This interview is part of a series featuring members of the Flavor Network research team, a multidisciplinary group exploring the evolution of cuisine through computational analysis. Meet Marcus Romundset, a UC Berkeley student combining his passions for computer science, business, and Scandinavian culture. As part of the team led by Professor Timothy Tangherlini, Marcus is analyzing historical cookbooks to map the evolution of Scandinavian cuisine through flavor networks. In this interview, Marcus shares how he joined the project, his perspective on interdisciplinary research, and what he’s learned from blending STEM with the arts and humanities.
What is your major, and what are your main academic interests?
I’m a Computer Science major at Berkeley, and I’m trying to double major in business administration in order to get more breadth. At this moment, I’m probably more interested in business and the intersection with technology, rather than strictly computer science and coding.
Can you describe the research project you are working on for Professor Tangherlini? How did you get involved in this project?
It’s actually a funny story of how I met Professor Tangherlini. He was one of the professors for one of my R5 series classes as I took the Scandinavian Folklore class. I’m Scandinavian myself, so I thought it would be an interesting course to take. During the final day of class, we had a guest lecture from him, where he presented his research. He had done some work with folklore and conspiracy theories and showed us a lot of really cool computer science applications quantifying mythical stories and conspiracies. There were connections you would never imagine, and I looked at it and thought it was incredibly interesting. I shot him an email right after class, and told him that I was a Norwegian computer science student, and would love to get involved. We arranged a meeting at the end of my Freshman Fall semester last year, where he told me that he wanted to explore Scandinavian cuisine through future research. He said I would be perfect for it, since I can actually read the books. That’s how I got involved, and that’s sort of how the project started.
What we’re trying to do is read recipe books and make inferences from those books about how flavors have changed over time. Scandinavia is very peculiar, as it used to be very poor, being historically rural and isolated. It’s all the way at the top of Europe, so there wasn’t really a lot going on there for many hundreds of years. During the 20th century, they got a lot more wealth, with more expansion and diffusion. In present-day Norway, for example, tacos are the most popular food. So it’s interesting to see how those flavor networks have evolved over time, and that’s what we’re trying to think about when we’re doing our research. We’re essentially just looking at old cookbooks and we’re creating computer software to both translate them and extrapolate the pure ingredients from these books. We then look at those ingredients and investigate the flavor compounds that go into those ingredients, so the actual chemical molecules that create flavors on the microscopic level. And then we also look at how they’re being treated, because if you cook something it will taste different from if you fry it or if you boil it. We’re trying to take all those factors and see what happens to different flavor compounds, and hopefully, once we get enough books, we can see how these flavor networks evolve over time. It will be interesting to make inferences about the future and where cuisine is headed.
How has doing research in the Arts and Humanities changed your perspective, as someone who doesn’t major in it? Are there any resources you would recommend to undergraduates who are interested in getting involved?
One of the biggest resources we have is just the people here. You can apply through URAP to research projects, but it’s hard to figure out what the projects are, and whether you’ll actually enjoy it, through a small paragraph on the website. I think if you shoot any professor an email, simply asking, “Hi, can I meet with you to talk about your research?”, you will almost always get a positive response. Professors love their subject so much that they’ve dedicated their life to it, so they’re usually more than willing to go out and talk about it. Many students tend to alienate themselves from professors, but professors are the Holy Grail for these research projects. My recommendation is to go out and talk to professors if you have any interest in doing research here at Berkeley.
How has my perspective changed? I didn’t realize how difficult it can be to study a discipline in the arts and humanities. In STEM, you either have the right answer or the wrong answer. But in the arts and humanities, there can be a million right answers. This also applies to the flavor networks. Everyone perceives flavors differently. So it’s really about finding structure. Even in the arts and humanities, you can find a lot of structure, and kind of create your own set of rules you can follow. Arts and humanities researchers have harder problems to solve than other fields because it’s so subjective and you have to be careful about how you approach it and meticulous in explaining your process. Seeing this firsthand has been a great supplementary contrast to my STEM background.
What book have you read during undergrad that you would recommend to everyone reading?
I took History 7A in my freshman fall semester. It’s introductory US history from the Revolution to the Civil War. The professor in that class, Hidetaka Hirota, mainly studies immigration and racism in the US, which isn’t usually covered in most textbooks. He had us read one book called Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. It’s about the true history of California: it goes in-depth about the racism behind the history of California, its position in the emancipation process, and Asian hate that gets brushed away in textbooks. That was an enlightening book; it offered a new prism through which to view California and its complicated history. It’s always interesting hearing new perspectives as history is always written by the survivors and victors. For anyone living in California curious about a more nuanced interpretation of the local history, I would most definitely recommend this book.