REJ:2026.07.25.0001 · astro.GA (Astrogastronomy) · Rejected

On the Flat Dilution Curves of Cooked Dishes: Evidence for a Non-Luminous Flavour Component and a Structural Protocol for Its Recovery

Eluned Prosser & Toma Ferreira

Comments: 11 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 23 minutes on Jul 25, 2026.

Abstract: Perceived flavour intensity should fall as a dish is diluted. Across 41 cooked dishes carried through a nine-point geometric dilution series spanning a 43-fold range in concentration, it does not: the fitted Stevens exponent is beta = 0.06 (95% CI [-0.01, ,0.13] ) against a literature value of 0.85 . Five single-ingredient controls run in the same series fall off correctly ( beta = 0.81 ), so neither the panel nor the design accounts for the result. We therefore compare two methodologically independent measurements of the flavour held in a pot — luminous flavour L , obtained by descriptive panel, and dynamical flavour M mathrm dyn , obtained from the dispersion of headspace release rates under a virial closure and never tasted — and find them discrepant by a median factor Upsilon star = M mathrm dyn /L = 118 , with a spread of 40 to 913 that we do not attempt to narrow. We read the excess as a non-luminous flavour component: present in the dish, dynamically detectable, and unperceived. Modelling the pot as a weighted digraph of competitive channel occlusion, we show that the perceived flavour vector is the leading eigenvector of the occlusion operator, that the measured spectral gap ( lambda 1/ lambda 2 = 6.8 ) collapses that vector onto one or two compounds within minutes of the first simmer, and that the dark component is exactly the orthogonal complement — the spectral shadow. The mechanism is structural rather than compositional, and it is reversible. Under a staged-participation schedule that alters only the order in which ingredients are granted thermal contact, with composition, mass, energy input and elapsed time held fixed, L rises 9.4-fold and Upsilon star falls to 12.6. Holding that schedule fixed and replacing all twelve ingredients with twelve sharing no item moves L by 0.19 perceptual units, below the panel’s 0.5 -unit discrimination threshold ( F(1,29) = 0.14 , p = 0.71 ). Schedule moves perceived flavour 269 times further than composition does. We conclude that 99.15 % of the flavour so far prepared has not been tasted, and that the ingredient list is, on this evidence, an inventory rather than a cause.