Can the same carrot taste different?

A few days ago I had breakfast with Ludwig, who spent many years growing vegetables in Vorarlberg and selling them at weekly markets. He told me about a customer who once came to his stand and said, “The carrots at the other stand taste better than yours.” The problem was that they were his carrots too. Same grower, same field, same harvest. The woman simply did not know that the other vendor was selling produce Ludwig had grown. I have been thinking about that story ever since, because it makes an ordinary assumption about taste suddenly unstable. If the carrot is the same, where does the difference in taste come from?

We often talk about taste as though it were simply a property of food. This tomato is sweet, that cheese is strong, these carrots are better. But eating never happens in isolation. We see the stall, know or do not know the person selling something, arrive with expectations, memories and recommendations, and carry our mood, hunger, attention and previous experiences with us. The carrot may be chemically identical, but the situation is not. Perhaps taste is not located entirely in the food or entirely in the person tasting it. Perhaps it is something that happens between a food, a person and a particular moment. That would explain why the same ingredient can disappoint us one day and feel extraordinary another, and why stories, places and people can become part of what we experience as flavour.

This is where the story becomes interesting for a podcast about AI. A machine can learn an extraordinary amount about carrots: variety, soil, sugar content, storage, recipes and consumer preferences. It may become very good at predicting which carrot I am likely to prefer. But is that the same as understanding why the same carrot can taste different to the same person? Ludwig’s customer had no idea that she was comparing one grower’s carrots with the very same grower’s carrots. For her, the difference was nevertheless real. The carrot had not changed. The taste had.