Albert AlcaineTaste is the sensation when we taste a food or other substance and put it in our mouth, and is influenced by taste, smell, sight and touch. Taste is limited to the perception that occurs when soluble chemicals come into contact with chemoreceptors on the tongue.
After taste, it is the sense of smell that is most important for the taste of food, and this is because many tastes are identified with the perception of smell, as odour particles travel to the nasal cavity.
But sound also influences taste, both from what the food produces in the mouth and from the environment .
Taste, if we hear high-frequency sounds, is perceived as sweeter, while with low-frequency sounds it is perceived as more bitter.
We should consider what kind of music should be played in restaurants! A lot of attention is paid to menus, crockery, furniture and lighting, but the wrong symphony could set the whole thing rolling! Ice cream manufacturer Ben & Jerry’s recommends a soundtrack to match their ice cream flavours that can be combined with QR codes.
The London restaurant House of Wolf served, for a month, a chocolate-covered bittersweet caramel “sound cake” that came, intriguingly, with a phone number. At the other end of the line was a person in the dining room who would order you to dial 1 for sweet and 2 for bitter, and high and low sounds would be played according to your selection. The chef still laughs now because he says it always worked and people stood still. This was also tested in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Music and the café.
Another related example is aeroplane food, where loud and intense background sounds suppress the perception of salty and sweet, making them more tasteless. The only taste that seems innocuous to the sound is umami, hence one of the places where tomato juices and bloody mary are most consumed is…. On aeroplanes! . So if you often travel by plane, choose menus that include tomato, parmesan, mushrooms and cold meats for the same price!
Does sight influence taste? Studies have shown that when the same juice is served in a red glass and a blue glass, the red glass tastes saltier. Another example that questions some wine tastings is the experiment that was conducted with 54 oenology students who tasted a white wine to which a neutral-flavoured colouring was applied to make it look like red wine. They described the wine using the typical expressions of a red wine analysis with attributes of ripe fruit, blackcurrant, violet…
📎 Alcaine, A. [Albert]. (2024, 25 July). We eat with our eyes… and also with our ears.. PsicoPop. https://www.psicopop.top/en/we-eat-with-our-eyes-and-also-with-our-ears/
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