Join me, Dr. Bryan Quoc Le, on Saturday, August 29th, 2026 (New Date) from 1:00pm to 3:00pm at the Community Center of Mendocino (998 School Street, Mendocino, California) for a free lecture on the origin of flavor and its connection to our journey of human evolutionary.

​​

I'll begin by sharing my personal story of how a chance encounter with a man on a highway and his gift of a watermelon, while walking a 2,000-mile pilgrimage across the United States, resulted in a sudden brief insight into the deep interconnection between all living beings, and how that experience led to my current professional career as a consulting food scientist.

​​​

We'll then be exploring how flavor shaped life's evolutionary lines, starting from the very first proto-cell and the fundamental drive to find sources of food, attempting to chemically differentiate between its interior structure and the exterior environment. We will see how this primordial tension gave way to the vast diversity of living beings and eventually what we now consider to be food.

​

We will also be diving into the paths taken by ancestral humans in search of food, and how their desire for variety, diversity, and flavor led to survival, exploration, and early technology. We'll look into the role played by, arguably, the first human technology of cooking and fire, and how the power of cooking for flavor helped shape us physiologically and genetically into modern humans.

​​

And as the final part of this exploration, we will project into the future to see what one human reality might look like where we must create food from scratch on a yet-to-be-known future Earth and unknown worlds beyond, and how that might transform our potential evolutionary trajectories as a species.

​​​

Thank you for joining me on this journey. I look forward to sharing this space with you. If you are moved to do so, please feel free to read more details of my spiritual journey here.​​​