Food makes the world go round - with apologies to Shakespeare! And what makes food so irresistible are ingredients - which can be broken down into the flavour components that build the dish. A simple tempering of spices in our home kitchens inform the flavour bombs of a dish. This process is researched and replicated on an industrial scale by flavour companies across the world, who have to get the recipe exactly right to create the perfect food product. In the alternative protein sector, as companies seek to bio-mimic meat with plant based or cultivated meat, flavours and fragrances are a crucial piece of the puzzle. On this episode of Feeding 10 Billion, we talk to Dr Ganesh Bagler, associate professor at IIIT Delhi and a pioneer in the exciting field of computational gastronomy. His work applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to culinary data on flavours, has created a wealth of insights on food - including a recipe index with more than 118,000 thousand recipes from across the world! Tune in for insights about what makes Indian food so unique, why seafood is an open frontier, and the work still needed to unlock the science of food.

SHOW NOTES: If you want to hear from speakers like Ganesh Bagler, register for our Future of Protein Summit being held in New Delhi on November 11 & 12th!

IIIT DELHI : The Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, is research-oriented state university focused on computer science and related areas.

FlavorDB : This is a database created by the complex systems lab at IIIT Delhi. It comprises of 25,595 flavor molecules representing an array of tastes and odors. It is intended to facilitate an exploration of flavor molecules for divergent applications, including finding molecules matching a desired flavour or structure, discovering novel food pairings and finding the molecular essence of food ingredients.Data-driven studies based on FlavorDB can pave the way for an improved understanding of flavor mechanisms.

RecipeDB : RecipeDB is a structured compilation of recipes, ingredients, and nutrition profiles interlinked with flavor profiles and health associations. The repertoire comprises of meticulous integration of over 1,18,000 recipes from cuisines across the globe (6 continents, 26 geo-cultural regions, and 74 countries), cooked using 268 processes (heat, cook, boil, simmer, bake, etc.), by blending over 23,500 ingredients from diverse categories, which are further linked to their flavor molecules (FlavorDB), nutritional profiles (USDA) and empirical records of disease associations obtained from Medline (DietRx).

DietRx : DietRx provides a platform for exploring health impacts of dietary ingredients by integrating interrelationships among food and key molecular agents. The resource assimilates dietary factors (food and chemicals), their health consequences (diseases) and genetic mechanisms to facilitate queries for investigating associations among these entities. Also see BitterSweet

INTERNATIONAL FLAVORS AND FRAGRANCES IIF is a global leader in the development of scents, tastes, experiences and ingredients for a variety of different products. Headquartered in New York, it has over 110 manufacturing facilities and 100 R&D centers across the world.

FIRMENICH Firmenich is the largest privately-owned perfume and taste company, founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1895.

GIVAUDAN Headquartered in Switzerland with local presence in over 145 locations, Givaudan is a global leader in the creation of flavours and fragrances.

SHIOK MEATS  Shiok in Singapore and Malay slang means fantastic and delicious. Shiok Meats is the first cell-based clean meat company in Singapore and South-East Asia. Their mission is to bring delicious, clean and healthy seafood like crustacean meats (including shrimp, crab and lobster) by harvesting meat from cells instead of animals. Their meats are animal-, health- and environment-friendly with the same taste, texture, more nutrients and no cruelty.

ALEPH FARMS Aleph Farms is the food-tech startup specializing in high-quality sustainable cell-grown meat. Aleph’s proprietary 3D technology uses the four core cell types of farmed beef to recreate a real food experience. It grows slaughter-free steak without the need for devoting vast tracts of land, water, antibiotics usage and other resources to raise cattle for meat. Aleph Farms recently became the first company to grow meat in space.

Bühler Group Bühler is a Swiss-based family owned company that is a global, industrial solution provider for processing foods and for manufacturing advanced materials, contributing to food security and high energy efficiency.

SCIENTIFIC DEFINITIONS

Computational gastronomy as defined by Dr Ganesh Bagler: Cooking forms the core of our cultural identity other than being the basis of nutrition and health. Starting with a seemingly simple question, ‘Why do we eat what we eat?’, data-driven research conducted in our lab has led to interesting explorations of patterns in traditional recipes, their flavor composition, and health associations. Our investigations have revealed ‘culinary fingerprints’ of regional cuisines across the world, starting with the case study of Indian cuisine. The increasing availability of culinary data and the advent of computational methods for their scrutiny is dramatically changing the artistic outlook towards gastronomy. Application of data-driven strategies for investigating the gastronomic data (such as traditional recipes, molecular constituents of ingredients, percepts of flavor compounds, and health associations of food) has opened up exciting avenues giving rise to an all-new field of ‘Computational Gastronomy’. This emerging interdisciplinary science asks questions of culinary origin to seek their answers via the compilation of culinary data and their analysis using methods of statistics, machine learning, natural language processing, pattern mining, and chemo-informatics. Backed with complementary experimental studies, it has the potential to transform the food landscape by effectively leveraging data-driven food innovations for better health and nutrition.

Bibliography:

• The Weizmann Institute continuously monitored post prandial blood sugar levels in 800 people for a week and found that bodily response to all foods was highly individual. So we need more data to understand how diet prescriptions can work as medicine, especially in the case of lifestyle diseases like Type 2 Diabetes

• Data driven approaches to leveraging food for better health | Dr. Ganesh Bagler | TEDxDAIICT

• The digital way forward for Indian Cuisine by Dr Ganesh Bagler

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