In the 1960s the world was abuzz with the potential developments of the future. From hover cars to Disney’s House of the Future, speculation on how technology may impact our everyday lives was surrounded by wild and whacky solutions to simplify everyday routines.

Fast forward to 2016, when food is both an experience and a chore to make. Palate fatigue reoccurs as culinary trends change, bringing about a myriad of new flavours, which drop out of favour as soon as the next big spice is Instagrammed into the mainstream food market.

Trade has diversified between cultures, broadening the variety of flavours available to consumers. However, as food trends change and the pressure to create interesting and innovative flavours and combinations has increased, what are the taste trends that may be changing our culinary experience in the future?

Food science and the culinary arts

Molecular gastronomy and flavour encapsulation may sound like something straight out of Doctor Who – which it is – but it’s a widely used idea in food production and might hold the key to how we approach food flavouring in the future. The theory is that the flavour found in whole ingredients will be stronger than if it is dispersed, and if this intense flavour can be preserved, it can be used to create new and exciting combinations. As William Hartnell’s First Doctor says: “Flavours are rather like primary colours, you blend two to get the third, and so on.”

British chef Heston Blumenthal has been championing the use of flavour encapsulation for years in his restaurant The Fat Duck, creating a myriad of dishes that break away from our existing perception of foods, such as a fruit bowl made of meat, curry ice-cream, and black pudding chocolate spread.

Although the idea of dressing food up in disguise may be a little niche, it plays on a method of condensing food into small capsules, which contain the flavour and nutrients of a full meal that has been a staple of futuristic science fiction since the 1960s. While the image of William Hartnell’s Doctor Who producing a small bar that tasted like bacon and eggs out of a machine was a fun futuristic joke at the time, it has since become a reality as Blumenthal managed to capture the flavours in his recipe for bacon and egg ice cream.

Molecular gastronomy, the scientific exploration of the transformation of ingredients during the cooking process, has been used by chefs and scientists to identify how flavour encapsulation can be achieved and to prevent palate fatigue. One company leading the development is Canadian-based Molecule-R Flavors.

“We like to think of it as the fusion of food science and the culinary arts,” says the company. “Molecular gastronomy is a new, exciting kind of cooking that borrows knowledge, techniques and ingredients from the food industry and makes them its own in order to combine tastes, shapes and textures in novel, creative ways.”

Molecule-R has been working to transfer the state-of-the-art techniques of creating flavoured foam, gels, liquid bubbles, and other artisan food science presentation, from the kitchens of award-winning restaurants to the tables of amateur chefs worldwide. Gelled food is one such technique that has gathered traction over the past decade; using hydrocolloids chefs can create interesting and strong flavour and colour combinations that hold various shapes, such as boiled fruit spaghetti.

You call that a knife?

While taste buds on the tongue recognise five primary tastes, chemesthesis – the combination of the senses – plays much larger role in the way we identify flavour, and can even change the way that we taste food. Synaesthesia – a neurological phenomenon where a person involuntarily experiences ‘crossed’ sensory responses, such as tasting colours – is present in only a minority of people, but it may be the inspiration behind the multi-sensory food revolutions.

Unlike the ‘just-add-water’ method of food delivery predicted in the 1960s, which focuses on simplicity and convenience, multi-sensory dining explores the eating experience as a whole, combining flavour, appearance and scents to influence the perception, enjoyment and taste of food. Imagine eating your favourite meal from when you were young and inhaling the smell of your childhood home, while using a spoon that makes your mouth tingle, enhancing the flavour with every bite. That’s multi-sensory eating.

Alongside its molecular gastronomy developments, Molecule-R has produced a range of aroma cutlery, which uses our sense of smell to enhance the flavour and taste of food. Aromaforks and Aromaspoons work by placing a drop of flavouring from a range of scents, including herbs, fruits, beans, umani, and nuts, on a small diffusing paper, which sits in the fork handle. The idea is that when you eat, you inhale the aroma and taste the flavour.

Molecule-R has produced a range of aroma cutlery, which uses our sense of smell to enhance the flavour and taste of food

“The initial idea was to reinvent the traditional fork into an improved utensil that would trick people’s mind by liberating an intense flow of aromas, but we soon realised that the Aromafork could also become the perfect educational tool to learn how to better appreciate food,“ explains Molecule-R Flavors president Jonathan Coutu.

Aroma-producing forks are not the only foray into changing flavour through cutlery design. A research team at Oxford University has been looking into the effect that different types of cutlery have on the flavour and taste of food. The experiment, led by chef in residence at Oxford University’s Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Charles Michel, saw 130 diners served the same three-course meal, but with half the participants using heavier banquet-style cutlery.

The findings, published in the journal Flavour, claimed that diners using the heavier cutlery experienced a higher quality dining experience: “The diners’ appreciation of the food is affected by the type of the cutlery used to eat (in this case, knife and fork were changed between experimental groups), in terms of liking, aesthetic value, and willing to pay for the food. In other words, a very common set of utensils, present on tables around the world, can potentially make the food ‘taste’ better (or worse).”

Replicating flavours digitally

Alongside the development of enhanced flavours for naturally grown food, scientists have been working on ways to replicate flavours and tastes that are completely divorced from the food products they originated from.

The digital taste interface, also known as a digital lollipop, works by stimulating the sweet and sour taste receptors using two metal probes placed on your tongue. The probes produce thermal and electrical stimulation, which translate to taste when activated.

Prototypes for a working interface have been in progress for a number of years, for example at London City University’s Mixed Reality Lab. Researchers from the lab explain: “Although there are a lot of systems in auditory, vision, and haptic domains, few attempts have been made in the sense of taste. As an attempt to bridge this gap, we introduced a method for digitally actuate the sense of taste by actuating the tongue through electrical and thermal stimulations.”

While the development of digital taste simulation is still in its infancy, it has been touted as a potentially revolutionary concept, which offers the potential of sharing flavour remotely via social media or advertising. If food adverts weren’t already pavlovian enough for your liking, imagine being able to experience the flavour through a device attached to your television set.

While tasting your TV may be all fun and games, the applications of digital flavour replication may play a significant role in how we consume food in the future. With the global population expected to reach 9.6 billion by 2050 and crops failing due to drought and flooding, access to the food we know and love may become increasingly difficult in the years ahead. Changing our eating habits is an incredibly complex task, battling both consumer perception of manufactured food and eating trends; however, if we can capture flavour, digitally or through flavour encapsulation, and apply it to bland, mass produced food (or bugs if you can stomach them), then flavour could be used as a bridge between the old foods that we are accustomed to, and the new foods that can be grown to survive extreme environments, creating new and exciting flavour combinations in the process.