Can Technology Enhance Your Taste Buds?

People say weed makes things taste better. I never got that—all weed ever did for me was drain the world of joy or purpose and recast all my past interactions as testaments to my utter fraudulence. In any case, I mention the weed thing here to preempt any comments about weed. I am aware that weed supposedly does this and that some jokers refer to weed as a kind of “technology.

Theoretically, this should be possible. Taste receptors are transmembrane proteins located at the surface of our taste buds. Their structure is now well-known, as are the genes coding for these proteins. Thus we could imagine that, in the future, you could get mRNA injections to trigger the production of these proteins by our taste cell.

I think we’re at the beginning of a new era in taste research, in which we’ll realize that the sense is broader than commonly believed. That is to say, we can detect more kinds of chemicals than just those that impart sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami sensations. Evidence is building that humans can detect fat, starch, calcium, Co2, and other chemicals. If this is true, there is ample room in the future for new opportunities to exploit these capabilities.

Can we produce a sweet taste that’s safe? Well, probably not. Everyone used to think saccharine was the silver bullet here, but modern research tells us that it’s just the opposite—saccharine can actually make you gain weight.

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