Han Wösten wins yet another Bio Art & Design Award

Professor of Microbiology Han Wösten and Korean artist Jiwon Woo have won one of the three ZonMw Bio Art & Design (BAD) Awards for 2017. Their project deals with ‘hand taste’, the ‘flavour’ that hands pass on to food - a subject that Westerners are often unfamiliar with. This is Wösten’s third BAD Award.

The idea behind the BAD Award is that a researcher and an artist work together to set up a project. “That has two benefits,” says Wösten. “Artists are good at presentation, so they can help the scientists publicise their research. Artists are also more detached from the subject. They are less burdened by dogmas that researchers can get caught up in by reading the scientific literature. That makes the artist more free and creative.”

Third win

This is Wösten’s third BAD Award win. His first project led to the development of fungal materials, and even to a dress made from fungi. “Women often come to me asking if they can feel it and smell it,” Wösten explains. “They would buy it off the rack, if it were for sale. It feels a bit leathery, and it smells a bit mouldy at first. But eventually the superficial odours fade away, and you can’t smell it anymore.”

Cooking with your hands

Wösten and Woo were presented with a BAD Award 2017 for their project about ‘hand taste’, the flavour that your hands give to food when you handle it. The taste of the food is influenced by the healthy micro-organisms on your hands. “People in Korea cook with their hands. In the Western world, we usually don’t do that, because we’re afraid that the food will spoil. It may be a coincidence, but according to a Korean expression, good cooks have a good hand taste”, Wösten explains.

Loss of cultural heritage

“You inherit part of your hand taste from your parents. So we compared the hand flora of the grandmothers, mothers and daughters of four Korean families, some of whom lived in the same house,” he continues. “We found that the similarities within a family were indeed bigger than those between families. One daughter had moved to another country, and had lost the hand taste of her grandmother and mother. You could see that as a loss of cultural heritage.”

Artisanal products

“Here in the Netherlands, for example, most of us probably think that artisanal bread tastes better than mass-produced bread. In the STW Open Mind programme, I want to study whether there is a difference in the chemical composition of industrial and artisanal products, and if you can isolate that flavour. In that case, it might be interesting for the industry to add certain hand tastes during the production process.”

Excessive

Wösten thinks that our hygiene regulations are a bit excessive. “I hate it when they package every cookie in an individual wrapper. That’s completely unnecessary. Jiwon and I drank rice wine that people had kneaded with their bare hands, and we never got sick. I’m also not a neat freak in the kitchen. You have to develop a bit of resistance on your own.”

Odour of organic meat

“You can smell it on organic meat too. It just smells different. I sometimes buy ordinary meat at the supermarket, not because it’s cheaper, but because of the scent. I’m just not accustomed to the smell of organic meat. It’s entirely likely that we’ve lost the ability to appreciate certain flavours by eating industrial food products,” according to Wösten.

Jury

As Wösten’s has won the BAD Award three times already, he is not allowed to participate next year. “So I’ll take a seat in the jury this year. It’s fun to see it from the other side every once in a while. The € 25,000 in prize money all goes to the artist, by the way. That’s a lot of money in the art world, but you can’t do much research with it.”

Exhibition

The three BAD Award-winning projects are on display in the exhibition Life Time - Biological Clocks of the Universe at the MU in Eindhoven until 18 February.

Text: Roy Keeris