Masing: You can learn more about all things happening at Whestone at WhetstoneMedia.com