115 - Food for thought

The waiter stared at Chef Kaiyi like he was a freak, did they have security cameras in the back? How did he even know that the next order was Li Yun?

"He ordered dandan noodles this time," the waiter replied.

Chef Kaiyi snapped his fingers, "I am right, he is going through the list of all the items on the menu!"

He thought a person who regularly ate with Meimei and Wu Ling would not be normal. Since they had been coming in to eat, the guy, whom he learned was Li Yun, had been keeping notes of every single dish on the menu.

"He must be some sort of food critic," Chef Kaiyi had concluded.

As the second runner up on the China Great Chef, Kaiyi had a reputation to uphold. He knew that there were people who did not like his food, but those people tended to dislike Sichuan style meals in the first place. However, he never saw someone who ate his meals so recklessly and without thought!

"Who in the world finishes their meals within ten minutes?!" That was Kaiyi's first impression.

It was not something Kaiyi could tolerate. Like a true wine sommelier, wine was not meant to be drunk directly down the throat. That was archaic and uncultured. Wine was supposed to be sipped and swirled around in the mouth. Once the tongue had figured out all the tones and undertones, that was when the true essence of the wine could be enjoyed and appreciated!

Quickly, Kaiyi raised his hand to his face, wiggled his fingers, and refocused all his energy to create the best dandan noodle he could ever create.

Pao Lie arrived as Kaiyi was in his most fervent state.

"What is he doing?" Pao Lie asked the dishwasher.

The dishwasher looked at Kaiyi dancing around elegantly in the kitchen. "I think it might be Dr. Li's appearance again."

Pao Lie scratched his cheeks. "Why would Dr. Li's appearance affect him?"

"Chef Kaiyi thinks Dr. Li is a super critic."

Pao Lie scratched his head. "Huh, and why would he think that?"

"Every time Dr. Li finishes a meal, he would send back tips and a letter asking the chef to confirm the ingredients he had used. Chef Kaiyi was so surprised at first, but he got most of the ingredients correct! Over time, it was too exact that Chef Kaiyi became concerned that his food was too simple."

Pao Lie grasped. "What sort of amazing tongue does Dr. Li have!? No wonder he caught Meimei!"

Pao Lie decided to greet them. He had been too busy setting up another restaurant that he hadn't had the time to see the operation in Caoben Street.

The restaurants were completely filled on the bottom portion while the top was reserved for VIP. Wu Ling, LI Yun, and Rouxi were able to eat at discounted prices, so they regularly booked the second floor where it was less crowded.

His restaurant was designed with Qing-style decor in line with the rest of the streets. The space was open, and the mezzanine area had a balcony overlooking the street. Pao walked up the wooden steps, and onto the balcony, his heavy steps creaked the floors despite losing a lot of weight.

"Dr. Li, I heard you have absolute taste?" Pao Lie asked when he approached their table.

"What?" Li Yun was surprised when Pao Lie mentioned this to him. If there was one thing he was bad at, it was his sense of taste. All of his senses were rather hyperactive, but taste, in the traditional sense, wasn't one of them.

Wu Xing Status

Fire: 53

Water: 53

Earth: 53

Metal: 53

Wood: 53

Based on his understanding of Wu Xing and how his body had been reacting every time he added points into it, he had concluded that it was related to the five senses. Compared to the beginning, it felt like there was more than 50% improvement to all his senses, except for taste.

Fire represented taste, but it wasn't like he could differentiate the different flavors.

Maybe his original perception of taste was so poor in the beginning that 50% improvement meant nothing. To him, it didn't matter much, but it was funny that Pao Lie was complimenting his absolute taste.

"I don't think I have absolute taste."

"Don't be modest Dr. Li, I heard that my chef freaks out whenever you stop by. They said you can identify a lot of the ingredients used in the meal."

"Oh."

Wu Ling and Rouxi were both amused and tried to retain a straight face. Li Yun was pretty good at identifying ingredients, but it had little to do with taste.

From what Wu Ling could remember, Li Yun ate a lot of sweets and junkfood when he was little. After he began his mission, he stopped focusing on food, and everything was for completing his mission. He started to eat very quickly and food lost its appeal. It was simply substance to refill his stamina and whatever strange jing qi shen stats he was always going on about.

"It's not that I can distinguish food by the taste," Li Yun responded. "It's really just based on how my body reacts to it."

Pao Lie returned a strange expression, he didn't understand the meaning behind the strange doctor's words.

"So it's not the taste, but how it affects the body?" Pao Lie repeated. His face twitched a bit. How was it possible for the body to distinguish food, but not the tongue?

The tongue had microvilli, hair-like sensory protrusions in the taste buds. Microvilli assist in absorption, secretion, and mechanotransduction.

It was mechanotransduction that processes the information collected by the taste buds and sends the information to the brain. The brain matched up and compare the compounds with the existing information, divided up into five qualities, bitter, sour, sweet, umami, and salty.

The taste buds could detect glucose and ketones as "sweet" and a positive attribute because it is the main source of energy. Amino acids in protein as "umami," sodium as "salty," and acidic chemicals as "sour," and heavy metal as "bitter." People with more taste buds could collect more information to the brain.

The typical person had 2,000-8,000 taste buds. For Li Yun, he was on the lower end of the spectrum.

He theorized that his body had intentionally reduced the taste function such as umami and sweet to reduce his food intake. It was an evolutionary change caused by dietary habits. Many carnivores were experiencing similar changes. Instead of searching for food, the body was telling people to stop eating too much junk.

The five basic taste classification were ancestral genes used to identify edible food. Much of that function was not needed as before. In prehistoric times, sweet was safe to eat, and bitter may be poisonous. In modern society, it was ironic that the original ancestral code was causing obesity, and it was the bitter medicine that could cure it.

Li Yun's body had reduced his taste bud, but he had gained something more. The ability to detect the compounds as they were absorbed into his bloodstream and reorganized the information in his head worked in a similar manner, but more accurately.

His body was basically skipping the taste function and directly classifying individual compounds rather than dividing them into 5 classifications. Taste was a redundant function, and therefore, his body saw no need to improve the tongue. The function of his stomach had replaced much of the taste function.

The fire elements were simply allowing his body to process food a lot quicker than the average person.

"Ah, but what do you think of the food?" Chef Kaiyi asked.

"Overall, it's not bad, there are more yang elements, so it should be good as the weather gets colder."

Pao Lie nodded. "Ah, I remember you're good you TCM stuff. But still, can you identify any types of food?"

"Well, just the ones I have consumed before."

Pao Lie's eyes lit up. "Ooh, I have a friend who works for this tv show. Are you interested in getting on TV?"