Have you ever left a chocolate bar in the back of a drawer and then gone to take a bite? Sometimes, instead of luscious and smooth, it’s somehow become…grittier. The cocoa butter has changed its texture.
In college, Arielle Johnson encountered one such piece of chocolate and was fascinated. So the future food scientist decided to run an experiment where she modeled the crystals of chocolate to get to the bottom of it. That kind of exploration—of the properties that make food and flavor what it is—has been the crux of Dr. Johnson’s work ever since. And her studies have taken her from the world’s best restaurant, to MIT, and the Food Network.
Johnson, 32, describes flavor as “a composite sense evolved to integrate taste and smell (with input from the other senses) to give us information and pleasure from the food we eat. Flavor is a visceral link, perhaps the most essential link, between culture, evolution, ecology, health, and biodiversity. In the brain, flavor cross-talks extensively with emotions and memory.” It’s what makes you associate that bite of lasagna with Sundays at your grandma’s house or cheap vodka with the first time you got sick from drinking in college.
After getting her PhD in flavor chemistry and gastronomy at University of California, Davis, Johnson went to intern with René Redzepi, the head chef at Noma, the two-Michelin-star Denmark-based restaurant that in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2014 was named the “Best Restaurant in the World” by Restaurant magazine. (As of 2019 it’s ranked second.) Redzepi had just launched the Nordic Food Lab, an interdisciplinary research organization studying the edible potential of the Nordic region. And when Johnson first got there in 2012, the lab was held on a houseboat in the middle of Copenhagen where it welcomed chefs, scientists, and thinkers from all over the world to talk food. Over time the lab has worked with bloody, jelly fish, and larvae—but while Johnson was there they had a singular obsession. Insects, insects, insects. (One of Noma’s most notorious dishes was dressed with live ants.)
“When I got there they were super interested in the possibilities for eating insects. And a chef from Brazil brought these Amazon rainforest ants that tasted like lemongrass, coriander, and ginger. It was like, ‘Wow, how the hell do they taste like that?’ I figured out that you could make connections between insect science, microbiology, ethnobotany and all these other fields,” she says. “I’d found a niche where it really helped me at the lab to have my chemistry background because insect scientists will be looking at the molecules that make insects have lemongrass or other flavors, but they’ll be looking at them as pheromones—not flavors. So if you’re looking for a recipe in a paper about insects, you’re not going to find it; but if you know enough about chemistry, you can help find the right flavors for it.”
