The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt — Read

A few years ago I tried a restaurant called The True Taste. The interior was entirely white. Each table was set only with spoons—five small spoons at each place setting. I sat down at a table and looked at the menu. It was divided into sections labeled “Sugars,” “Honeys,” “Tree Saps,” and “Artificials.” I called the waiter over and asked him to explain. Did they not serve food?

The waiter, it turned out, was also the owner and sole employee of the restaurant. He told me that the restaurant was the first of its kind in the world: it was a tasting bar for sweeteners. I could sample sweeteners from thirty-two countries. He explained that he was a biologist who specialized in the sense of taste. He described to me the five kinds of taste receptor found in each taste bud on the tongue—sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory (also called umami). He said that in his research he had discovered that activation of the sweet receptor produced the strongest surge of dopamine in the brain, which indicated to him that humans are hard-wired to seek sweetness above the other four tastes. He therefore reasoned that it was most efficient, in terms of units of pleasure per calorie, to consume sweeteners, and he conceived the idea of opening a restaurant aimed entirely at stimulating this one taste receptor. I asked him how business was going. “Terrible,” he said, “but at least I’m doing better than the chemist down the street who opened a salt-tasting bar.”