Did you know electricity can alter the way we taste food? Proving this fact is a revolutionary electric fork designed by Japanese researchers that can make any dish taste salty, thus acting1 as a substitute for the popular seasoning2.
你知道电可以改变人类饮食的方式吗？由日本研究人员设计的电动餐叉证实了这一点，这种革新性的餐叉能够使食物变咸，成为常用调料的替代品。
According to Hiromi Nakamura, a Post Doc Research Fellow at Tokyo's Meiji University, the technology can be very useful for people on special diets. Patients with low blood pressure, for instance, can easily go on a low-salt diet and still enjoy delicious food. And with the fork, there's absolutely no risk of over-salting your food. Luckily, the voltage is so small that there is no risk of electrocution either.
The idea of adding electricity to food was first revealed as an experiment at the Computer Human Interaction Conference in Austin, Texas, in 2012. Nakamura and her team connected a wire to a 9-volt battery and threaded it through a straw placed in a cup of sweet lemonade. Volunteers (who were asked to sign a waiver) reported that the charged lemonade tasted '
blander3', because the electricity simulated the taste of salt.
Nakamura, along with professor Homei Miyashita, now call the idea '
Augmented4 Gustation' and have refined the technology to be able to transfer an electric charge to food through forks and chopsticks. "The
metallic5 part of the fork is one electrode, and the handle is another," Nakamura explained. "When you take a piece of food with the fork and put it in your mouth, you close the circuit. When you remove the fork from your mouth, you disconnect the circuit. So it actually works as a switch."
Munchies host Simon Klose, who recently visited Nakamura to try out the fork himself, called this form of 'food
hacking6' one of the most profound eating experiences he's ever had. "When I first heard of electric food it sounded scary," he said, in a 15-minute documentary clip about the special technology. He later proceeded to use a charged fork to eat pieces of fried chicken, and found that the saltiness
considerably7 increased as the electricity was dialed up.
Nakamura has been eating 'electric' food for the past three to four years, in an attempt to understand it better. "For me, food hacking is about
augmenting8 or diminishing real food," she said. "It may seem like we're cooking but we're actually working on the human senses. We are inventing devices to add electricity to the tongue. We're trying to create virtual taste."
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