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Welcome to Food Hacking Japan! Host Simon Klose kicks off our new series on tech cuisine with a Japanese researcher who shows us how to use Virtual Reality to make a cookie taste like five different things. Also we take a bite of some of Tokyo’s best video game cuisine at Capcom Café: the Resident Evil merengue brain cake.

The new MUNCHIES series Food Hacking reimagines the ways that people around the world cook and eat. Host Simon Klose, a documentary filmmaker from Sweden, explores the cutting-edge technologies that are permeating and transforming Japan's culinary scene. Neither a chef nor a hacker, Simon is curious about subversive cuisine at the intersection of ecology and technology. In this episode, Simon visits Kentaro Fukuchi, a professor who wants to fuse cutting-edge technology with the Japanese tradition of eating raw meat. Using an industrial laser, Professor Fukuchi is able to fry just the fat in raw strips of bacon while leaving the rest intact.

Simon visits the inventor Hiromi Nakamura, who is researching the concept of "electric taste." Hiromi has developed a fork and cup that zap your taste buds with electrical currents to make food taste saltier. We wanted to experience the shock ourselves with this kitchen gadget.

As the only Food Hacker at Maker Faire Tokyo, Akihiko Iyoda demonstrates how to change the taste of food by spraying it with perfume. In the process, Simon gets to smell delicious with Iyoda’s specialty: Eau de Curry.

Would you eat a Tomato that talked back to you? In this episode, Simon meets an ad-agency that makes organic vegetables speak to customers, with the voices of their farmers. In the name of hacking consumer trust, Simon lends his voice to a touch activated tomato.

Our host Simon visits computer programmer Yui Kita who’s developed a software that can compose new untried food pairings through a recipe network. The flipside to the software is that it can also calculate terrible food pairings. When we asked the algorithm for some delicious and disgusting food pairings, it fed us bourbon raspberries with microwave popcorn and rosemary olives on white chocolate.