It's not what you eat but how you eat it

Experimenting with colour, plate size, serving dishes, and presentation all reveal that it’s not what you eat but how you eat it that makes food tastier (BBC – Future, February 26, 2016).

Sensory stimuli can impact the perception of flavour. That’s the outcome of several food studies. The colour of the serving plate and the texture of food influence taste – and so do the type of utensils used. For example, serving desserts in a red dish makes them taste sweeter than serving the same dessert, with the same sugar content, in a non-red dish. Heavier knives and forks increases people’s perception of how valuable a meal at a restaurant is – the heavier the utensils, the more valuable the meal.

Psychologists at the University of Oxford says plateware plays a role in how food tastes. Charles Spence says ‘everything from the texture, the temperature, or the feel, or the plateware, or bowl can fit into this.’ If a bowl of food is held in the hands, increasing the weight of the bowl, it could impact people’s sense of satisfaction with the meal, even making it taste ‘more rich or intense.’

Spence conducted experiments with participants to determine whether the size or the rim on a plate will impact their perception of how much food there is on the plate. The results showed that portions of the same size seemed smaller to particpants when the size of the plate was increased.

Plateware does matter to taste, says Spence. And food served in a bowl, rather than on a plate, seemed to taste better. So he says, it’s not what you eat, it’s how you eat it – from the shape, size, and colour of the crockery to the weight of the cutlery.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160226-why-bowl-food-might-be-tricking-your-brain

MARTINA NICOLLS is the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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