Book Review: ‘Neurogastronomy: how the brain creates flavor and why it matters’ by Gordon M. Shepherd

Gordon Shepherd, a distinguished professor at Yale School of Medicine whose research, focuses primarily on the neurobiology of the olfactory system in the animal model, has appeared frequently in many of the top science journals, including Scientific American, and Nature. Indeed, his experimental work has, for many years, been at the cutting edge in terms of furthering our understanding of the sense of smell. It is safe to say, then, that Shepherd probably knows more about olfaction than virtually anyone else. Unfortunately, though, Shepherd spends the first 12 chapters (or 40%) of his new book discussing the intricacies, and the current understanding, of the neurobiology of olfaction in humans and other species. Hence, while the reader gets to learn a great deal about the inner workings of the nose, and, more importantly, how the brain manages to decode the complex patterns of information (which Shepherd likens to a Pointillist painting) it receives from the olfactory epithelium, the relevance of much of this material to the field of contemporary gastronomy is often less than clear.Had this volume been called ‘Neuro-olfaction’ then this bias (in the material covered) would have been perfectly understandable. Furthermore, it may well be true that as many a popular science writer will tell you (and contrary to folk intuition, [5]), that as much as 80% of what we think of as the flavour of food and drink actually comes from information provided by the nose (for example, [6,7]). As Shepherd puts it in one section header ‘Flavor is mostly retronasal smell’ ( [1], p. 29). I think that highlights the crux of what is wrong with Shepherd’s approach to neurogastronomy. To me, and many of my colleagues, the (neuro-)scientific study of gastronomy is about so much more than merely retronasal olfaction, important though it undoubtedly is to the perception of flavour (see [8]; Spence, [9,10]).I would argue that the overrepresentation of olfactory research in Neurogastronomy, whil