For artists and designers the play of materiality and the affects on the senses connects the practice and emotion of creating a new work and design. Touch, sight, sound, taste and smell evoke sensations that may come from memories or associations. These senses creates a connectivity between artist and viewer that heightens the experience.

The Brooklyn based Museum of Food and Drink in their current show uses the same concept to bridge sensory associations in Flavor: Making It and Faking It. The interactive exhibit surveys the history of crafting savory and sweet scents and tastes from natural ingredients and their chemical doppelgängers. Showcasing the flavors of sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami, entice our receptors tickling our 10,000 taste buds and 6 million scent cells to create our food and drink pleasures. 

Throughout the gallery, futuristic smelling stations demonstrate the purist form or make you guess between synthesized recipes. Faking flavor demonstrations are compacted into tiny pills that simulate natural foods that are the chemicals mixed in our grocery store brands.  

With all these synchronous taste and smell events affecting the human brain makes you stop, consider and question the next time you bite, drink, smell and enjoy your favorite delicacy.