(Photo: Sarah Lee/The Guardian)
Zoe Laughlin, the director of the Institute of Making, says that, "my ambition is to make the best spoon in the world." Oliver Wainwright of The Guardian met her to learn about how important it is to choose the right eating utensils in order to taste particular foods. He writes:
I reach for a spoon and plunge it into some yoghurt. The resulting mouthful tastes a bit fizzy, as if the yoghurt’s gone off – the trademark tangy tingle of zinc. A second spoon gives a salty metallic kick – the steel – while chrome makes no difference at all. Sadly, there is no magnesium spoon; if you ever put an old school pencil sharpener on your tongue, during an idle moment in maths class, you’ll know that it gives even more of a thrill than popping candy. (Or was that just me?)
In a blind tasting, Laughlin’s guinea pigs found that copper and zinc were the sourest, while the spoon to end all spoons was, of course, made of gold. “Mango sorbet with a gold spoon is just heaven,” she sighs. “Mango never tasted so mangoey.” But too bad if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth: in the blind tasting, it came out near the bottom.
It all has to do with the “reduction potential” of the different metals – the ease with which they oxidise – which affects how many atoms come off in your mouth. The relatively inert gold is best suited to subtle, creamy foods, Laughlin found when she put on a seven-course banquet with a Michelin-starred chef, because it has the least metallic taste. Cod on a zinc spoon, on the other hand, was revolting. Time for Heston to appoint a spoon sommelier, perhaps?
Like, gag me with a spoon! But make sure that it's the correct spoon. To know for sure, consult designer Andreas Fabian, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on spoons. He's working to optimize the tactile experience of eating:
He unravels a black pouch, containing a collection of oddly fetishistic implements, like the toolkit of an aesthete-torturer. There is a pair of golden tongs – half knife, half chopstick – and a silver-plated tuning fork, for pronging chunks of food with a twang, along with several glass wands with rounded, pendulous ends.
“This one is to replicate the pleasure of licking your finger,” he says, inviting me to dip a gold-leafed wand in a jar of warmed Nutella. Then there is a glass bowl covered in rabbit fur, designed to encourage a more tactile experience with your soup.
-via Marginal Revolution
Comments (2)
Total Fail...I was onboard for the yellow/blue not being able to occur together (yellow is all red & green, no blue), but red and green are fundamental components of vision (your recepters are for red, green, and blue). Red plus green is yellow!
http://imgur.com/9OsLm
In this little picture I made the square on the left is blue & yellow pixels which looks kind of grey-ish and the right is red & green pixels only, which looks yellow!
Process architecture of the visual system
http://helen.pion.ac.uk/outreach/images/how/Figure-1.png Van Essen and Felleman (1991)
Kind of. The receptors are for short, medium, and long wavelengths.
Their ranges overlap a bit. Wavelengths that trigger the short receptors are translated as blue. The medium green, and short blue (at least as far as I can tell, depending on how you read the various descriptions), but as the receptors respond to the same light, the relative strengths of the signal (I think) are translated into the varying intermediate colors. Long (red) and medium (green) receptors firing at the same time are interpreted as yellow, for example. We can't "see" a reddish green, because red+green (long + medium) is already perceived as yellow. We *already* have a color that describes that combination.
We perceive colors that can be produced by the full range of physically possible overlapping wavelengths within the visible light spectrum. Take Magenta: there's no single wavelength that can trigger both the long and short receptors while NOT stimulating the middle receptors. But since they can be simultaneously stimulated by *separate* wavelengths, we have the "extraspectral" color Magenta - which you will not find in a rainbow, or in an illustration of the visible light spectrum. Wrapping a spectrum diagram around in a circle so the long red end overlaps with the short blue end is how we get a diagram - the color wheel - that shows all the colors we can see: all the possible combinations of length/receptor overlap that can be triggered by actual light sources.
Take a cup of hot water and mix it with cold, you get warm. We have a sensation mapped onto that combination of degrees of heat. Somehow these experiments are stimulating some kind of response where the brain isn't perceiving warm, its like the subjects are their hands in hot and cold at the same time. It doesn't make any sense physically, but the receptors are being stimulated that way nonetheless, and perceiving something new and completely imaginary, that is not mapped directly to anything in the real world. Or, I could be full of it.
"(your recepters are for red, green, and blue)"
Kind of. The receptors are for short, medium, and long wavelengths.
Their ranges overlap a bit. Wavelengths that trigger the short receptors are translated as blue. The medium green, and short blue (at least as far as I can tell, depending on how you read the various descriptions), but as the receptors respond to the same light, the relative strengths of the signal (I think) are translated into the varying intermediate colors. Long (red) and medium (green) receptors firing at the same time are interpreted as yellow, for example. We can't "see" a reddish green, because red+green (long + medium) is already perceived as yellow. We *already* have a color that describes that combination.
We perceive colors that can be produced by the full range of physically possible overlapping wavelengths within the visible light spectrum. Take Magenta: there's no single wavelength that can trigger both the long and short receptors while NOT stimulating the middle receptors. But since they can be simultaneously stimulated by *separate* wavelengths, we have the "extraspectral" color Magenta - which you will not find in a rainbow, or in an illustration of the visible light spectrum. Wrapping a spectrum diagram around in a circle so the long red end overlaps with the short blue end is how we get a diagram - the color wheel - that shows all the colors we can see: all the possible combinations of length/receptor overlap that can be triggered by actual light sources.
Take a cup of hot water and mix it with cold, you get warm. We have a sensation mapped onto that combination of degrees of heat. Somehow these experiments are stimulating some kind of response where the brain isn't perceiving warm, its like the subjects are their hands in hot and cold at the same time. It doesn't make any sense physically, but the receptors are being stimulated that way nonetheless, and perceiving something new and completely imaginary, that is not mapped directly to anything in the real world. Or, I could be full of it.