I pulled this quote from Robert Hooke's 1665 scientific best-seller, Micrographia, a work that did much to attract scientific attention to the formerly unseen. But did Hooke's sensory optimism ever come to pass?
One would think so. In the early days of the Royal Society, the sense of taste garnered a great deal of scientific interest. Tongues (human, bovine, and elephantine) were pricked, poked, sliced into pieces and slid under a microscope in order to understand how sapid particles imparted the sensations of sweetness and saltiness. Scientists assiduously debated the number of flavors (and flavor combinations) that existed. And I was particularly amused to read Robert Boyle's attempt to trick unwitting subjects into believing a mystery substance made of roots could taste like a delicious raspberry wine. Equipped with state-of-the-art single lens microscopes, it seemed as if an army of chemists, botanists and anatomists would be able to explain the tricky subject of taste preferences in no time.
Yet the more research that was poured into understanding the sense of taste, the less the sense of taste actually seemed to be understood. By the dawn of the 18th century, John Houghton's Newsletter reveals a much more pessimistic attitude regarding any standardized measurement of the gustatory sense:
“Tis to be wish’d there were discovered a good theory of smell, as also of taste, etc. but ‘tis rather to be wish’d for than expected; but if it could be done, we should then make a considerable improvement of the art of perfuming.”
In less than forty years, Hooke's enthusiasm had given way to distanced, practical resignation. Why this change in sentiment? Perhaps the question isn't "what did scientists say about taste?" but rather, "Why did scientists give up on taste?"
Hmm... A question of much contemporary debate. :)
ReplyDeleteNow there is a presumably solid science of scent (olfactory chemistry) and the results for perfumery are frankly dismal. Perfumes are formulated according to theory and often by computer programs, and the result is that even as they are formulated with mathematical precision they smell clumsy, unstructured, chaotic.
I think that for taste, like scent, any thorough science is going to have to be rooted in a well-developed sense culture.
...I think the problem, as with scent, is partially due to the fact that our common language is so overwhelmingly visual. Our society generally has very little capacity for expressing gustatory or olfactory concepts. And on what would a science of taste rest, if not on the questions provoked by a solid conceptual understanding?
Perhaps scientists gave up on taste for precisely this reason. I mean, that the search for standardised measurement was so inherently doomed to failure. Taste is stochastic: certainly not a random phenomenon, but not entirely predictable either. At least not with current scientific methods and attitudes... So, any gustatory science in the centuries leading up to this point might have been explanatory or descriptive, but it would never have realised Hooke's ideal of a unifying and complete theory.
Thanks for a really neat and thought-provoking article!