Optimized Fruit
What does tastiness tell us about fruit choice? Could we engineer the perfect fruit? Or are we just comparing apples and oranges?
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing which is the best fruit.
Speaker B:Peter, which is the best fruit? I can't answer that definitively because obviously it's very subjective, but the question came about. I recently went up to see my parents to stay over for a few nights and the typical parent household, they still see you as a child and they're forever trying to force good food down you and prevent you from eating biscuits, which means that whenever I'm going to stay there's always a huge fruit bowl selection. But it's great, I do like fruit so I tuck in. And I think I was peeling an orange, a sort of satsumori type small orange thing. Nice loose skin? Well actually, and this is the point, I was peeling this orange with great frustration. Stop calling it an orange. Well what is it? What if it's a satsuma or a tangerine? It's an easy peel because an orange is definitely
Speaker C:not one of the easy peeling things.
Speaker B:A citrus fruit of some sort that was difficult to peel, small. And there were several different types of these oranges, similar citrus fruits in the bowl and I was having more than one. Some of them were easy to peel, some of them weren't. The easy to peel ones were less tasty, very obviously less tasty than the hard to peel ones. And that got me thinking, is there some correlation between the effort and reward of a fruit? And I was sort of musing on this and comparing apples, are they more tasty than bananas? You're just comparing apples and oranges there. Well yes, it's a cliché. So mangoes, really difficult, pain in the bum, really fibrous, big stone in the middle which is probably more than half the volume and they've got really thick skin, difficult. You've got all sorts of techniques to get them on. Whereas an apple all you need to do is wash it and bite it and it's done. So is there some sort of correlation? And if you could design the best, the optimum fruit, what would
Speaker A:it look like? Right, we need to set our minds to this. So devising the Aleph, here we go, the Aleph challenge, we're going to design the optimal fruit. But yeah, I think this is super fascinating and absolutely, I know that oranges aren't as popular as they could or should be precisely because of the faff factor.
Speaker C:Yeah, so I've made a faff scale because I was analysing this. One is, so this goes from one to five. One, you can stick it in your gob right away, blueberries, blackberries, just stick it straight in and eat it. Two is, it's very easy to peel. So that would be a clementine or a banana. So you can just take the skin off and then you can eat it. Three is if you've got a stone or a core of some sort to worry about. So I would put an apple or a cherry in that category because you can just bite into it, but you can't with total abandon. You've got to worry about that stone. You've got to eat round it. I think your scale is wrong already, but keep going. I've got a different and possibly
Speaker B:superior scale.
Speaker C:Okay, fine. But wait one sec. Four is it requires some prep, but not that much, but you've got to use a knife at this point. So melons, grapefruits, you've got to cut them in half. And finally, the extensive prep involved in a mango or pineapple puts it at a five. That's my faff scale. Let's hear Peter's brilliant improvements. That's the Hare faff fruit scale, right?
Speaker B:So I came about a very similar scale, but I decided to break it down into all the activities you have to do to a fruit before you can eat it. So I had all the same kinds of activities. So say a banana, right? You don't have to wash it. You have to peel it, but then you don't have to do anything else to it. So that gets a score of one. One point. Wait, wait, wait. Have you got a zero? There's a zero because some fruit you don't have to do anything to. But even berries you have to wash. So everything, but I'm not too fussed about this washing thing. Yeah, I wouldn't wash a berry. Just pick them off the tree and eat them. So there's six different activities, including washing, peeling, de-stoning. Well, there's peeling easy, peeling hard. So if there's a hard peel, you get two points. And then some fruit you have to cook, etc. So there's lots of activities. So different fruit will have different scales. And then I got a list of fruit energy content per hundred grams, working on the assumption that, by and large, preference for a fruit on average is going to be driven by energy content. So you have a natural disposition towards things.
Speaker C:I can totally disprove that based on my analysis, but carry on.
Speaker B:And I found a very weak correlation between FAF and energy content as a proxy for taste. So you're doing that as a proxy for taste? Yeah, so I'm assuming that, by and large, if something's got more energy in it, you're going to find it more tasty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, a very weak correlation, only 0.15.
Speaker A:Okay, so hold on.
Speaker C:Yeah, but I think Peter's made a terrible, terrible gaffe there in assuming that energy content is correct. Because one of my least, on my ranking, I also rank them by calories per gram, because I think that's something to take account of. It's certainly something you're interested in. So for me, for example, I would like to minimise calories if I can. So I've separately ranked tastiness and calories per gram. And there is almost no correlation at all. And in fact, my least favourite fruit, well, it's equal least favourite fruit, is also the highest in calories, which is dates. Medjool dates, they're off the scale in terms of calories per gram. And I hate dates, loathe them. But then you've got other things like, I mean, I love melons. Melons are one of the lowest calories per gram. In fact, the whole melon family occupy the three bottom. I'm trying to find a global average preference. I'm just saying, your assumption that it's somehow related to energy content per gram, I massively reject.
Speaker B:Oh no, but I think on average, if you took everyone's preferences for fruit, the global average for preference for melons, I don't think it would be linked to energy.
Speaker C:Right, but I'm saying that that isn't the case. I mean, I don't know why you're just making that assumption. I am making that assumption, but I'm declaring it. But I've got an economic argument, right?
Speaker A:It's always like this with fruit, it always ends up. At dinner, never discuss politics, religion or fruit. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker C:Now, my economic argument is simply that all of these fruits are available, right? So none of them can strictly dominate any other, right? They must all, in some sense, be on some kind of boundary, right? They must all occupy some equal point, a boundary, so that there is going to be someone who thinks that, you know, the the extra taste of cherries is sufficient to offset the fact they have a stone and that the effort of preparing a pineapple is offset by the tastiness of the pineapple. So, you know, I mean, I take I suppose I'm sort of agreeing with Peter in the sense that I think taken everything into consideration. The fruits we have available in shops all, in some sense, represent optimizations of fruit over hundreds of years. And there are fruits like, you know, what's that fruit that they have in the Far East, which is disgusting? Jackfruit, is it?
Speaker A:No, it's not jackfruit. I forget the name, but the one that stinks, right?
Speaker C:Yeah, so there's fruits, you know, which no one eats, right? Which obviously, you know, outside very niche real fruititarians, which obviously have, you know, are inferior. So in some sense, these fruits are all good at what they're doing. Okay, none of them is going to be better, having said that.
Speaker A:No, but I think we have to be anthropocentric about this. We have to. There's no point having a discussion.
Speaker C:I think you mean we have to take into account the tastes that people have? No. What do you mean anthropocentric?
Speaker A:Because the reason why that fruit stinks like it does is so that I think it's so it's attractive to flies, I think. So we have to forget about the flies and just concentrate on us. So that fruit is just...
Speaker C:Yeah, right. But it's why it's not in shops. Shops are, I don't know if you know this, but shops are not natural phenomena. They're created by humans, right? The reason that humans have put those things in shops and that there's a trade in them is that all of them are considered good by someone.
Speaker A:Okay, look, hold on. Let's sort of, let's do this in another way, right? I don't think we've scratched the surface here. No, no, we haven't.
Speaker C:For one thing, we don't know what Peter's favorite fruit is.
Speaker A:Right, well, this is my point. This is what I want to say. So let's just go with either your favorite fruit or the fruit you eat most often. Peter?
Speaker B:Favorite fruit would be pineapple, but I don't eat it very often because it needs to be done at a scale to make the faff. The faff scales well with pineapples if you use the Coghill technique of a sharp knife and chopping board, but in order to make it worthwhile, washing up the chopping board, getting the knife out, you have to do it for a whole pineapple, which means that you have to eat a whole pineapple within a couple of days. Yeah. And I don't... It's at the risk of heartburn as well. Yes, yeah. So I think, but the favorite fruit overall is probably the apple because it's just so convenient. Yeah. You don't even need to wash it, you just wipe it on your T-shirt. What kind of apple? Something small and sharp, like a cox's apple. Yeah. Okay. Because it's zero faff, pretty much.
Speaker A:Nick, by the way, for someone who can be so clever, I thought you had some really stupid bits on your scale. I think you got your second and third mixed up.
Speaker C:You have to assume that if you think my scale is stupid, it might be you.
Speaker B:Your scale is quite subjective because you're wrapping in your dislike for doing certain things.
Speaker C:No, it's not. No, I'll tell you what it is. So I'm putting peeling, having to peel something as easier than having to worry about a stone. And I'll tell you for why. No, no, rubbish. Go on. Will you allow me to tell you for why or not? Because once you've done the peeling, which is easy by definition. No, it's not. You're done. You're good. No. It isn't. I've defined it. I've defined it as something that's easy to peel.
Speaker A:But it's not easy than just picking something up and eating it.
Speaker C:No, that's why that gets a one, right? The point about having a stone or a core is it affects every mouthful. Whereas once you've got done the peeling. No, because if you've got a big apple, you don't have to worry about the core. Right, you do. With every mouth, as you get closer to the core, you have to worry about where it is. You said with every mouthful. With a stone or a pit, you've got to take it. You've got to chew round it. You've got to bite round it. You've got to spit it out. It's a pain in the arse. I can do without. Compared with just peeling something, which you just eat. Nick, favourite fruit. Right. So this was a useful exercise for me. I have to say, I'm not a fruit person. But I ranked everything in terms of calories per gram, tastiness and faff. And then I took various use cases. So for me particularly, I'm negatively interested in calories per gram. I want low calorie fruit. And I obviously want tastiness and I don't want faff. So putting all of that into consideration, what I realised actually is, Peter mentioned pineapples, is that there's a whole family of fruit which is sort of quite acidic. And that would include plums, cranberries, pineapples, which I've discovered I don't really like. There's a certain kind of acidity about those kinds of fruit. A squidginess and an acidity that I don't like. But anyway, top of my list, grapes. Good old fashioned grapes, right? Just sling them in. Seedless, mind you. Yeah. If they had seeds, they would be a three on the faff. So that would be no good. Grapes, strawberries, raspberries. Top three. And that actually pretty much accords with my fruit behaviour. Sorry, say those again, sorry. Grapes, strawberries, raspberries. Okay. Right. So that does, that accords with my fruit consumption actually pretty well. And then it's nectarines and tangerines, which I also would eat. And then after that, the classic banana. And then when we get, it's really, I eat a lot of those top fruits. And then we get to things I don't eat. So apricots, blueberries, peach, sort of second division. And finally at the bottom, there's a bunch of things which I actively dislike, which are kiwis, pomegranates, papayas, grapefruits and dates. That's my nightmare five fruits.
Speaker A:Hold on, you've missed out the king of the fruit, which is the apple. I didn't hear that anywhere.
Speaker C:No, apples are like my 17th favourite fruit because they're quite high in calories per gram, apples. And I don't find them particularly tasty. So there are only three on the tastiness. That can totally offset by the three on the faff because of the core, the ever-present core. Yeah, which obviously you're wrong about. Okay. So there we are. But anyway, I did. So, I mean, if we were just interested in packing for, of course, as usual, it boils down to what you want. If we were packing for an Arctic expedition, we would be looking for, you know, calories per gram. And it's a totally different story. Then you'd be packing dates and raspberries and bananas.
Speaker A:Yeah. I mean, you're going to be in trouble with things like, I can't remember what was on your scale, things like nectarines and apricots, for example, things like that. Whereas you're going to be all right with apples.
Speaker C:Jam and marmalade is your answer there.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah. Look, a couple of things. First of all, I like the fact that by quite some distance, our most heated discussion ever on the Cognitive Engineering podcast has been about fruit. And that's, we're talking about, we were in the region of a hundred podcasts we've done. I like that. Second.
Speaker C:Well, I've only just discovered I'm in a room with a pair of fruit morons. I'm disgusted at them. Yeah.
Speaker A:But also, yeah, I hope, by the way, that all this research was or these ratings you've got were only for the purposes of research for this podcast. I hope you sort of didn't do these on your own sort of years ago.
Speaker C:Now I've done it though.
Speaker A:It's going to come in handy. I'm going to maintain this. I'm going to work on this. But look, yeah, for me, by the way, I'm a simple guy. Apples. And it's got to be a Braeburn. But it's also got to be a Braeburn that's not part of a multi-pack. I'll agree with you.
Speaker C:Because they diddle you on that stuff. But I agree with Braeburns. They're the all-around best apple. They're nice and big. They've got nice, even though they're slightly red, they've got a nice sort of apple-y sharpness without being too acidic.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah. But do you know, so that bit we've done. Okay. But next, we've got to look at this in a constructive way. We've got to think about what if we could design a superfruit. Okay. And I'm going to blow your mind with something here. Go on then. So imagine, for example, if you could eat an apple that tasted just like an orange. Okay. Now there's an element of is that possible in terms of texture? But anyway, imagine that. Wouldn't that be great? But imagine no more. Okay. In Brazil, you can eat a banana that tastes like an apple. And in fact, as you may or may not know, there are huge dozens of varieties of bananas in the world, but we're just kind of used to one or two of them. But in Brazil, you eat, and I've had it myself, this beautiful, very sweet banana. You eat it, it tastes just like an apple. And sure enough, they call it an apple banana. So look, let's design from, so mine was the apple. Yours was? Pineapple. Pineapple. Yours was grape. Yes. Okay. Let's design this fruit. Right.
Speaker B:So we need, and we can call it the Aleph. I think, well, in terms of packaging, the banana is king. It's brilliant. It comes with its own wrapper.
Speaker C:I think we're thinking about, if we're thinking about distribution as well. So if we're thinking about the need to make it travel round. Well, bananas travel pretty well. Well, that's what I mean. So, which I wasn't doing, but perhaps we should. So if we've got to think about the necessity to keep it sort of not getting bruised, I think a banana is the easiest peeling. That's the easiest fruit prep, really, isn't it? Yeah.
Speaker A:No.
Speaker C:Because you want something. These preposterous things that he's coming out with.
Speaker A:No, because you want something that you don't even need to peel, that preserves itself without having to have a skin. Like an apple.
Speaker B:Where the banana wins, this is where my scale needs some, my FAF index needs some work, is that because you're peeling, but it's really easy peel, you don't need to clean it. So I'm assuming that all the fruit you need to clean. I never wash fruit. Yeah, I don't wash fruit.
Speaker C:So I think this is because Peter's a germaphobe. So he's more interested in washing fruit.
Speaker B:So if you're roaming through the woods and you come across an apple tree, you'd probably want to wash the apple, wouldn't you? No. Especially if you were roaming through the woods. Okay, roaming through the woods next to a motorway with all the diesel fumes and certain things. You rub it on your jumper, don't you? You rub it on your pullover, your stripy pullover. Apples have got a sort of easy wash function, which means, because they're shiny, you can just rub it on a cotton shirt and it's fine. Bananas are even easier because just by removing the easy peel skin, it self-cleans. Whereas a raspberry has got quite a complex texture to it. They're quite difficult to wash.
Speaker C:Okay, look, so thinking about this. I think we have to face the practicalities here. And if we're going to get these new fruits to every corner of the globe, I think we've got to put some sort of nice skin around it. And the great thing about banana skin is it's sort of pleasant to people.
Speaker B:Banana skin needs to be slightly cubic so they can stack well. Yeah, that's good.
Speaker C:So cubic banana skin type. What colour? What colour?
Speaker B:I think the yellow of a banana is quite appealing. And they've got a good handy ripeness indicator built into the skin. Yeah, yeah. Green through yellow to brown. Tells you exactly what kind of banana it's going to be when you open it up.
Speaker C:Okay, well, I mean, what might be good is if once you peel that banana, you had sort of eight mini cubes inside, some of which was grape, some of which was nectarine, some of which was strawberry. But my nominee for the contents of this thing would be strawberry flesh because it's the lowest calorie per gram of the things that I consider tasty. But do you want it to taste like a strawberry as well? Yes. So that's what I want. But you don't have to go very far away from a strawberry. So you can make it taste of a strawberry and you don't have to do much to the fat content. Because I guess that's where the really difficult trade-off is. It's very hard to say, well, I want something that tastes like a banana but has the fat content of a watermelon.
Speaker B:I think we could probably have different varieties because given that we've solved all of these complex genetic engineering problems, what it tastes like could be literally anything. Yeah. We could have nice combinations. I'd like one that sort of starts off strawberry flavoured one end and then goes progressively to pineapple on the other end. Because a fruit salad that's pineapple and strawberries is just the most incredible combination.
Speaker C:If it's a cube, you can have three different dimensions represented. So you can have from top to bottom, you could have acidity. And then you could have sort of fat content going from left to right. And then in the Z axis, you could have colour. So if you wanted to have a highly acidic, squishy, fatty, kind of like maybe a kiwi fruit type thing, you'd go to one corner. But if you wanted something more like a blackberry, you'd go to the other corner, you know. Yeah. Something like that.
Speaker A:I like this. I like this. And yeah, something actually also in the UK, we're actually relatively...
Speaker C:We really have designed the ideal fruit. Yeah.
Speaker A:That's a brilliant idea for a fruit.
Speaker C:We've done it, lads.
Speaker A:If you like, this is the fruit of such heated debate. You see, because we're so motivated to sort of find a solution.
Speaker C:Start that Kickstarter. Yeah. Anyway, I mean, I think what this has all illustrated is the joy of multi-criteria decision analysis, which, as I have actually found, is useful. It's useful just for doing it because you find out stuff that you didn't know, like, you know, dates being the most calorific fruit per gram. And then you discover things about yourself. So when I was forced to make a judgment about, you know, what fruits do I really like? I discovered there were these clusters, you know. So there's this cluster of sort of squidgy things, like sort of apricots and oranges and things that I'm really not that fond of, you know. Raisins, not a big fan of those at all. Just that kind of squidgy, fruity, squidgy, acidic thing I don't like. And I much prefer these kind of more fleshy, melon-y, strawberry type things, you know. So I'd never really thought about that before. But now I've handily managed to reduce my fruit heuristics down to just, you know, is it one of this type or that type?
Speaker A:Yeah. Also, we haven't talked about, in terms of FAF, we haven't talked about payoff in terms of, against a risk. So, for example, there's a risk when, there's a risk when you eat an apple that you might not like it because there's something gone wrong with it. But there's a risk when you eat an orange that it's sort of gone off or, you know, it's too acidic, etc. But, of course, the journey to get there is very different with each of those fruits. And that's why I don't eat oranges that much, because I can't be bothered with the FAF to get through to a disappointing fruit. Peter, anything to say?
Speaker B:Yeah, orange is another thing that the FAF scales quite well if you get in there with a knife rather than trying to peel it by fingers. That tends to be my solution. All that sort of half inch of pith that gets left when you're trying to peel an orange without any implement, it's just unadvertising, isn't it? Yeah. Much better to do it halftime orange style and cut it into slices. That's what I do. Munch them out. Yeah. No. We need to round off with something.
Speaker C:What you want to do with an orange is squeeze all the juice out and drink that. Throw the orange away. Love freshly squeezed orange juice.
Speaker A:Yeah. Anyway, sorry, Fraser, you were about to wrap up. Yeah, I don't know what to wrap up on now. But I think we've got somewhere somehow with something there. And I think I can see a new direction for Aleph Fruit Incorporated with our genetically modified fruit. I'm kind of up for that. I think that was a productive 20 minutes or so. Brilliant. Okay. Thank you as always for listening to the Cognitive Fruit podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. And thanks as always. And until next time.
Speaker B:Stop laughing at your own joke.
Speaker A:No, I'm just still slightly sort of shocked by how much time we devoted to fruits. Anyway. It's good. It's a good one. Okay. Bye bye.
