Heston Blumenthal and top scientists to explore link between taste pleasure and genetics

Why are some foods more pleasurable to eat than others? How far does genetics go towards determining what you like to eat, and how much you enjoy it? Why do certain foods pair better than others?

We've come a long way but there are still so many questions left to answer around our understanding of food and taste. Now some of the world's top chefs, including Heston Blumenthal, and sensory scientists will be joining forces in Spain to see if they can fill in some of the gaps around the delicious mysteries of perception and emotions when it comes to our experience of food.

There'll be more than just excellent pintxos to boot, as culinary greats and researchers descend on the Basque Culinary Centre in the coastal city of San Sebastian on October 24-26 to share and exchange knowledge.

The event, organised by Barcelona-based Centre for Genomic Regulation's (CRG) as part of their research project "Brainy Tongue", will be exploring the intricate factors governing our food perception through a series of interactive seminars and exciting sensory experiments.

"Over recent decades, gastronomy and sensory neuroscience have been sharing a fundamental interest in the principles governing perception… we want to promote a dialogue and an opportunity to work together " the Brainy Tongue event page states.

Leading team gastronomy will be The Fat Duck's Heston Blumenthal, a pioneer in multisensory cooking and a strong advocate for scientific understanding around food, as well as Andoni Luis Aduriz, whose experimental restaurant Mugaritz is rated among the world's best. They will be working with top geneticists, neuroscientists and physicists from Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia and Yale universities.

"The world of cooking has always been close to science and that of science to cooking," Aduriz said at a presentation of the Brainy Tongue project in Barcelona. "But there was still something missing."

CRG researcher Matthieu Louis said often the "magic" we often attribute to amazing dishes is an example of neuroscience in action, but "we don't know most of the scientific principles that lie behind exception food."

By gaining a better understanding of these principles one could customise menus and dishes to someone's genetic or health profile, or create virtual taste experiences, such as the "digital lollipop" developed by researchers at the National University of Singapore in 2012, in which a device simulates all four primary tastes—sweet, sour, salty and bitter—on the human tongue via electric currents.

For the food and scientific curious, there will be conferences and debates open to the public around food pairings, kitchen theory and more.

San Sebastian is something of a gastronomic hotspot, boasting the second-most Michelin star restaurants per square metre in the world, behind Kyoto, Japan.