Taste-T, the app designed to help you like the taste of foods you normally don’t care for, may be the biggest Ceremplant hit of the year, but not everyone is singing its praises. A coalition of healthcare professionals and parent groups have started a petition to have the popular app banned, and raise awareness to the “real and serious dangers of using Taste-T.” The app’s creator says the technology is safe, and poses no danger when used as released. Ceremplant officials say they are looking into the matter.
Alex James is no stranger to ceremplant users. His “Emotional Compass” (EC) app took the Ceremplant world by storm back in 2034, and still remains one of the most popular apps for users of the ubiquitous implants. Taste-T has sold twice as fast as EC in its first year. “I got the idea from my nephew who famously hates the taste of peppers. He wouldn’t touch anything with peppers in it, no matter how delicious. I wondered how hard it would be to train someone to associate a flavor they didn’t like with a flavor they did. I started investigating if you could transform a “bad flavor” reaction in the brain with a “good flavor” reaction, targeting specific areas with electrical stimulation. I learned quickly that there wasn’t much scientific study done in the area. If it wasn’t for the amazing work of Dr. Adler Walters, I’d still be working on the software. His discoveries about how the brain responds to taste, while working on the kükenroot, and his database of compounds found in edible plants, was vital to the development of Taste-T.”
Taste-T transforms the brain’s response to an unliked food to one that a user finds delicious, over the course of a few days. Once properly calibrated, the taste of every food can be your favorite. With record sales it looked like Taste-T was well on its way to be the most popular app ever made for the Ceremplant. However, users began to exploit an unfortunate flaw in the program, which allowed users to greatly enhance the brain’s pleasure response to certain flavors.
Soon, many were using “enhanced” versions of the app. Healthcare professionals say that using the enhanced version of Taste-T can be dangerous. While most experience a mild euphoria, a sense of relaxation, or an altered perception of time when tasting specific foods, many can experience much more drastic effects when eating certain items, particularly with first time users. Instead of relaxation and euphoria, some users can experience aggresiveness (asparagus), fear (tuna), or feelings of distrust (SSHAM). In extreme cases the altered app can lead to long-lasting disorders or even permanent rewiring of the brain according to some in the medical community. While Alex has since upgraded Taste-T to disable the exploit, parent groups say that it is easy enough to rollback the software to an earlier version if you know where to look. They say the potential for abuse is too high, and they want the app pulled from stores.
Well known Lahaina restaurateur and business owner Bob Abramo has banned anyone using the app from dining in his famous Chop House. “I take the art of grilling and preparing meat seriously, and want customers who appreciate the true taste of our offerings. Meat tastes good without the use of Taste-T, although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little intrigued. I bet you could even make people taste like cured pork belly with the app, if you wanted.”
“It’s the kind of thing you think only happens to other families, not your own,” says one of the most vocal critics of Taste-T, 40-year-old mother Brenda Ronner. “My son Max never liked the taste of onions. It wasn’t an issue when he was younger, but as he grew up it started to become a real problem. Just about everything has onions in it, and he’d spend hours a week meticulously picking them out of food. We had to avoid certain restaurants all together because of their limited onion-free options. On his 12th birthday his father and I decided to finally do something about it, and get him the Taste-T app.” Brenda says it was one of the worst decisions of her life.
“Everything seemed fine for a few weeks. We went through the calibration phase, and soon he was loving the taste of: onions, shallots, chives, leeks, and even garlic. Our food options and future seemed wide open, but Max started hanging around with a bad crowd at school, biohacker Taste-T vegetarian kids with wifi studs in their foreheads, and LED eyebrows. His grades began to slip, and I started noticing onion skins in his room, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. Then he was caught trying to steal a head of garlic from the store, and the truth came out. Those kids had done something to his app, and he had been on a tasting binge for months. We took him to the doctor, and applied the upgrade. I thought I had my old Max back again, but I was wrong. A few weeks later, I came home early, and heard music blaring from his room. I could smell the onions halfway up the stairs, despite the towel he had put at the bottom of his door. What I saw will be burned into my mind forever. The reggae music was deafening, and there were half-chewed leeks everywhere. I even found a shallot in his underwear drawer. He was sitting in his chair with his eyes rolled back in his head, licking the biggest vidalia onion I’d ever seen. He was so out of it, he barely moved when I screamed his name. I want to save other mothers from seeing their sons like that.”
Brenda says they’ve had to enroll Max into an institutional learning facility equipped to deal with the issues caused by his Taste-T app, and she is not alone. Hundreds have claimed to have similar experiences to the Ronners, and many healthcare professionals say the potential for harm is high for those using the app. Ceremplant says they take their customer’s health and well-being seriously, and will address the petition after a thorough review of Taste-T, and their third party app policy.
