You’re not going to believe this, but this is absolutely going to be possible—or, depending on how demanding you are about the meaning of “possible,” already is—with current technology.

Let me show you what I’m talking about.

Imagine a small appliance sitting on the counter in a pleasant office kitchen, the sort of place with pale wood, expensive plants, and a bowl containing three pieces of fruit that nobody has touched in weeks. The machine is cream-colored and reassuringly solid, with rounded corners and a large black screen. It looks like something Braun might have made in 1973 if Dieter Rams had been given access to a molecular-generation model and told that the future depended on snacks. On the screen is an enormous three-dimensional cloud of tiny luminous points. Some gather into dense yellow islands, others into green continents or purple filaments. There are labels here and there: CITRUS, GREEN LEAF, FERMENTED, FLORAL, ROASTED. But the most interesting thing on the screen is not what has been labeled. It is everything that hasn’t.

You move the cursor away from the green cluster and into the darkness between GREEN LEAF and FERMENTED, stopping in a sparse region that belongs to neither. There is nothing there because, as far as anyone knows, there is no flavor there. You press the mouse button and hold it. A circle expands around the cursor. New points begin flickering into existence. The machine is not searching a catalog for something that tastes a bit like cucumber. It is generating molecular structures predicted to create a sensory experience in that particular unoccupied territory. Candidates appear and disappear. One is unstable. Another would be miserable to synthesize. Another trips an early safety screen. Eventually a candidate remains, and much later—after considerably more chemistry, characterization, toxicology, regulatory work, and controlled testing than the tasteful progress indicator on the screen would lead you to imagine—a little ledge slides out of the machine. On it sits a transparent bubble containing a single clear droplet. A narrow paper flag curls out of the top, like the plume on a Hershey’s Kiss, and on it are the words LUMEN-7A62: green mineral · airy · crisp. Nobody has ever tasted it before, for the excellent reason that until somebody asked the machine to look in that particular patch of darkness, it had never existed.

I keep returning to this image because it makes visible a mistake we have been making for several thousand years, albeit a productive and often delicious one. We have confused flavor with ingredients. For practically the whole history of cuisine, flavor has been downstream of biology. We have strawberries, garlic, cows, cacao, limes, mushrooms, chickens, coffee beans, and an almost vindictive number of peppers, and so we have become very clever about persuading these things to do tricks. We roast them and ferment them, dry them and smoke them, breed them, age them, distill them, bury them, combine them, and occasionally allow microorganisms to have their way with them for six months before announcing that the smell is intentional. The results have been magnificent. I have no complaint against butter. But underneath this entire culinary civilization sits an assumption that is beginning to look less like a law of nature than a historical inconvenience: flavor comes from ingredients.

An ingredient, after all, is just one way of producing a sensory event in a human being. A strawberry is an extraordinarily elaborate biological machine for delivering a particular collection of molecules to your nose and tongue, along with water, sugar, acids, seeds, fiber, color, nostalgia, and the occasional disappointing white interior. We have treated the strawberry as the fundamental object because, until recently, there was not much practical reason to do otherwise. But if the thing we actually care about is the experience produced when those molecules meet the human sensory system, then the strawberry begins to look less like the definition of strawberry flavor and more like one implementation of it. Once that distinction becomes clear, a peculiar door opens. We can stop asking only what nature has given us to taste and start asking what the human sensory system is capable of experiencing.

Flavor science has traditionally approached this from the sensible direction. Take a molecule, expose someone or something to it, and determine what it does. Molecular structure goes in; perception comes out. Increasingly, machine-learning systems can participate in this process, predicting whether a compound is likely to be bitter or sweet, estimating odor character or intensity, and learning relationships between molecular structure and sensory descriptors. Generative systems have also begun proposing novel odorants and taste-active molecules, including candidates that can subsequently be synthesized and experimentally evaluated. None of this requires the invention of magical technology. The strange thing is that so many of the pieces already exist. The more interesting move is simply to reverse the arrow.

Instead of asking what a molecule will taste like, ask what molecule would taste like this. Perhaps I want something with the opening brightness of yuzu, some of the vegetal snap of a tomato leaf, a peculiar mineral sensation in the middle, almost no sweetness, and an aftertaste that vanishes completely after eight seconds. That description can become a target in a multidimensional sensory space. A generative model can then search chemical space for structures predicted to produce it, while other models reject candidates that appear unstable, impractical, reactive, environmentally troublesome, or otherwise unpromising. What sounds at first like an eccentric application of artificial intelligence is really an inverse-design problem, of the sort appearing across materials science, drug discovery, and protein engineering. We know approximately what behavior we want. Instead of waiting to encounter something that exhibits it, we generate structures that might.

The interface for such a system should not, I think, look much like chemistry software. It should look like an instrument. I call it FlavoSynth, partly because it describes what the machine does and partly because every sufficiently interesting technology eventually deserves a name that would have looked good stencilled on a synthesizer in 1982. A musician does not sit at a synthesizer thinking about Fourier transforms. The complexity has been translated into controls corresponding to perceptual consequences: attack, decay, resonance, brightness. FlavoSynth could do the same for flavor. You might turn up brightness, pull back warmth, add greenness, lengthen persistence, or, most important, rotate a large knob marked STRANGENESS. The chemistry remains underneath, where chemistry is happiest. The person using the machine manipulates sensation.

There is another version of this idea that feels less like playing an instrument and more like committing tasteful acts of vandalism. I call it FlavorShop. Load strawberry—not a photograph of a strawberry but a representation of its sensory character—and begin editing. Increase brightness by eighteen per cent, reduce jamminess by twelve, introduce a little more green, leave sweetness exactly where it is, and stretch the experience so that it persists for nine seconds rather than four.

The familiar tools of image editing become strangely natural when transferred to perception. An eyedropper could sample the cold mineral character of cucumber so that you could paint some of it into watermelon. An eraser could remove the faint cooked note from a processed fruit flavor. Layers might separate aroma, taste, trigeminal sensation, texture, and temporal behavior. A magic wand could select whatever combination of signals humans interpret as “ripe,” which is the sort of phrase that sounds ridiculous until you realize that computers already perform similarly improbable acts with images every day.

Eventually, of course, somebody would add Generative Fill. You would circle an empty region in the sensory representation and type, “Put something here that we have never tasted before.” At that moment FlavorShop would cease to be a sophisticated way of improving strawberry yogurt and become something considerably stranger. It would be an editor for possible human experience.

To make such an editor useful, we would need something like a Flavor Atlas, a map of known sensory chemistry. Imagine every characterized flavor-active molecule rendered as a point in an enormous space, positioned according to what it does perceptually rather than where chemists happen to place it taxonomically. Familiar territories would emerge as dense constellations: citrus, floral, roasted, green, fermented, sulfurous, marine. The shape of the map would be fascinating, but the revelation would come from its emptiness. Between the known clusters would be enormous gaps, regions of molecular and perceptual possibility that cuisine has never had any reason to visit. Our present vocabulary might prove to be less a description of flavor itself than a record of the neighborhoods biology happened to build.

This is where our language starts to become a handicap. When we imagine an unfamiliar flavor, we tend to construct it from familiar ones: pineapple crossed with basil, perhaps, with a little sea air. But that may be like trying to describe an unknown color by listing vegetables. Fruity, floral, woody, nutty, smoky, green, meaty—these categories exist because we have repeatedly encountered things that produced those sensations. If there are other stable and pleasurable regions of sensory space, we should not expect to have words for them in advance. The first encounter with a genuinely un...

Insanely Generative

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