As I swirled and sniffed the red wine in my glass, I felt relieved I didn’t smell any corpses. There was a hint of blackberries—the way the whole bush of the ripe fruit smells after a summer rain, earthy and slightly tart—but mercifully no wisps of decaying flesh or urine. Unfortunately, knowing the wine contained the chemicals cadaverine, spermine, and putrescene, responsible for the rancid smell of bodily effluents and rot, somewhat spoiled the experience.

I learned about this gruesome trio of chemicals in wine from FooDB, the world’s largest database of the chemical composition of foods, launched in 2011 by David Wishart, a professor of computing and biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Canada. It’s an incredible project, designed to deliver healthy new insights into the interactions of food, the environment, and us.

Plenty is known about key compounds in food responsible for nutrition, but they represent only a tiny fraction of the molecular makeup of food—less than 10 percent, estimates Wishart. The rest is “nutritional dark matter,” a term coined by Albert-László Barabási, a professor of network science and physics at Northeastern University.

“The tantalizing thing about dark matter is you never know whether this obscure compound may in fact be the reason why a food is particularly healthy, or particularly bad for you, or why it produces certain effects or behaviors,” Wishart told me recently. “Our guess is that an average food item probably has 20,000 to 50,000 compounds.”