Divya Adil

All Publications

• The mechanical and sensory signature of plant-based and animal meat. NPJ science of food St Pierre, S. R., Darwin, E. C., Adil, D., Aviles, M. C., Date, A., Dunne, R. A., Lall, Y., Parra Vallecillo, M., Perez Medina, V. A., Linka, K., Levenston, M. E., Kuhl, E. 2024; 8 (1): 94

  Abstract

  Eating less meat is associated with a healthier body and planet. Yet, we remain reluctant to switch to a plant-based diet, largely due to the sensory experience of plant-based meat. Food scientists characterize meat using a double compression test, which only probes one-dimensional behavior. Here we use tension, compression, and shear tests-combined with constitutive neural networks-to automatically discover the behavior of eight plant-based and animal meats across the entire three-dimensional spectrum. We find that plant-based sausage and hotdog, with stiffnesses of 95.9 ± 14.1 kPa and 38.7 ± 3.0 kPa, successfully mimic their animal counterparts, with 63.5 ± 45.7 kPa and 44.3 ± 13.2 kPa, while tofurky is twice as stiff, and tofu is twice as soft. Strikingly, a complementary food tasting survey produces in nearly identical stiffness rankings for all eight products (ρ = 0.833, p = 0.015). Probing the fully three-dimensional signature of meats is critical to understand subtle differences in texture that may result in a different perception of taste. Our data and code are freely available at https://github.com/LivingMatterLab/CANN.

  View details for DOI 10.1038/s41538-024-00330-6

  View details for PubMedID 39548076

  View details for PubMedCentralID PMC11568319