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Flavor Networks
December 2, 2011
My longtime employer nicely provided a fitness center for its employees. Mid-day, I would exercise on a
treadmill while watching
television. Since daytime television is uniformly awful, I eventually settled on watching the
Food Network. My exercise time coincided with a show about
desserts hosted by
Debbi Fields of the famous
Mrs. Fields cookies.
In watching that show, I saw that most of the dessert
recipes contained a set of common
ingredients, such as
flour,
sugar,
butter,
oil,
milk and
eggs. To make a new recipe, you just needed to vary the proportions of these and add a pinch of some other ingredients, such as
cinnamon,
vanilla, or
chocolate.
If I had been adventuresome, I would have written a
computer program to
randomly generate dessert recipes, baked them up, and seen how they tasted. It would have been a
Monte Carlo calculation, with ingredient distributions derived from existing recipes. Alas, all this eating would have been contrary to the idea of my being at the fitness center in the first place.
No
scientific idea is lost forever. It's generally rediscovered by another
scientist. An eclectic group of scientists from the
Department of Physics,
Northeastern University (Boston, MA), the
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute,
Harvard University (Boston, MA), the
School of Informatics and Computing,
Indiana University (Bloomington, IN), and the
Cavendish Laboratory,
Cambridge University (Cambridge, UK) has recently published a paper on the
arXiv Preprint Server that analyzes the connections between food ingredients in
western and
non-western foods.
The number of potential food recipes is huge. If a typical recipe has just eight ingredients, there would be about 10
15 possible combinations using the 300 most common ingredients. The authors point out that this could still be an underestimate, since one authoritative source lists 1,000 ingredients,[2] and there could be ten ingredients per recipe, for a total of 10
23 combinations. Obviously, humans are exploiting just a small fraction of the "culinary space," although most of these combinations would be quite unpalatable.
The authors find that
western cuisines use ingredient pairs that share many
flavor compounds. This finding supports what's called the "
food pairing" hypothesis that some foods seem to naturally go together. A strange example of this is the discovery that
chocolate and
cauliflower taste good together.[3]
East Asian cuisines, however, avoid such flavor pairing.
So, what ingredients are used most often? The following table shows the most popular food ingredients for North American and East Asian cuisine.
Contributing ingredients to North American and East Asian cuisine. The numbers are the relative contributions of each ingredient to the total cuisine, as defined in Ref. 1. These are ranked in order of greatest use from top to bottom.[1]
Network-oriented papers always have some very pretty figures, such as the one shown below. See the caption of the original figure for an explanation.[1]
This figure shows the connections between food ingredients. No, you're not expected to read the tiny characters. Click on the image for a more readable version, and see the caption of the original figure for an explanation. (via arXiv Preprint Server, Fig. S4 of Ref. 1).
References:
- Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian E. Ahnert, James P. Bagrow, Albert-László Barabási, "Flavor network and the principles of food pairing," arXiv Preprint Server, November 25, 2011.
- O. Kinouchi, R.W. Diez-Garcia, A.J. Holanda, P. Zambianchi and A.C. Roque, "The non-equilibrium nature of culinary evolution," New Journal of Physics, vol. 10, Document No. 073020 (July, 2008).
- Martin Lersch, "Flavor Pairing," Khymos Blog
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