Thread by @realscientists

I had an unexpectedly busy morning but I am now ready to talk about food science!

I good place to start today why I choose food science and when my interest in food started!

Now I know most people have some interest in food.

Be it in nutrition or flavour/taste, origin, sustainability or price, maybe you have an interest in a combination of these.

What's the most important thing for you when you are buying or making food? (There can also be other factors too but just from these ones!)

My own interest in food started from childhood and it's mostly started from a sensory point of view. I wanted to know why sometimes things would have different textures or why one ingredient made such a big difference to a food?

What do I mean by "why one ingredient made such a big difference to a food?"

Well, my earliest memory of this is when I was about 8, I was making a cake with my aunt and someone (probably me) forgot to put in baking powder so the cake didn't rise. And I was like what happened?

In my world, you mixed up some ingredients, cakes went into the oven, they were in there a while and then they came out risen and fluffy. But this one didn't? Why?

And that is when I think my whole interest in food science started.

At first, I thought my interest in food was from a culinary point of view so when I got into my teens, I started to experiment with cooking & different cuisines.

While I still LOVE cooking, I realised after a while that my interest was actually in the science behind the cooking!

So why am I so interested in the sensory side of things?

I am autistic so I have sensory sensitivities especially with texture but with other things too!

I despise mushy textures with a passion & for most of my life I didn't understand why people were okay with them.

To me, these were awful and made my brain scream so for a lot of my life I didn't understand that other people didn't react like that to mushy textures.....

So when I realised that I also became massively interested in sensory because I was like WHY? Why is my brain doing this?

But there's also another side of this (that I'm not 100% sure if it related to autism or not?), which is when I get a texture that my brain LOVES, usually crispy or soft (but not mushy), it's like stars aligned and everything is happy!

Why don't I really know? There's not a lot of research into why autistic people have sensory sensitivities.

We know they do & there are some patterns that emerge in the types of foods people tend to be sensitive to but the type of food can vary but we don't really know why...

But there is a lot more research into how neuroscience and psychology play into our eating so maybe we'll get the answer at some point?

But the psychology of eating is absolutely fascinating and something I will probably go more into doing the week!