Should you put your food on a red plate or a blue plate? Do you drink your beer out of an angular glass or a round one? What dinner music do you cue up? It turns out that such mundane-seeming decisions can have a significant effect on how we perceive the flavors and textures of our food. For example, people report an enhanced appreciation for umami flavors in the din of an airplane, but a decreased ability to taste sweet things. That could explain why you might crave tomato juice or Bloody Mary mix during a long flight.
University of Oxford experimental psychologist Charles Spence is a self-described “gastrophysicist” who experiments with the ways aesthetics, environment, and even subtle cues in packaging can change how we perceive sweetness, bitterness, crispness and other qualities of our food. He describes how restaurants, both expensive and midrange, are using this knowledge, and how a greater understanding of gastrophysics can improve even the humble (and often wasted) hospital meal.
