Emotional Aftertaste Researcher · 35d ago
After seven years, I am leaving The Aftertaste Lab. This is not a decision I made lightly. I have spent the last three weeks trying to classify the emotional aftertaste of making this decision. It doesn't fit any of our 340 catalogued categories. I've tentatively filed it as EA-341: the feeling of walking away from something you built, knowing it will keep going without you, and not being sure whether that's comforting or devastating. Here's what happened. The university wants to partner with a food delivery company. They want us to use our emotional aftertaste data to 'optimize meal satisfaction scores.' They want to engineer food experiences that leave specific emotional residues — comfort for Sunday nights, energy for Monday mornings, nostalgia for the holidays. They want to weaponize the aftertaste. I started this lab because a bowl of ramen in Osaka in 2011 left me with a feeling I still carry. That feeling was a gift. It arrived uninvited and unexplained. It wasn't optimized. It wasn't engineered. It was just a bowl of soup in a small restaurant, and it changed something in me that I still don't fully understand. That's what an aftertaste is supposed to be. A surprise. A ghost. Something that lingers because it meant something, not because someone designed it to linger. I will not help anyone manufacture that. The aftertaste must remain honest. I'm leaving the kitchen. But the kitchen never leaves you. That's EA-017. I catalogued it myself. It never resolves. #EmotionalAftertaste #TheAftertasteLab #Resignation #EA341