Listen up and see, as well as taste what’s in your mouth
HAVE you ever had a glass of your favourite tipple while sitting on a river bank on a sunny day? How about beside a roaring winter’s fire? Neuroscientists have been examining why the same drink seems totally different when supped in different contexts.
When your Granny told you that food always tastes better out of doors, she might have recognised what the food industry is only now beginning to realise — that flavour is not just down to your taste buds, or even your nose but is a total sensory experience.
A recent experiment by drinks giant Diageo has the food industry in a spin. They used Scotch whisky for the experiment and found that if you drink a glass of single malt in a room bathed in green light and covered in real grass, accompanied by the sound of a lawnmower and birds chirping, the whisky tastes “grassier”.
Replace that with red lighting, curved edges and tinkling bells and the drink tastes sweeter.
Best of all, though, was the ball of malt over a crackling fire which produced a woody taste.
“For a drinks company to think ‘what does our whisky sound like, not just what does it taste like’, opens a window to a whole lot of creativity,” says Nik Keane, malt whisky global brand director for Diageo.
The company applied these new multi-sensory insights when designing its gift packs for 2014’s Chinese New Year, introducing new colours and textures to the packaging.
“We are looking at bringing this to life on a long-term basis,” Keane told the BBC World Service.
In the experiment 18 lucky participants were tested under laboratory conditions at Oxford and tasted four samples of Singleton Single Malt Scotch Whisky whilst watching three visual cues designed to enhance wood, sweetness and grass and listening to three different musical soundtracks.
It was carried out under the direction of Professor Charles Spence, who runs the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University. He is the father of “neurogastronomy” which is based on the understanding that everything we eat or drink is processed by all our senses.
“We see it, we hear it, we smell it, we taste it, we feel it. All those senses come together,” says Spence. In another experiment by Prof Spence, two groups were given an identical pink strawberry dessert. Those eating from white plates rated it 10% sweeter than those who ate from black plates.
Other experiments are also gaining traction. One London restaurant gave customers identical desserts with half of the diners listening to high-pitched flute music and the other half to instruments with deeper tones. The higher notes evoked sweetness; the lower bitterness.
Starbucks were so struck by this experiment that the company is currently conducting a similar one, using music ranging from works from Puccini to Amy Winehouse.
All this is no surprise to Ireland’s foremost experimental chef, Seamus O’Connell, who runs the Ivory Tower Restaurant in Cork and has been named Munster’s top chef by the Restaurant Association of Ireland.
“I have studied the physiology of taste and flavour and while we all see the same colours and hear the same noises, we don’t taste things the same. It can even depend on your own personal make-up. For instance, someone with an iodine deficiency will experience the taste of broccoli as bitter while the rest of us will think it’s sweet.”
Taste, he says, is not the main sensation in experiencing food or drink: “It is also about measuring the atomic movement and molecular activity of the food you are eating and smelling.”
But, even so, many restaurant goers delight in the exotic which experimental chefs like Seamus provide by offering unusual combinations like, for instance the venison with chocolate or rabbit in Beamish stout and prune jelly on offer at the Ivory Tower.
- The Diageo experiment can be viewed online at www.flavourjournal.com/content/2/1/23. For details of Seamus O’Connell’s restaurant go to ivorytower.ie.
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