S4 Ep 43: Connecting Culture, Pleasure and Sustainability of the Human Food Experience Through Neuroscience with Mario Ubiali
“We all want to transition to something more sustainable. But if you take sustainability without the hedonic component, you take pleasure away from sustainability.” — Mario Ubiali
Future Food-Tech Alternative Proteins Series Part VI
in partnership with Future Food-Tech Alternative Proteins Summit, NYC June 21 - 22, 2022
It's no secret that humans are emotional eaters. We can't help it—we're built this way! It is the way we deal with stress, the way we bond with our friends, and the way we console ourselves after a bad day.
Therefore, in order for sustainability to work in the food space, it has to be more than just a good idea—it has to be exciting, fun, and worth the effort. Sustainable eating is not about telling people what to do. It's about addressing the emotional, psychological, and cultural needs behind eating so as not to take the pleasure away from sustainability.
Mario Ubiali founded Thimus with the vision of humanizing the food experience. Their team consists of biomedical engineers and cognitive neuroscientists who have developed a high-level portable electroencephalogram/EEG device with dry sensors embedded in the hardware to provide neurophysiological data used in analyzing and interpreting human behavior, specifically toward food.
Listen as Justine and Mario discuss how technology helps us understand our food choices, why pleasure and sustainability must go together, how to encourage inclusivity and diversity in the food system, how food transforms humans, and what each of us can do to accelerate the rise of sustainability in the food space.
Connect with Mario:
Mario Ubiali is the Founder and CEO of Thimus. He has 20 years of experience in the creation and scale-up of international service companies with highly innovative content. He has a strong focus on the growth of multidisciplinary teams, on the planning and execution of strategies aimed at implementing IP portfolios and positioning the company as a powerful generator of added value.
Episode Highlights:
01:29 Thimus— Understanding the Human Food Experience
05:23 Accelerating the Neuroscience of the Food Experience
08:42 Pleasure and Sustainability Go Together
14:02 Inclusivity and Diversity of the Food System
18:16 How the Language is Changing
21:14 Food is a Place for Human Transformation
24:04 If You Really Want to Make a Change
Tweets:
Humans are emotional eaters. We want to experience pleasure and satisfaction, and we often do it through food. Join @_NextGenChef and Mario Ubiali, the Founder and CEO of Thimus as they discuss how technology can help us address the sustainability issue without sacrificing our desire for good food.#podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #futurefoodtech #Thimus #sustainability #foodtech #neuroscience
Inspirational Quotes:
04:06 “Thimus is the result of a combination of very hard science and a purpose that is driven by a certain vision of human beings and the future of food.” -Mario Ubiali
05:00 “An amazing way of trying to make a difference is to be working with all these smart, young, incredibly brilliant people from diverse backgrounds.” -Mario Ubiali
07:18 “Food is such a nexus for human culture and emotions, nurturing, and social dimensions. If we can make a difference in that, that’s going to be impactful!” -Mario Ubiali
07:41 “We are focused very often on health which is important, on the planet which is important, but why not include it all? -Justine Reichman
08:25 “Better understanding different cultural settings and what people have available to them, and looking at it in a global perspective is going to allow the future of food to be a more inclusive way to look at things on a global level.” -Justine Reichman
09:24 “If this is a planet issue, the one thing we definitely need to do is to have tools that will allow us to make food successful with so many diverse cultures.” -Mario Ubiali
10:17 “We all want to transition to something more sustainable. But if you take sustainability without the hedonic component, you take pleasure away from sustainability.” -Mario Ubiali
14:38 “We need to raise more and more in the debate on being inclusive of the diversity of what food means to others.” -Mario Ubiali
15:09 “It's all intellectual. And food is all about heart too. So we got to connect the two.” -Justine Reichman
20:05 “I am hoping that through our conversations… everyone can participate. Because that's the only way people can make more informed choices, be part of the conversation, and have access and choices to a better food system.” -Justine Reichman
21:14 “When it comes to food experiences, it’s deep stories, it’s diversity, it’s social, it’s memories… Food is such a profound place of transformation for humans.” -Mario Ubiali
23:18 “Food provides us with a gigantic opportunity. We can vote with our wallets when we go and purchase food. We also can vote with our fork when we make choices about how healthy we want to be.” -Mario Ubiali
24:05 “If you want to be relevant and make a change, you have to be in the dynamics of the real companies. And what you can hope to do is to slowly influence them to think differently.” -Mario Ubiali
Transcriptions:
Justine Reichman: Good morning, and welcome to Essential Ingredients. I'm your host, Justine Reichman. Today with me is Mario Ubiali, CEO and Founder of Thimus. And this is part of our future food tech series that we're doing to introduce you to some of the key speakers that will be at the conference. We are so pleased to have you here today, Mario.
Mario Ubiali: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me, and it's very exciting. Any opportunity to try and talk about how neuroscience can help the future of food is such a welcome opportunity, so thanks again for this chance.
Justine Reichman: It's my pleasure. I'm excited because I think that you have a little bit of a different take on things, and your perspective, and your motivation is very different than a lot of the conversations I have. So for the folks watching or listening that are not familiar with Thimus, perhaps you could just give us a short synopsis of what it is? What Thimus is.
Mario Ubiali: Of course. So without making it sound terrifying and terribly complicated, at the same time, I would want to say that Thimus was born and is operating to better understand human relationship with food and interaction with food. So in other words, you could say human food experiences through the lens of neuroscience. And what really makes us stand out, or at least what we try to be very special with is the way we mix neurophysiology. So neuroscience, the combination of different disciplines that goes into understanding brain functioning and brain reactions, and we meet that kind of hard science approach to neurophysiology with cultural studies and anthropological approaches. The result is almost like we have crafted a new lens. And now, you can look at the nature of human relationship with food through this kind of very innovative lens, which explains a lot about the increasingly emotional and all of those hidden processes that we sort of either give for granted or think they're too complicated to be explored.
Justine Reichman: Wow. So the first question that comes to mind is, what is your background?
“Thimus is the result of a combination of very hard science and a purpose that is driven by a certain vision of human beings and the future of food.” -Mario Ubiali
Mario Ubiali: Okay, I gotta say my background is the most, I wouldn't say the most distant from neuroscience so that we can dispel any idea that an entrepreneur pushing cultural neuroscience might be a neuroscientist himself. I am not. I'm an intrapreneur who comes from innovation and family entrepreneurship since three generations. I was born and raised in Italy. And to no surprise, I guess I am a philosophy major, and I have a master in human development and sustainability. So before you actually think that we're just selling snake oil in Thimus, actually, my job is to make sure that the team of people who work around me do maintain my vision, but at the same time, their competence. And so before people freak out and think that I'm really actually leading neuroscience projects, it's a team of cognitive neuroscientists, biomedical engineers, data scientists, anthropologists, sensory experts who work in teams and teams, and these are really the people who are making a difference and making any progress. What I contributed when I created the company was a very humanistic approach to this. That's the beauty and the tension in a company like Thimus. It's the result of a combination of very hard science, very rigorous one for that matter, and a purpose that is driven by a certain vision of human beings and the future of food. So I guess my role is that crazy philosopher guy who wants to be the CEO and tries to set the beater for a bunch of much smarter people.
Justine Reichman: Well, you're the visionary. And as the visionary, it's your job to innovate and to come up with these brilliant ideas, and then to surround yourself with the people around you that know a little bit more and can make it all happen.
“An amazing way of trying to make a difference is to be working with all these smart, young, incredibly brilliant people from diverse backgrounds.” -Mario Ubiali
Mario Ubiali: That's precisely, thank you for saying that. I should probably reuse what you just said. But no, it's a fantastic alchemy, by the way, when it works. You have the bad days, you have the good days. But on a good day, it's such an exciting and really amazing way of trying to make a difference is to be working with all these smart, young, incredibly brilliant people from diverse backgrounds. It's amazing.
Justine Reichman: So what was it that sparked this interest to specifically to have you come up with this brilliant idea, this innovative, this really thoughtful way of looking at the future of food?
“Food is such a nexus for human culture and emotions, nurturing, and social dimensions. If we can make a difference in that, that’s going to be impactful!” -Mario Ubiali
Mario Ubiali: Well, I think the real story, so without trying to embellish things too much. The real story is I was coming in from 14 years in a completely different line of business. I had grown and developed a network of international small service companies in a completely unrelated field that I was very expert on technological innovation and research. And what it means to be efficient in technology and then turn that into a product or something that you can actually make a difference or an impact in incorporate sort of word. I was coming from that. I was very lucky because I successfully managed to raise the interest of a multinational group. They approached me and basically bought out what I had built. And so at one point in my career in life, I was like, okay, turning the page, what do I know? What is my skill set? And my skill set was partially, let's not blow our own trumpet too much, but I certainly had the skill set of building something, from building a successful business from scratch was my goal in life as a professional. And as an intrapreneur and an investor, I was approached by a person who was a friend at the time and our ways parted since then, but he came to me and said: "Have you ever looked at the opportunity of neuroscience to be taken out of the live set into corporate world?" And long story short, I embraced that idea. We started out on a very simple level. And then during the pandemic, the peak of the pandemic, I made a decision that we needed to accelerate. Accelerating during the pandemic was, we must have a broader purpose, and that's where I realized that the greatest impact we could have with cultural neuroscience in corporate work could be in food and beverage. And why? Because food is such a nexus for human culture, and emotions, and nurturing, and social dimensions. And so I thought, if we can make a difference in that, that's going to really be impactful. And this is where it really came along. So it's really a story of different steps and different stepping stones, if you will.
“We are focused very often on health which is important, on the planet which is important, but why not include it all? -Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: I think that it's overlooked, I think so much. We are focused very often on the health which is important on the planet, which is important, but why not include it all? Why not look at the cultural? Because I think that oftentimes, there's different sets of groups that get overlooked because we're not inclusive. We're being exclusive, actually, by not being inclusive and thinking about all these different cultural groups, or these different people, what they grew up with, what they know to eat. And as a result, we're saying that this is what's healthy, but they've never known that, or they've never experienced that, that's not within what their comfort zone is, that's not what they know to go to. So I think better understanding different cultural settings, and what people have available to them, and looking at it in a global perspective is going to allow the future of food to be a more inclusive way to look at things on a global level.
“Better understanding different cultural settings and what people have available to them, and looking at it in a global perspective is going to allow the future of food to be a more inclusive way to look at things on a global level.” -Justine Reichman
Mario Ubiali: I couldn't say it better than you just did, and I just want to complement that by sort of raising a couple of points for stuff that it's emerging from the kind of work that we're doing. On one end, I want to say, even though it might sound a little oversimplified, I don't believe it is if we have at heart the full sustainability of future food systems. The famous challenge of feeding 10 billion people, and then I believe the most logical consequence of that vision would be to make sure that we design food that is going to be embraced and welcomed by all human beings on the planet. If this is the planet issue, the one thing we definitely need to do is to have tools that will allow us to make food successful with so many diverse cultures. So to me, I always say, the trick is when you start looking at the way the brain responds to food, you quickly realize that there is no such thing as the brain being rational about food. And as much as we like to think that humanity will convert to sustainable food because we're all good and nice and we want to save the planet. We all know then the juicy burger, or the great seafood, or whatever we want to eat out as a cultural example will always come first emotionally for people. And so cultural neuroscience on one end, just to add to what you just said, in my opinion, is the tool that will allow the whole food chain to actually be successful. So we all want to transition to something more sustainable. I am worried that if you take sustainability without the hedonic component, you take pleasure away from sustainability. Those two pillars, they can only work together. If you take pleasure out of the equation, the whole table, the old plane that you're trying to build falls. I want to add one aspect to that, maybe that's going to spark some of your curiosity on these.
“If this is a planet issue, the one thing we definitely need to do is to have tools that will allow us to make food successful with so many diverse cultures.” -Mario Ubiali
But later studies we've done for example also indicate that it's even deeper and more complex than that. So there is an emergence of a correlation between how your brain reacts to a food experience for likes or dislikes, embraces it or wants to get away from it that is heavily influenced by your genes. A gene and network approach to food liking in the brain is emerged as emerged as a recent trade of studies in some of the most advanced universities around the world, and teams who are trying to embrace that approach too. So all of a sudden now you see, we talk about saving the biodiversity of the planet, which I fully subscribe to, I don't think anyone wouldn't. But we have to start talking about biodiversity in humans that is also a biodiversity in humans. It's the biodiversity of how humans have shaped themselves, their biology, their tastes, their sensory abilities, their memories through centuries, if not millennia of history. Ignoring the bio and cultural diversity of humans, in my opinion, is a really high, high, high risk game because the game can only put in jeopardy diversity in humans. And so do we want to save the planet and effectively carry out in the Holocaust in terms of food cultures? Is that what we're trying to do? So that implication is very difficult to discuss, very difficult to bring to the table because it has political, economical, cultural implications. It's a touchy--
“We all want to transition to something more sustainable. But if you take sustainability without the hedonic component, you take pleasure away from sustainability.” -Mario Ubiali
Justine Reichman: There's a lot of nuance to that. There's one other thing I want to bring to the table, it sounds very (inaudible), maybe, but it's a shame. It's human behavior around this. It's not complicated, and it's not technical. But I feel like a lot of times, there's a lot of shame around what people are eating. And whether and where it comes from, and how it's prepared, and all these things. And then if you then go to people's cultural foods, whether, I mean, I've lived in Mexico, I've lived in a variety of other places, and some places are much more forward and conscious. And some people, whether it's resources or knowledge, or maybe it's the way I make my food for my Jewish holidays, and the lack of accessibility to certain things, but I feel like there's a lot of shame when it goes to being able to prepare or have access to create the things that I crave, or I want to put forth to my family for those that come from my roots. Does that make sense? So shame was just another thing that I wanted to add to the equation. I know it's not technical or any of those things, but it is part of the equation. Because I think that often, people shy away from those things because of it.
“We need to raise more and more in the debate on being inclusive of the diversity of what food means to others.” -Mario Ubiali
Mario Ubiali: Yes. And what tends to shock me as well is that we are not capable, perhaps enough in the current debate on the future of food to be honest and say, how much of what we're talking about is Western centric? I mean, let's be honest, if you take a flight to central India and you approach a certain group of people there and tell them, what do you think about being (inaudible)? They're gonna look at you like you're out of your mind. Well, what are you talking about? So I guess one of the points that I think we need to raise more and more in the debate is being inclusive of the diversity of what food means to others. And I love that you talked about shame. Because you know what? And you use another term, technical. See, the key to this is in the West, we're driving the debate about the future of food by, I want to say, overloading the topic with technologically driven terms. It's all about 3D printing, the bioreactor.
Justine Reichman: It's all intellectual.
Mario Ubiali: What is the emotion here?
Justine Reichman: Exactly. Emotion at heart. Food is all about the heart too, so we got to connect the two.
“It's all intellectual. And food is all about heart too. So we got to connect the two.” -Justine Reichman
Mario Ubiali: Exactly. That's the reason why for somebody like us, the teams who constantly work on the emotional food being measured scientifically because we're not talking about us being all nice and even dancing around and trying to extract the readings from I don't know, the bottom of a teacup. This is neurophysiology intersected with genetics, intersected with sensory analysis. We're talking about stuff that is widely recognized as being fully valued on a scientific level. But the beauty of this is that science doesn't remove from the equation the implicit process, the emotional process. In fact, the beauty of what we're trying to do as a team is you want to push that to the forward part of the conversation. You want to say, guys, it's never going to work unless you take a look at this. It's almost like literally teamsters have been trying to kill the food war in the last three years. You should take a look at this. I always think of this like one of those Hollywood movies when there is this kind of weird scientist observing the stars in some remote place that he sees that there's a comet coming towards the air, and he runs out in the other room and says, guys, you need to look at this, and nobody really listens to you at the beginning. Now, it's moving along, people are starting to care. But I'm telling you, it's an uphill struggle sometimes.
Justine Reichman: I agree. Mario, I'm so glad that we had a chance to talk, this is just a little bit of what everyone's gonna get to hear from you at the future food tech conference, and I can't wait to hear more. So I'm curious about all the innovations they're going to show and have all the speakers that will be at the future food tech conference. What are you excited to see there? What are you excited to learn?
Mario Ubiali: I'm always excited. The beauty of being excited about a certain place in a conference is that you always end up learning something you were not expecting, something completely unexpected comes. So personally, I'm extremely excited about meeting the innovators and the real trailblazers whom I already partially know rather, sometimes the person, sometimes just because you read about them. So it's exciting to see what's going on in their minds. What is the vision? What are the goals? How technology has evolved? Yes, of course, I'm always excited. We also need to keep that into consideration. It's not like you can ignore it or antagonize technology. I can be honest with you, I'm on the lookout for one specific thing which is difficult to describe, but very relevant to me. How will the language be changed in comparison to other events that we attended earlier on in the year, or last year, or the year before? I'm always trying to have sensitive antennas to see how the language is changing. For example, in the last few months, there's been a lot of transition to semantics of full blown experiences keeping the identity of people more at the center of the equation being more humanistic or human centric. I love the fact that that language is kind of slowly floating to the surface and emerging in the conversation. I am very curious to know how mainstream that is becoming in food innovation, because that would be a sign that something is really going in the right direction, I guess.
“I am hoping that through our conversations… everyone can participate. Because that's the only way people can make more informed choices, be part of the conversation, and have access and choices to a better food system.” -Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: Yeah, I would agree. And I think it'd be interesting to see how the narrative changes, the language changes, the vernacular. I'm hoping that through our conversations, we can demystify some of this stuff, we can answer some of those questions for people and make it more palatable so that everyone is included in this conversation and can understand what's going on so that we're not always speaking at a higher level, but more at a level where everyone can participate. Because that's the only way people can really make more informed choices, be part of the conversation, and really have access and choices to a better food system.
“When it comes to food experiences, it’s deep stories, it’s diversity, it’s social, it’s memories… Food is such a profound place of transformation for humans.” -Mario Ubiali
Mario Ubiali: I have to tell you, I love that you have this purpose and goal for what you're doing. And I do hope that even in this tiny little opportunity that you're presenting. We had the big opportunity, but I'm a tiny little thing here. But I would love for people to understand that there are companies such as ours and many others, it's not celebrating just us who are really doing everything they can on a daily basis to raise the voice of the so called common human being. There's no such thing as like, there used to be expressions about the men from the street and that kind of expression. But I honestly believe that when it comes to food experiences, its stories, its deep stories, its diversity, its social, its memories. I mean, you know, we've done this for six years now, I can assure you, ask anyone about food in a matter of maybe 60 seconds, they will be telling you some incredible story about when they were small kids, or grandmother, mother, whatever, there's always an emotional attachment, there's always that kind of color that comes into the thing. So food is such a deep, profound place of transformation for humans that I do believe that it's a great opportunity to speak out on this. I hope that I have this picture in my mind of some guy in Brooklyn, or in unknowingly, or in whatever, fixing his or her dinner and hearing these voices, and I hope that message gets loud and clear to them. There are people in the food system who are really caring for who these people are. It's about safeguarding identities, I cannot say that enough. I don't want my goal as an entrepreneur and my company's goal, we do not want to lose that. We do not want to lose the diversification of food identities because there will be a rising social and emotional life, and that's just not fair.
Justine Reichman: I think the message here is we need this platform to have people speak up so that people can join the conversation, be part of the conversation so that people can make more informed choices, so that the businesses and everyone can include the different cultures, the different conversations, the different emotions, the different information as part of the solution.
“Food provides us with a gigantic opportunity. We can vote with our wallets when we go and purchase food. We also can vote with our fork when we make choices about how healthy we want to be.” -Mario Ubiali
Mario Ubiali: Absolutely. This is absolutely no place and not certainly my intention to be political, but not in a political sense. I want to say in a social and almost activism kind of dimension, I do believe that food provides us with an opportunity, a gigantic opportunity, which is we really can vote with our wallets, so to speak, when we go and purchase food. And we also can vote with our fork when we make choices about (inaudible) we want to be, but also (inaudible) we want to be who we are. I go full circle back to what you mentioned earlier on. This is no time to feel shame about our identities and how we want to feel. And let's not cancel that, let's make sure that we also work with large corporations around the world, which is our daily life, as teamers. A lot of people come to us and say, you have to transition to the dark side of the force. And he's like, no, I have not. I inhabit the world and my teammates' habits work. And in the real world, if you want to be relevant and make a change, you have to be in that kind of wrestling theme where you are in the dynamics of the real companies, and what you can hope to do is to slowly influence them to think differently. And I can assure you, it's a lot better for me to obtain one inch of advantage and progress with a large food corporation than being somewhere outside the domain of food and barking from the outside because I want to protest about something. I want to be in themes and make sure that I try to make a difference. I know it sounds like sometimes we are a little too much in the fold, but there's no other way to do that.
“If you want to be relevant and make a change, you have to be in the dynamics of the real companies. And what you can hope to do is to slowly influence them to think differently.” -Mario Ubiali
Justine Reichman: No, I would agree. Mario, thank you so much for joining us, and we look forward to having you back after the conference to hear your update on what you saw, what you learned, and just keep following your progress on how things are progressing.
Mario Ubiali: Well, thank you so much, and thank you everybody for listening to this.
Justine Reichman: Don't forget, if you're at the future food tech tech conference, don't forget to check out Mario Ubiali.
Mario Ubiali: Will be there. Thank you.
Justine Reichman: Thank you so much.
