Conference chair Panos Bamidis introduces Prof. Per Moller in a cosy style talk to end Day 2 of the SAN conference. Everyone is invited to enjoy this talk while drinking some ouzo and snacking. What are those mysterious cones that Prof Per so casually treats us to but prefers that we did not open until he says so?

Basic tastes! Sweet, sour, salty, bitter & umami --> not the sole determinants of the tast of foods. Can we re-create the taste of oranges and chocolate by a clever mixture of these basic tastes?

Flavour! Actually the itegration of signals from 4 senses as food are eaten: taste, smell, touch (tactile), trigeminality (pungency, irritation), as well as indirect effects on flavour from other senses (vision, audition, temperature).

It was jelly beans all along! Chew it while blocking your nose. Then open it BOOM exploding sense of HOT! (why did I pick the red one again?)

Where do preferences come from, either way, seems to puzzle Prof Moller as well. Very few are hard-wired from birth, such as sweet, bitter and fat. Incidental learining and implicit memory play a role there.

How and why do preferences change? Conditional learning among other mechanisms. Old mac Pavlov had a dog...
Human foetuses learn odours from their pregnant mother's diet! Carrot, garlic... nicotine...

Humans can learn to like and accept any flavour or food through repeated exposure, flavour-flavour learing and flavour-nutrient learning. Homeostatic mechanisms are not sufficient in explaining eating behavior. We need rewards... motivation, learning and emotion determine our behaviour. Sensory specific satiety and core hedonic pleasure in science-talk. 

Quality vs quantity? Well-tasting foods promote overeating. Or do they? DUNdunDUNdunDUN 

Dopamine modulates motivation and reward circuits and hence dopamine deficiency in obese individuals may perpetuate pathological eating a a means to compensate for decreased activation of these circuits. 

This is why I chose the red one!! Trigeminal tastes better after all, the experiments say so. This is probably also why I can eat a whole pot of hot soup...

Eating what you like promotes a decrease in wanting to eat. Serving boring foods would actually be the most counter-productive way to cut down overeating, says prof. Quality can replace quantity.

Recent developments include neurogastronomy, gastrophysics, molecular gastronomy, computational gastronomy [sic]. No more, no less.

Best damn talk in the SAN Conference already. I enjoyed it, everyody enjoyed it.
Will anyone actually read this (and all the way to the end)? If you do, please eat a jelly bean with your nose initially closed and then open it. Then leave a comment :) Salud! 

Rapporter Alkinoos is out for the day. So is the conference. See you tomorrow!