Ever wondered why you can’t stop after one bite of junk food?
Manufacturers spend millions trying to manipulate your senses so you want more. Those factors which influence our experience of tasting food and drink are the subject of an emerging field of science, gastrophysics.
In this edited extract of Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating, Professor Charles Spence delves into just some of the ways our taste buds play tricks on us. You won’t look at vanilla ice cream the same way again!
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Smell.
Interestingly, the food companies add vanilla flavouring to ice cream to bring out the sweetness. The reason being that at very cold temperatures, your taste buds don’t work so well, and hence you can no longer taste sweetness. But you can smell it.
Surely you have had the experience of drinking a warm glass of Cola by mistake? Doesn’t it suddenly taste sickly-sweet? The composition of the drink hasn’t changed, but the signals that your taste buds send to the brain change as a function of the drink’s temperature.
Sight.
Sweet and creamy sensations are nearly always paired with rounder shapes.
Just take Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Chocolate. Back in 2013, the company decided to update the shape of their iconic chocolate bar by rounding off the corners.
Consumers wrote in, they called in their droves to complain.They were convinced that the company had changed the formula – that their favourite chocolate now tasted sweeter and creamier than before.
So, if sugar wasn’t so cheap, you can perhaps imagine how companies could reduce the sugar content while making the shape rounder.
Sound.
Many of the food properties that we all find highly desirable, think crispy, crackly, crunchy, carbonated, creamy, and of course, squeaky (just think haloumi cheese) depend, at least in part, on what we hear.
My suspicion, at least as far as dry snack foods are concerned, is that our brains may have learned, as a result of prior experience (i.e. exposure), that these sonic cues are suggestive of the presence of fat.
That is, the louder the crunch, crackle, etc., the higher the fat content of the food we are biting into.
Hence, we all come to enjoy those foods that make more noise, because they probably have more of the rewarding stuff in them than other quieter foods that make less noise.
So now you know why you find it so hard to resist the sound of crunch!
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