Ruth Reichl + Paul Rozin

“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me.” – Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past. Volume 1: Swann’s Way: Within a Budding Grove. (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)
Ruth Reichl is a writer and editor who was the Editor in Chief of Gourmet Magazine for ten years until its closing in 2009. Before that she was the restaurant critic of The New York Times, (1993-1999), and both the restaurant critic and food editor of the Los Angeles Times (1984-1993). As co-owner and cook of the collective restaurant The Swallow from 1974 to 1977, she played a part in the culinary revolution that took place in Berkeley, California.
Paul Rozin is Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a renowned authority on human and animal behavior related to taste and smell. His research interests include: attitudes to chocolate, meat and water; magical thinking; cultural evolution; disgust; morality; psychology of music; positive psychology; negativity dominance; and the idea of purity.