The Universal Flavor Network Emerges

Flavor pyramids for North American and East Asian cuisines, credit - Barabasi Labs, 2011

Global diets are converging, with benefits and problems
Jan 2020, phys.org

They found what sounds like a two-way shift between Asian and Western countries, where Asia is eating more animals and the West eating less.

This idea of the global diet reminds me of the Flavor Networks of 2011, where they took all the molecules in all the ingredients of all the recipes ever (56,498), and linked them together. You can see one of their network graphs above, and the rest in the paper.

The graph shown above is the part related to this global diet shift. You can see that Western recipes are populated by animals, bread and butter, and Eastern cuisine is likely to have more vegetables.

There is another way to look at this which includes the homogeneity of the ingredients. Western recipes rely on similar ingredients. Cows and their butter are related. Wheat, which is a grass, is eaten by cows, so it's in their meat and their butter. If these are the staple foods, and staple flavors of the West, then  it would make sense that those recipes are more closely related, like family.

For the East, there is less focus on animals and more on vegetables. Flavorwise, it's a more adversarial arrangement. Think onions and garlic and sesame oil and of course soy sauce. Note that soy sauce actually gets its strong animal-like flavor not from an animal but from the complex of fermented by-products that develop as a result of the browning reactions that occur after purposefully-inoculated molds and bacteria have digested and transformed the soy-energy for a long time.

The vegetables aren't eating each other and becoming part of each other's bodies like cows and grass. They aren't related in that way, so their flavors are different, and they have to stand out from each other.

And one step further, consider Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel idea. In it he points out that Asia has less medium-sized domesticable animals as compared to Western Europe. This matches the respective diets we're talking about. He also points out that the West had wheat and the East had rice as the staple grain. Finally, he reminds us that the East is predominantly north-south in its axis and the West (both Europe and America) are more on an east-west axis.

Who cares? Plants care. Plants in the north need a very different algorithm than plants in the south, because of the change in day length. Those plants will be different, and any culture that lives on a north-south axis, eating lots of different plants, will produce a diet like the one described above.

The side-to-side shape of the West allows all the plants to be on the same daylight schedule, and thus similar algorithms overall, similar plants, similar flavors.

It might be interesting to compare some data from global trade over the past 50 years to see how it matches with these diet changes (because we've pretty much obliterated any east-west or north-south biases of a culture).

Post Script:
Soylent Green is people mixed with soy and lentils and fed back to people.

Russian space lettuce was grown on the International Space Station for astronauts.

Notes:
Multidimensional characterization of global food supply from 1961 to 2013.
James Bentham, Gitanjali M Singh, Goodarz Danaei, Rosemary Green, John K Lin, Gretchen A Stevens, Farshad Farzadfar, James E Bennett, Mariachiara Di Cesare, Alan D Dangour & Majid Ezzati. Nature Food volume 1, pages 70–75 (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s43016-019-0012-2.

Flavor network and the principles of food pairing.
Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian E. Ahnert, James P. Bagrow & Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Scientific Reports, published 15 December 2011. DOI: 10.1038/srep00196

FurFuryl Mercapton, Abstract Foods, and Flavor Networks
Network Address, 2012

FurFuryl Mercapton, Abstract Foods, and Flavor Networks

Coffee, Cannibis, Tobacco, Skunk, Beer, Lemons, and what else, all share a common smell from a common chemical called furfuryl mercapton.

Upon verifying this fact , I came across the following:

Miracle Berries
Explore the many ways to use mberry tablets. Host "flavor tripping" dinner parties. Get your kid to eat their vegetables. mberry miracle berry tablets are hand-picked fruit and 100% natural.
http://mberry.us/

And it reminded me of an ever-present crazy idea from a crazy culinary friend of mine:

Abstract Foods

--Thai curry and Nutella? Cream Cheese.
--Tobacco and peanut butter? BBQ sauce.

I also call it the Jelly Belly Effect, as they have a chart on the back of the box that shows you how to mix and match some flavors to 'create' other flavors.

and finally, this brings us to the topic of

FLAVOR NETWORKS

Flavor Network and the Principles of Food Pairing
This study uses a network-based approach to explore the impact of flavor compounds on ingredient combinations, analyzing 56,498 recipes, and measuring links between flavor profiles of separate ingredients in various recipes

Barabasi Labs-2011

"The flavor network allows us to reformulate the food pairing hypothesis as a topological property: do we more frequently use ingredient pairs that are strongly linked in the flavor network or do we avoid them? To test this hypothesis we need data on ingredient combinations preferred by humans, information readily available in the current body of recipes. For generality, we used 56,498 recipes provided by two American repositories (epicurious.com and allrecipes.com) and to avoid a distinctly Western interpretation of the world’s cuisine, we also used a Korean repository (menupan.com). The recipes are grouped into geographically distinct cuisines (North American,Western European, Southern European, Latin American, and East Asian)."

"This distribution reveals that North American dishes use far more compound-sharing pairs than expected by chance, and the East Asian dishes far fewer." [...] "The results largely correlate with our earlier observations: in North American recipes, the more compounds are shared by two ingredients, the more likely they appear in recipes. By contrast, in East Asian cuisine the more flavor compounds two ingredients share, the less likely they are used together." [...] "...suggests that the food pairing effect is due to a few outliers that are frequently used in a particular cuisine, e.g. milk, butter, cocoa, vanilla, cream, and egg in the  North America, and beef, ginger, pork, cayenne, chicken, and onion in East Asia." [...]

"North American food heavily relies on dairy products, eggs and wheat; by contrast, East Asian cuisine is dominated by plant derivatives like soy sauce, sesame oil, and rice and ginger."

"The fact that recipes rely on ingredients not only for flavor but also to provide the final textures and overall structure of a given dish provides support for the idea that fitness values depend on a multitude of ingredient characteristics besides their flavor profile."

"More generally this work provides an example of how the datadriven network analysis methods that have transformed biology and the social sciences in recent years can yield new insights in other areas, such as food science."

Barabasi Labs-2011

Flavor network and the principles of food pairing
--Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian E. Ahnert, James P. Bagrow & Albert-La´szlo´ Baraba´si
--Center for Complex Network Research, Department of Physics Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115,
--Center for Cancer Systems Biology Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02115
--School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47408
--Theory of Condensed Matter, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0HE, UK
Scientific Reports, published 15 December 2011
http://www.barabasilab.com/pubs/CCNR-ALB_Publications/201112-15_Nature-Flavor/201112-15_Nature-Flavor.pdf

Barabasi Labs-2011

The only link I see on the sample diagram is 'tetrahydrofurfuryl alcohol', found in soy sauce

very similar study:
Chinese Cuisine Patterns Revealed By Food Network Analysis
July 25, 2013

I would like to make copious personal mental notes between this study and the Evolution of Adult Lactose Absorption study cited in W.H. Dunham's Coevolution.

But, most importantly, reference to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel idea, which suggests why North America would have a dairy-based diet based on animal husbandry. It was a combination of just-so variables, the most significant (in reference to the above topic) being that of the protein-per-gram ratio of wheat vs. rice. Wheat yields a higher return-on-investment. This in addition to the east-west landmass of Europe/North America (increasing the spread of agricultural technology upon similar day lengths) vs. the more north-south axis of East Asia. This combination facilitated faster population abundance; the resulting higher population densities then led to the use of medium-sized domesticable animals (which ~Europe/North America both had in abundance) for food. In ^Coevolution with human-manipulated genetic adaptation, the dairying practices of these cultures make the same setting described in the Flavor Networks studies above.

POST SCRIPT

Nutrigenomics

Also known as nutritional genomics, this is the study of the complex interplay between food and genetic expression. Scientists working in this field seek to understand the role of genetic variation, dietary response, and the ways in which nutrients affect our genes. And indeed, food has a profound effect on our health — and it starts quite literally at the molecular level. Nutrigenomics works both ways; our genes influence our dietary preferences, and vice-versa. A key goal of nutrigeneticists is to establish personalized nutrition — matching what we eat with our own unique genetic constitutions. More here.

[pdf]

^11 Emerging Scientific Fields That Everyone Should Know About

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The Truth About Taste (Documentary)

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25 Amazing Food Infographics, Drawn From 49,733 Recipes

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Chinese Cuisine Patterns Revealed By Food Network Analysis

July 25, 2013

Milk digestion's 'more recent rise'

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