December 2022 By David A. Edwards, Ph.D., scientist, author, pioneering inventor If we are what we eat, in a very real way, we eat what we are. “What we are,” in this sense, includes a collection of thoughts and emotions that preoccupy us at any given moment, a surprisingly large fraction of which happen to relate […]
December 2022 Recent data from the United States restaurant industry shows that Americans are eating out more than ever before. The USDA reports that food-away-from-home (restaurants, take-out outlets, and other eateries) accounted for 55% of total food expenditures in 2021 (“2021 U.S. Food-away-from-home spending,” 2022). The trend of eating out more is likely due to […]
By Dennis Ausiello, MD, Jackson Distinguished Professor of Clinical Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and David A. Edwards, Ph.D., scientist, author, pioneering inventor While the sight of an apple pie or the astringency of the orange peel can each shape the memory of what we eat, our memories of the foods we love are mostly […]
By Ellen Langer, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, author, widely regarded as founder of the academic field of mindfulness Many of us may know that the perception of scent (olfaction) is 85% of flavor perception. When we have a stuffy nose, food simply loses some of its appeal. As Ausiello and Edwards write in […]
By Nancy Rawson, Ph.D., Acting Director and President of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, and Rachel Field, Ph.D., Co-Founder of Sensory Cloud The ability for humans to craft fragrance (not to say flavor, which until recently was best delivered by the act of eating) is truly old technology — dating back to 4000 years ago […]
By David A. Edwards, scientist, author, pioneering inventor, and Touré Roberts, author, entrepreneur, investor, producer, and pastor Eating habits are the hardest to change. That’s because our food cravings are hard-wired into our brains. Some of our food cravings, as in our natural preference for the sweet versus the sour, trace back to human evolution, […]
By Marty Kolewe, CEO, Foodberry and David Edwards, Ph.D., scientist, author, pioneering inventor The incredible success of the modern food experiment in radically reducing global hunger over two centuries of unprecedented human population growth has led to the hard realization that what seemed to work well till now, cannot work for much longer. Feeding humanity […]