Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (22 page)

The few things Janni doesn’t do with her hands involve sharp objects. The safety lid of the Cuisinart food processor takes on new meaning when you’re blind. Janni’s knife skills are charmingly lacking, I notice as I stir the onions she’s chopped up, removing the tufted end of the onion and a few bits of foil butter wrapper from the sizzling pan. As we fill the knish rounds, I notice that hers are bigger but better sealed than mine. She’s more experienced than I. Even without her vision, she’s learned how to cook without looking.

There’s still controversy about whether blind people develop more acute senses of touch, smell, taste, or hearing than sighted people; regardless, they do use the four remaining senses more effectively.

My colleague and fellow foodie, Candice Lin, brought to work a can of silkworm pupae, the cocoon stage of the silk moth’s growth, which comes after it is a caterpillar and before it becomes a flying adult silk moth. Lin had been shopping at a Korean grocery store and found the product so appalling that she simply had to buy it. And for some reason, she felt compelled to open the can of critters only when I agreed to eat one with her. I had been desperately seeking surströmming; so a few insect cocoons weren’t going to scare me off. After all, the package said they were “High Protein—Great side dish when drinking alcohol,” making them sound a lot like salted peanuts.

Another colleague, Rich Gorski, overheard us talking and before either one of us girly girls had worked up the courage to eat a pupa, reached into the can, grabbed a bug from the murky liquid, and popped it into his mouth. A consummate professional, he chewed, he chewed, and he chewed some more, the look on his face absolutely neutral. Not good but definitely not bad. Lin and I reached in, buoyed by his apparent acceptance. Lin beat me to the chew by about twenty seconds, and her immediate reaction was definitely not neutral. A look of utter disgust crossed her face and I knew the minute I bit into mine—while watching her chew, grimace, and flinch—that this was not going
to be good. I sank my teeth into the pupa, gave a few chews, and ran to the sink to spit it out.

Upon reflection, this little mummified worm was no worse in flavor than the crispy fried grasshoppers called
chapulines
I had eaten in Monterrey, Mexico. In fact, with a bit of lime juice and dried chile powder they might have tasted quite similar. Why was I so influenced by Lin’s pained face but not by Gorski’s neutral one?

Researchers in France set out to see if the emotions on someone else’s face could influence the desire to eat a particular food. They chose three foods that their panelists liked (bread, green beans, chocolate bars) and three foods that the panelists didn’t like (bloody red meat, kidneys, blood pudding). Then they paired each of these foods with one of three human faces: one showing pleasure, one showing neutrality, and one showing disgust. The emotional faces proved to be very powerful. In the presence of disgusted faces, the test subjects wanted to eat the liked foods
less
than they did without the emotional face present. They wanted to eat disliked foods
more
in the presence of pleasure.

You could argue that emotions displayed on another’s face gives the “reader” information about a food, but this study was conducted with six foods that were everyday, familiar foods to the participants, who already knew how they savored. And no one was actually eating the food, so you could assume that the participants weren’t worried about its safety or freshness. I think there is another communication-based explanation for this.

The
embodiment theory
says that seeing an emotion on another person’s face will induce that emotion in the observer. In other words, when you watch someone in pain, you experience a bit of pain yourself. If you were to apply this to eating, you would expect that watching someone struggle to keep from retching after eating a silkworm pupa would make you a bit nauseated as well. The same would hold true if you saw pleasure on the face of someone who was eating grasshoppers, as I did in Mexico when I was eating with a Mexican national, Giselle Marce, a client who had grown up with chapulines. We were also drinking. The grasshoppers are served as a salty snack with alcohol, which seems to be insects’ natural habitat on a menu. Marce’s nonchalant ingestion of them made it easier for me to get them down than the pupae.

There was a similar study that coined the term
chameleon effect.
The researchers got participants to mimic their physical behavior—rubbing their nose or shaking their foot—simply by doing the desired behavior in the course of an unrelated task. If I sit across from you and scratch my nose, you are likely to do so, too. If I tap my fingers, you might tap yours as well. If you doubt that this
is a basic human behavior, the next time you’re with a friend or in a meeting at work, put your hands behind your head, spread your elbows out, and lean back. It’s almost comical how quickly the people around you will do the same. This is a result of unconscious mimicry, which the study authors related to the ability of a chameleon to blend into its surroundings. To quote from the study: “The chameleon effect serves the basic human need to belong . . . a powerful, fundamental, and extremely pervasive motivation.”

We human beings are incredibly good at detecting emotion on others’ faces, we wince at others’ pain, and we react as if we are feeling the same thing as someone else. But we aren’t really in touch with how much these emotions can influence our behavior. We use our eyes to read emotions on the faces of others as we eat. And the minute we see something, we react whether we’re conscious of reacting or not.

This is relevant if you are raising children and want them to be open-minded about what they eat. Children want to belong and they’re prone to mimicry from an early age. As a child I watched my mother make pained faces after eating peas or green beans and so wouldn’t eat them until I was in my early twenties. I didn’t know they could taste delicious. You, too, can unconsciously telegraph your food likes and dislikes to your family. This can be useful if you work it consciously, for good, not evil. By expressing obvious joy and delight to your family when eating Brussels sprouts and salmon you can help increase their desire to eat these healthful foods. If you want your kids to avoid a certain food, eat it with them and visually communicate your disgust. In the same way that my mother telegraphed to me that peas were bad, you can communicate to your kids that goo-goo cakes are bad.

In the professional field of sensory evaluation and product development, we know this chameleon effect all too well and have to adjust for it. When we conduct taste tests on food prototypes at Mattson, we set up independent booths for the testers to sit in so they can’t see one another’s faces. We know all too well that one “eww” face can influence a whole roomful of people, so we try to prevent this from happening.

For sighted people, grocery shopping is mostly a visual exercise. Because you can’t sample the tomatoes, milk, or bread, you simply have to use your eyes to
ensure that what you’re buying is what you want. In the produce section, we can use our sense of smell with some fruits and vegetables (peaches, tomatoes), but not all (onions, carrots, bagged lettuce). For packaged foods, we rely on the photographs or images on the front to tell us what’s inside.

This single-sense shopping experience makes our grocery stores complicit in encouraging us to eat the same stuff we’ve always been eating. There simply isn’t enough over-the-counter and in-aisle sampling to nudge us out of our comfort zone and into the experimentation mind-set necessary to buy a bag of Jerusalem artichokes or a head of black garlic or piece of skate wing. How in the world would you know how they savor in today’s sterile supermarkets? Some retailers do a better job than others, offering samples in the aisles. But I have a vision of a future where the shopper can sample every single thing in the store before buying. If real, edible samples aren’t feasible, I’d even settle for scratch-and-sniff. At least we’d be one sense closer to eating. The supermarkets of today will be looked back upon as bland, boring, sensory-deprived morgues. Whole Foods has a loyal fan base due in part to the fact that it’s turned grocery shopping into much more of a sensory experience than its traditional competitors. But even Whole Foods hasn’t gone far enough, in my opinion. Eventually retailers will embrace both low and high technology to approximate the experience of eating using multiple sensory inputs at the point of sale, in contrast to today’s stores, where we rely on sight almost exclusively.

You decide how much to eat using your eyes. Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, does research on how people decide what to eat. One study on portion size used a deviously brilliant self-refilling soup bowl. Imagine a table with a floor-length tablecloth over it. The participant sees only what looks like a normal bowl of soup on the table, not the mechanism under the table that continuously refills the bowl as it empties.

Wansink measured the amount of soup that test subjects consumed when eating out of a normal bowl and out of one that never emptied out. The result was not surprising, but the magnitude of the difference was: participants ate 73 percent more soup when the bowl stayed fairly full. When asked afterward to estimate how much they’d eaten, they estimated that they’d eaten the same amount as those eating from normal bowls. Worse yet, they didn’t notice being more full
when they’d consumed the extra calories. The results were crystal clear: “People use their eyes to determine how much they eat. This biases their intake and can lead to overconsumption.” How much of the obesity problem is due to that old adage, “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach”?

We get information about what a normal portion size is from the visual appearance of a food. Our eyes tell us that a full plate of food from a casual dining restaurant is a normal meal. We adjust our eating to that norm, even if that norm may be enough calories to sustain us for an entire day. We look at a whole candy bar as a normal treat, even though that candy bar might be three times the size of candy bars from twenty years ago. We have yet to connect our behavior to this simple fact: bigger portions, bigger packages, and bigger plates result in bigger waistlines.

The Cornell researchers have a suggestion on how to avoid these visual traps. They can trick people into eating 73 percent more with a bottomless bowl, so it’s likely you can trick yourself into eating less by using smaller plates, bowls, and glasses. Repack snacks (or other bulk foods) into smaller baggies that set the appropriate portion for you to eat. In fact, the food industry itself took heed of this insight and introduced single-portion packages in the mid-2000s. You can see 100-calorie packages today on the grocery store shelves. The researchers also suggest that leaving empty bottles of wine on the table will remind guests that they’ve had enough to drink. The reverse should also hold true for restaurants. If you want your customers to order more beverages, clear the empty glasses and bottles from the table as quickly as possible. It seems that we’re genetically programmed to react to an empty glass or plate the way nature abhors a vacuum.

Although we rely heavily on our sense of sight, the enjoyment of cooking and eating is not diminished by the loss of sight. And a healthy understanding of how sight influences what you think you’re savoring—and how much—can help you make more informed decisions.

The goal of this exercise is to experience how changing the color of a juice can confound what we savor. Tell your tasters it’s okay if they get the answers wrong. That’s part of the fun.

In preparing for this exercise, you will be “making” 5 cups of juice in 5 different colors. They all need to look natural, like various types of juices. Go easy with the color drops! It’s best to put a drop of color onto a spoon first, then stir it into the juice. That way, you won’t squeeze out too many drops by mistake. Be sure to prepare the juice—and hide the bottles—before your tasters arrive.

YOU WILL NEED
¹⁰

Masking tape and markers

5 transparent cups, glasses, or bowls

½ cup apple juice

½ cup lemonade (which contains only lemon juice, water, and sugar)

½ cup white grape juice

½ cup cranberry juice cocktail

½ cup pear juice (or other light-colored juice)

1 package food coloring (containing blue, red, yellow, and green)

Spoons for tasting

Saltine crackers for cleansing your palate

Paper and pens or pencils

DIRECTIONS

1. With masking tape on the bottom of the glasses, mark each juice by name.

2. Add ¼ cup of the corresponding juice to each glass.

3. To the glass of apple juice, add 2 drops of red color (goal: red).

4. To the glass of lemonade, add ½ drop of red color (goal: pink).