From UC Berkeley Division of Arts and Humanities
Professor Tim Tangherlini and His Student-led Research Team Uses Data Science to Uncover the Evolution of Nordic Flavors Over 200 Years
By Linda Chon
In this first installment of our interview series with the “Flavor Network” research group, Linda Chon interviewed Professor Tim Tangherlini, a computational folklorist in the department of Scandinavian. Professor Tangherlini leads an innovative project that uses data science to trace the evolution of Nordic flavors over the past 200 years. By analyzing historical cookbooks and flavor compounds, his team aims to uncover how Scandinavian cuisine has transformed and what it can reveal about social, cultural, and economic changes in the region. Forthcoming interviews with his students will follow this month.
What led to your interest in this project? Why the interest in flavor?
I thought YY Ahn’s work on flavor networks was a very interesting approach to a systems-level understanding of cuisine. I’m very interested in aspects of everyday life and the things that influence us on a day to day level that we often don’t even recognize as having such an important influence on us until they’re taken away.” Flavor networks became important at the end of the 18th century as autocratic empires started to crumble, leading to democracy movements and the broad adaptation of democracy in Scandinavia, as well as the ability of people to imagine things like cooking as more than just subsistence cooking. Things like transportation, reading, literacy, and the emergence of a broad middle class - groups of people not just scraping by - coincide with the development of food culture. We have no idea what we will find - Scandinavian cuisine might just be quite bland and marked by pickled herrings and meat based sauces. But more likely we will find that with the emergence of accessibility to global markets through shipping and trade, that things like different types of spices start to creep into the cooking and cuisine becomes less of a privilege of the aristocratic and upper classes and becomes something that people recognize as a shared part of the culture. Our goal is to try to understand what Scandinavia tasted like from the end of the 18th century to the mid 20th century. Are there moments when certain things change? It’s a project that integrates folklore and the culture of everyday life, and data science. Can we leverage data science to understand how it tasted?
Could you briefly describe what a “flavor network” represents? How do you leverage computing to capture how different flavors interact?
Every ingredient in a recipe is made up of different molecules and those molecules acting individually or in concert with each other create flavor compounds. We can match ingredients to flavor compounds. Things like heating can change the interaction of ingredients to create different flavor compounds. One of the students on this project is a chemical engineer interested in flavor. For each ingredient we're going to extract or match the ingredients to flavor compounds, and for each step of the recipe we will look at the transformation of flavor compounds in that recipe. Professor YY Ahn’s work examines the pairing of complementary flavors rather than contrasting flavors in Asian vs European cuisine. We’re hoping to see something like that – some change over time – using data methods like change point detection. Change point is built into the system, as we're taking cookbooks from different periods that were in broad circulation and using them as a proxy. For each recipe, we’ll be mapping ingredients to flavor compounds and looking at how the recipe combines different ingredients to create a flavor profile. We might have an overrepresentation of recipes. Essentially it’s a list of flavors and how they relate to each other and which flavors seem to be most common or of the highest degree in the flavor network.
Tim Tangherlini recently joined the I School in a joint-appointment with the Department of Scandinavian. His research centers around the circulation of stories on and across social networks, and the ways in which stories are used by individuals in their ongoing negotiation of ideology with the groups to which they belong.
