What does a spoon taste like?
In the basement of King's College there are forty people tasting spoons. Not food on spoons but the spoons themselves. It's part of a research project by Zoe Laughlin, curator of the Materials Library which is an interdisciplinary team of people interested in the properties of stuff. I offered up my services as a guinea pig and found myself blind-folded in a room under the Strand.
The room is quiet, small and bland, which Laughlin explains prevents me from getting distracted. The walls are tiled in a pistachio colour, there’s a sink on my left and lots of empty shelves, the large window looks out onto a brick wall, it’s got that abandoned-hospital-in-a-horror-film vibe. Whilst being filmed, each spoon is given to me to suck on while Laughlin asks for scoring on various ranges of descriptors: sweet, salty, metallic, unpleasant and so on. Obviously it’s a very relative process, they pretty much all taste metallic but some more than others, and they’re never going to be sugary sweet but again, you can pull out differences between them. After the test is over I get to see exactly what I’ve been putting in my mouth, there’s stainless steel, zinc, copper, silver, gold and tin. So what are my particular likes and dislikes? It turns out I don’t like licking zinc, but perhaps that isn’t so surprising. And it also turns out I have a strong preference for gold – is it wrong that this makes me a little pleased, as though it has some wider significance?
Laughlin kindly gives me a boiled sweet to get the strange tastes out of my mouth and then she lets me have a peek into their HQ down the corridor. There are two rooms filled with objects you wouldn’t normally see together. There’s a variety of animal jaw skeletons having some rather violent experiment performed on them, a selection of astro turf from an American company who make surfaces specifically for walking dogs, and a box labelled Periodic Table full of small jars. Now the Materials Library may have a scientific side but they have also done projects with the V&A and Tate, in their own words they’re a ‘play pen for the material minded’. In their HQ, my attention goes straight to a flat pink blob on one of the tables, it must be at least two feet in diameter and looks like icing slowly inching towards the edge. I really hope it is what I think it is – ‘yes’, Laughlin replies, ‘it’s silly putty, you can touch it if you want’. And so I go and play.
www.materialslibrary.org.uk
