While reading a series of titles of new scientific papers, I came across an unnatural series of words: "Innovative flavoring behavior." The phrase sounded alienating, like the impossible promise of some doomed startup or the way Meta might refer to the advent of tongues. But these words appeared, in this order, in a report recently published in the journal Current Biology titled "Innovative flavoring behavior in Goffin’s cockatoos," which only made me feel intrigued. A cockatoo innovation, you say? Regarding flavoring? Tell me more!
As I read the abstract, I realized that the key innovation of this new paper was innovated by nine cockatoos, all of whom had learned to drag a noodle through a puddle of blueberry-flavored soy yogurt. The innovation, the researchers contend, is not the daring idea of creamy blueberry noodles—although this seemed the most radical recipe I'd encountered in years—but rather the flavoring behavior itself, which is rare in the animal kingdom.
Many animals are known to engage in another innovation called "dunking," which is the scientific term for the action by which an individual dips their food in another medium before eating it. Some of the known dunkers include birds, apes, river otters, boars, and pig-like mammals called babirusas. Scientists have suggested five possible explanations for dunking: cleaning, flavoring, drowning prey, transporting liquid, or soaking until the food is swallowable.
Only one non-human species had been previously observed dunking with the express purpose of flavoring. In the 1960s, a trend-setting Japanese macaque named Imo washed her sweet potatoes in the ocean to salt them. This is a familiar innovation to us humans, many of whom are known to enjoy a salty snack. But noodles buttered with blueberry-flavored soy yogurt is a new flavoring innovation to most people, probably.
To be clear, the authors of the new paper, who work at the Goffin Lab in Austria, did not come up with the dish on their own. In November 2022, researchers observed two Goffin's cockatoos named Irene and Renki dunking chunks of cooked potato into blueberry-flavored soy yogurt during breakfast. (The cockatoos at the lab receive a breakfast buffet that can include, but is not limited to, egg, noodles, potatoes, cauliflower, fruit, and soy yogurt.)
The dunking itself was not a surprise; the researchers had previously observed the cockatoos dunking twice-baked toast in water to soften it before eating. But the combination of potatoes in blueberry yogurt, they realized, could be interpreted as flavoring. To test this, the researchers offered a group of 18 cockatoos three dunking mediums: fresh water, blueberry soy yogurt, and unflavored soy yogurt. They found half of the cockatoos dunked food into yogurt, most often noodles and occasionally potatoes. Most importantly, however, the cockatoos were more likely to dunk their food in the blueberry yogurt than the neutral yogurt—suggesting they preferred the taste of blueberry.
The researchers observed that individual cockatoos had different styles of dunking, particularly two birds named Kiwi and Moneypenny.
"Although other individuals dragged and pressed their food in the yogurt, these two individuals dropped the food in the yogurt, picked it up, and repeated this to get yogurt on all sides, resembling the soaking behavior," they write in the paper. They add that this might represent "two separate dunking innovations."
But did the dunking represent flavoring, or did it have another purpose? The researchers could easily rule out drowning prey, as the noodle was inert. Nor was it cleaning, as the noodles were already clean, nor soaking, as the noodles were already boiled and soft. Nor did it seem to be the case that the cockatoo wanted to use the noodle as vessel for the yogurt, as the birds also ate yogurt on its own.
To rule out the possibility that the cockatoos simply preferred the purple color of the blueberry yogurt, they conducted a separate experiment in which they presented a cockatoo two cubes: one the color of unflavored yogurt and the other the purple of the blueberry yogurt. The birds had no significant preference between the colors, and when the birds were offered a choice between a noodle, a dab of blueberry yogurt, or a blueberry noodle, they chose the blueberry noodle.
The most logical explanation was that the cockatoos enjoyed a noodle dish coated in a sweet blueberry flavor. The researchers concluded it was an Innovative Flavoring Behavior.
Here's the thing about innovations: They are often extremely stupid. Or rather, many things marketed as Innovations are extremely stupid, such as incomprehensible AI-generated recipes or the dreaded Hyperloop. A quick search for "innovative flavoring" returns a company called Synergy Taste, which allegedly collects "Inspiring Flavors & Trends" in the mission of "understanding a fast-changing world," and another company called Innova Market Insights which allegedly aims for "tasting success through flavor innovation." What does that mean, exactly? Innova Market Insights explains that "[t]aste is not necessarily king in the land of flavor innovation and it must share its throne with flavor’s role as a marketing tool, i.e. as a means to accentuate a product’s image, mood or even health profile, so there is far more to flavor development than simply making things taste good." Amazing. I've never read a clearer explanation.
The cockatoos' Innovative Flavoring Behavior tempted me, however. The birds were not capitalists; they had nothing to sell and no need for my money. They had no cares for trends, insights, or muddled metaphors of monarchy. I earnestly appreciated the entry of a non-human inventor into the innovation space. After I read the paper, I began to wonder: Were these cockatoos onto something? Was this, at last, a real Flavoring Innovation? The only way to find out, I realized, was to try the blueberry noodles for myself.
The paper described the pasta shape as "fussilini." I substituted rotini, as the noodles were similarly spiraled, and also I had a half-opened box in my pantry. I prepared the noodles al dente and let them cool. Then I swirled them in a few spoonfuls of Silk dairy-free blueberry yogurt. Bon appetit!
My verdict: Not unpleasant at all. I had salted the pasta water, so the noodles added some complexity to the blueberry, and the many crevasses of their spiraling shape nicely cradled the yogurt. It was an uncanny feeling, biting into a noodle I have only ever encountered in savory contexts, now swaddled in a fruity cream. As I chewed, I began imagining the smorgasbord of sweet pastas I had yet to try: peach yogurt farfalle, chocolate rotini, a heaping nest of tres leches pappardelle. The possibilities were endless.
Would I eat this again? I would not go out of my way to make it again, but if someone, especially a cockatoo, prepared this dish for me, I would not turn it down. What I had eaten was unlike anything I'd eaten before, less a recipe than a stroke of mad genius—nothing less than a Flavoring Innovation.
