Tasting the Virtual: Digitised Flavour and Culinary AI

Taste, once inseparable from biology, is becoming digital. Chapter 9 explores how AI, neurostimulation, and sensory computing are transforming flavour into data—allowing us to simulate, design, and share taste without food. From electro-gustatory interfaces like the Digital Lollipop to generative culinary algorithms, machines are learning not just to recreate flavour, but to invent it. Eating becomes an interface: monitored by smart utensils, modulated by biosensors, and personalised by mood or metabolism. Yet as cuisine becomes computational, questions of authenticity, culture, and belonging emerge. When flavour can be coded, will food still feed us—or only our algorithms’ appetite for sensation?