The trouble is that “tastes good” isn’t a blank canvas. It’s built on hardwired signals plus learned associations. Our basic tastes evolved as nutritional indicators: sweet signals energy, umami signals protein, bitter warns of potential toxins. And our brains are rather insistent about finding flavors more pleasant when they match patterns we’ve already learned are safe.

Jell-O actually proves this rather than refuting it. It succeeds because it hits that hardwired sweet preference, not because it invented some novel taste dimension. A truly new taste that doesn’t map onto the existing five basics would likely register as “off” rather than delicious. Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.

So you’d have to either work within those existing taste channels while creating novel combinations and textures, or somehow condition people to associate genuinely new sensations with safety and reward. The latter is slow going. We’re quite literally built to be suspicious of unfamiliar foods.

> A truly new taste that doesn’t map onto the existing five basics would likely register as “off” rather than delicious. Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.

We have five taste receptors, so it's it's actually impossible to get something that doesn't map unto those five. Instead, what we call the taste of food, and what GP was referring to, is actually the smell of food, or more commonly, its aroma, which we can detect both from the outside by sniffing it with our noses, and while it is in our mouths via molecules wafting up to our respiratory tract.

Unlike the simplicity of taste, we have a huge array of smell receptors, with most of them having much more indirect associations, if any, with any specific survival need. It's very much possible, and in fact quite common, to synthesize novel smells/aromas which don't resemble any natural food.

> Unlike the simplicity of taste, we have a huge array of smell receptors, with most of them having much more indirect associations

Slightly unrelated, but what I find very cool is thinking about your taste sense as a hyper-sensitive molecule detector. Individual aromas are just the signal your brain generates for different kinds of molecules, and it's very good at that. That's why at wine tastings, for example, people come up with all these elaborate terms for specific aromas—it's a way to name the molecule composition.

Agreed.

A good example might be one that came up recently (on "Tasting History") is musk, which tastes of and has the bouquet of laundry detergent, or basil (which if you eat it plain and in isolation has a bizarre chemical flavor and bouquet), etc.

> Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.

At first. If the food has nutrients that are important to the brain, it will recognize that in the future. There are animal experiment confirming this.

The term "acquired taste" quite literally means this.

We don't link a sensation initially, until our mind associates it with feeling good in some way. Then we like it.

I was not suggesting inventing a new fundamental taste but new foods that are unlike existing foods. "meat" is not a taste for example. I can't give you an example, because that's the whole point, someone needs to experiment and find out. But the fundamental tastes like sweet and umami will remain of course.

There are plenty of "synthetic" flavours - Takis, Twinkies, and bubblegum drinks spring to mind.

There are also a wide variety of textures that are heavily industrialised. If you go to some fine dining restaurants, you'll find smells and colours which you simply cannot replicate at home - let alone make from scratch.

Most synthetic meat and fish is really just a flavour carrier for whatever sauce people like. I've had imitation chicken, shrimp, beef, crab, etc. They all taste great - but that's mostly because the sauces are the same as their meaty counterparts.

Right. Chicken is more of a texture than a flavor. When you buy a Spicy Zinger Burger from KFC you're tasting more of the zingy than the cluck-cluck.

The chicken that KFC uses, sure. There’s a huge difference between that and a chicken that’s been raised well and allowed to get to a sensible age before slaughter.

The taste/texture of jello is just collagen (roughly, "meat stew flavor"), fruit juice, and (tons of) sugar. It’s just an extremely heightened version of natural flavors. There is nothing new under the sun.

Not to mention that "nothing tastes like it naturally" is false. Plenty of fruits have a jelly like consistency, they're just not common in the modern western world. Consider ripe persimmons, caimito, or abiu. Jelly palm and quince are cooked into literal jelly. Further afield you also have aloe leaf and cooked nopal.

Your question is rather ambiguous. Do you mean using chemistry to develop new techniques or combine unusual ingredients to create food that has novel flavors or textures? That would fall under Molecular Gastronomy, which has been highly influential within fine dining in the last few decades.

Do you mean processing ingredients with the goal to take cheap ingredients and make a product as hyper-palatable as possible? That would generally be called "ultra-processed food"; you're not going to find a Doritos chip in nature.

Do you mean developing completely completely new flavors via chemical synthesis? I don't think there's much possibility there. Our senses have evolved to detect compounds found in nature, so it's unlikely a synthetic compound can produce a flavor completely unlike anything found in nature.

Also, I think you're overestimating jelly. Gelatine is just a breakdown product of collagen. Boil animal connective tissue, purify the gelatine, add sugar and flavoring and set it into a gel. It's really only a few of techniques removed from nature. If you want to say it's not found in nature, then fair enough, but neither is a medium-rare steak.

I mean using chemistry to create food using atypical ingredients that aren't normally classified as food or entirely synthetic. Take more simpler or more abundant compounds to create original food instead of using plants and wildlife. Flavors don't need to be new, but as others mentioned there are plenty of recently invented flavors. Doritos is ultra-processed corn, what i'm saying is Doritos but there is no corn involved. The original article is about meat-like food, I was saying "why meat-like" , if it is food that has similar taste like meat, that's fine, but it doesn't need to be like meat, it just needs to taste good and have palatable texture. Maybe we can have something tastes better than meat!

You may be interested in the biotech startup Oobli <https://oobli.com/>. They're attempting to commercialize a protein-based sweetener, where the protein itself is interacting with your taste receptors and registering as 'sweet'.

The technology is based on some naturally occurring proteins from fruit native to West Africa, but I'd say the idea of sweet things that are good for you is pretty novel!

I find this highly annoying. Here we've had very tasty wheat based slices that can serve the same purpose as sliced salami/meats on bread, and didn't try to muck anything in particular. But they disappeared from the shelves while the stuff branded as Vegan Salami seemingly does well.

I guess for casual buyers having a familiar reference point is just crucial.

The crusade against gluten probably did it. Tofu lives as un-refrigerated grey blobs and tempeh never even made it to the shelf, probably because of hormone-disrupting soybeans. But hyper-engineered single cell meat? Now that’ll sell.

Tempeh is pretty common at health food stores. More common than seitan, less common than tofu.

This is really frustrating to me, it's hard to find seitan outside of Chinese shaokao (BBQ skewers) restaurants. There's a local brand of wheat-meat that even runs a deli that's pretty good, but people are so afraid of gluten.

That's because 166.2% of the population are allergic to wheat.

Jello doesnt really have much taste by itself. what youre tasting is mostly sugar.

Plus small amounts of perfumes similar to fruits or other bits of plants, usually.

Like you said I think it's culture, particularly ones that are food oriented. It's gonna be hard to get buy-in if people think it's too weird.

I'd argue that Jell-o tastes good because sugar tastes good and that it's just the novel texture coupled with sweetness that is the attraction. I doubt many people know what unsweetened gelatin tastes like or if that even tastes good.

I have all my shots and drink pasteurized milk, and I prefer familiar chicken-like substances over experimental cuisine.