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1-2: Creative Tastebuds 2020
  • ISSN: 2056-6522
  • E-ISSN: 2056-6530
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Abstract

Food production is a main cause of the accelerating anthropogenic changes in the Earth’s ecosystems. There is an urgent need for global changes in the food production systems throughout the food chain as well as a call for a significant reduction in food waste. Sustainable and healthy eating has hence become a key issue on the global scene. The provision for a sustainable green transition involves eating more plant-based foods. The question then arises if such foods, e.g. vegetables, are sufficiently palatable for the carnivorous human whose evolution has been driven by meat-eating and a craving for umami taste for more than two million years. Is green food sufficiently delicious for us to eat more of it? This article describes an approach to sustainable eating of vegetables based on a combination of gastrophysical insights with culinary innovation and gastronomic design. Plant-based raw ingredients often lack the basic tastes umami and sweet and also need special attention regarding mouthfeel. As a result, a ‘taste rack’ of condiments, a kind of generalized spice rack or tasting inventory, which allows most vegetables to be turned into delicious dishes by ‘umamification’ and used effectively in a flexitarian setting, is developed. The power of the approach is illustrated by a number of case studies.

Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • The Nordea Foundation
© 2020 the Author(s). Published by Intellect Ltd
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (CC BY-NC-ND), which allows users to copy, distribute and transmit the article as long as the author is attributed, the article is not used for commercial purposes, and the work is not modified or adapted in any way.
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2020-12-01
2024-05-02
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Design and ‘umamification’ of vegetable dishes for sustainable eating
International Journal of Food Design 5, 9 (2020); https://doi.org/10.1386/ijfd_00008_1
/content/journals/10.1386/ijfd_00008_1
/content/journals/10.1386/ijfd_00008_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): flexitarian; kokumi; mouthfeel; sustainable eating; umami; vegetables

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