Malcom Gladwell: The Ketchup Conundrum (or Lord of the Recipes)

The Ketchup Conundrum (or Lord of the Recipes):

This was a fascinating story of the development of the phrase and underlying idea that when it comes to food, there is no single perfect recipe, but rather there are a set of perfect recipes.  Essentially, a clever guy in the food science industry, Howard Moskowitz, developed a code that, given the input of taste test groups and their preferences, could optimize the (in this case) spaghetti sauce recipe to maximize the score for each of 4 groups that were recognized.  This was revolutionary in that it challenged the idea of a perfect recipe that would please everyone.  Well, with one exception:  ketchup, there is only one and like a black hole or singularity, it has its own rules that no one understands.  What other “single recipes to rule them all” ideas do we have in our daily lives?  Perhaps politics – each group has an idea on how to solve a problem, perhaps a plan to please each group rather than one plan that pleases only a few (obviously there are issues with maximizing funding and mutual exclusivity of ideas). 

The idea was revolutionary to the food industry, but it seems mundane from an engineering perspective:  choose the number of sauces you want to make and then choose your optimization criteria.  The food industry chose 1 recipe and optimized to 1 testing group.  That would be like designing one type of motor for all vehicles:  everyone could still get around, and a lot of folks would be happy.  But by understanding specialization (trucking vs. commuter cars vs. luxury vehicles), one could modify the one design and please each individual group more.     

The other cool thing to take away from this:  the basic taste of Umami.  Sure, we've all heard of sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, but I'd never heard of umami before.  Cool!