Sneaky mind tricks that make us splash out more on food

From scrunchy crisp packets to heavy cutlery in restaurants and French music in the wine aisle, an Oxford psychologist reveals how you’re manipulated every time you leave home

THESE days, too many restaurants and bars are so noisy that it’s a struggle to hear what your companions are saying.

There’s a simple reason for this: they are designed this way to make us spend more.

Indeed, one report has suggested that when the volume of music in a bar increases by 22 per cent, patrons drink 26 per cent faster — partly, scientists believe, because we finish drinks more quickly when noise makes it difficult for us to converse.

There are a host of other cynical tricks to make us spend more money.

many posh restaurants realise that if classical music is played in the background, diners feel there is an air of sophistication and tend to spend as much as 10 per cent more on food and wine than they do when pop songs are played.

Another piece of subtle manipulation is the shape of your table.

Research shows we prefer circular tables because they evoke greater feelings of pleasure than square or rectangle-shaped furnishings.

Some psychologists attribute this to the fact that angular objects are subconsciously associated with danger (think sharp weapons).

However, circular tables take up more floor space and thus eat into restaurateurs’ margins — so you’ll often find a mixture of the two, balancing approachability with the need to make a profit.

Other design considerations have led to McDonald’s fast- food chains deliberately using hard chairs that customers find uncomfortable after sitting in them for about ten minutes. They’ll soon vacate them and make room for another customer.

Such psychological tricks are examples of the new science of ‘gastrophysics’, the focus of the research I’ve been conducting at Oxford University for the past 20 years.

Funded largely by the food and drinks industry, we have shown that eating involves all the senses — not just what we taste, but what we see, hear, smell and touch, as well as key psychological ingredients such as the emotions and expectations that we bring to every meal.

All this knowledge, for example, explains why crisp manufacturers design their packets to be noisy and why Starbucks personalises its approach to customers by getting staff to write their names on their cups.

But gastrophysics is about far more than big business making money out of us. It can also be harnessed to help us lose weight, get more enjoyment out of what we eat and understand more about the sometimes strange food choices we make . . .

Juicy secrets

TOMATO juice makes up 27 per cent of beverages ordered in- flight by air passengers — with Lufthansa serving up 53,000 gallons a year. Yet almost a quarter of people surveyed said they’d never have a tomato juice on the ground. So what’s the reason? The answer lies in the typical 80-85 decibels of background noise at altitude which suppresses our ability to taste — but it does not affect our perception of all foods equally.

When exposed to loud noise, the body seeks foods rich in protein, which will help its ‘fight or flight’ response.

Loud background noise helps us taste ‘umami’, the Japanese word for the savoury flavour that signals the presence of protein and makes food such as bacon so hard to resist.

Umami is also found in foods such as tomatoes and ancho- vies. Of course, the latter are a key ingredient in Worcestershire sauce which is essential for a Bloody mary — another popular in-flight drink, made with tomato juice!

The supertasters

WE ALL live in different ‘taste worlds’. It’s not just a question of whether we like a flavour, but whether we recognise it.

For example, roughly 1 per cent of the population are unable to smell vanilla.

And while most people like the fresh and fragrant flavour of coriander, others find that it tastes soapy.

Scientists are not sure the reasons for this but there is a proportion of the population who are so- called ‘ supertasters’ — able to perceive bitterness in food and drink while others taste nothing. These supertasters may have as many as 16 times more tastebuds, and their sensitivity to particular flavours seems to be genetically determined. In fact, during the Thirties, it was suggested that people’s ability to detect bitterness should be used as the basis for paternity tests.

Recently, one fascinating study has linked a preference for bitter tastes to ‘psychopathy, narcissism and everyday sadism’.

However, it is important to note that just because these two traits often coincide, you are not necessarily a psychopath should you like bittertasting food and drink.

Blind to truth

WHAT we taste is profoundly affected by what we see, as shown by studies in which even wine experts were fooled into thinking they were drinking a glass of red when, in fact, it was white wine artificially coloured to look dark red.

Tests also suggest that people will rate a drink which is pinkish — a colour associated with sweetness — as

sweeter than a green drink, even when the latter contains 10 per cent more sugar. In other words, psychological factors can change the way the brain thinks.

Ditch the plastic lid

TRY holding your nose pinched tightly closed, and get a friend to feed you morsels of a food without letting you know what it is.

you will probably have little idea of what you are tasting — onion or apple, red wine or cold coffee. This proves that the sense of smell is vital in the way we taste things.

As a result, I advise you to use your nose to boost your enjoyment of food. For instance, with a takeaway coffee, remove the plastic lid. It may help to stop the liquid from spilling, but it also deprives you of much of the aroma.

Similarly, avoid drinking from a bottle or a can. Not because it’s uncouth but because the olfactory hit is mostly missing from the experience. As for sipping through a straw — well, that’s even worse!

Forking out

THE weight of the cutlery you are using influences your view of the food you are eating.

As part of a test, I organised a lunch for 150 people at a conference at a posh edinburgh hotel.

half were given light knives and forks; the others given heavier and more expensive ones. When asked to rate how artistically their food had been arranged on the plate, and what they would pay for it, the results were very different even though the dishes were identical.

Those using the heavier cutlery rated the visual appeal of their meal more highly, and indicated they would pay much more for it.

home cooks should get out the family silver to make guests think that they are a better chef.

Personal touch

THE ruse by Starbucks to write customers’ names on their cups is linked to a phenomenon known as ‘ sensation transference’, in which the warm feelings we have about something being specially our own transfers to our attitude to the contents.

This could explain why many of us have a favourite mug — mine being an orange one with a cartoon pig on the side.

Of course, the coffee is the same whichever cup I drink from, but somehow it doesn’t feel the same — and I get very annoyed if ‘my’ mug is in the dishwasher.

Fishy names

MENU descriptions are a key area. If confronted by a listing for ‘Patagonian toothfish’, I bet you would find it unappealing and prefer something more reassuring such as ‘Chilean sea bass’.

In fact, they are the same thing. until the Seventies, British restaurant menus offered the former, but sales increased ten-fold after it was listed as ‘sea bass’.

This is an impressive example of what food marketers call ‘nudging by naming’. No one is better at this than the big supermarket chains.

For example, Tesco customers buying ‘Nightingale Farms round Tomatoes’ or ‘rosedene Farms Small Sweet Apple’ might fondly imagine these products come from British farms. In truth, the names are made up to seduce shoppers and the products often come from Morocco and Argentina.

Supermarkets have learned that people will pay more for products with homely names. Psychologically, they may perceive such foods to taste better.

Indeed, blind tests suggest that consumers are mostly unable to tell the difference between organic and non-organic food. So, if they are told that something is nonorganic (even if it’s really the former!), they rate it as inferior.

More is less

WHAT’S the ideal number of items on a menu? According to Bournemouth university researchers, too many dishes can leave people feeling overloaded — but too few may leave them feeling deprived of a proper choice.

Indeed, seven seems to be the magic number: seven starters, seven to ten main courses and seven puddings.

For restaurants wanting to be showy, the trick is to break the menu up into a number of sections. how many? you guessed it: the recommendation is seven.

Second-choice men

IN POLITE company, men tend to let women choose first in restaurants. As a result, men might find that their choice duplicates the one already made by the women. Thus they feel pressured to pick their second choice — and enjoy the meal less.

Gastrophysic diet

1. If you’re fond of junk food, try eating in front of a mirror or from a mirrored plate? research suggests it can help reduce consumption of a variety of foods, even those as tempting as chocolate brownies. 2. Don’t drink iced water with your meals. It numbs the tastebuds, forcing us to cram in ever more food to get the satisfaction we are looking for in our meals. 3. If eating from a bowl, hold it in your hands rather than putting it on the table. The weight tricks your brain into thinking that you have consumed more, and you’ll feel satiated sooner. 4. use red plates. The colour tends to evoke an ‘avoidance’ response in us and means we eat significantly less than when eating off crockery of other colours. 5. If you are on a diet but are tempted to indulge in your favourite ‘guilty pleasure’, first try to imagine yourself eating it.

This can help to reduce the amount you consume — yet another example of one of the fundamental principles of gastrophysics, that the pleasures of the table lie not in the mouth, but in the mind.

ADAPTED from Gastrophysics: the New Science Of eating by Charles Spence, published by Viking at £16.99. © Charles Spence 2017. to buy a copy for £12.74 (valid till April 5, 2017) call 0844 571 0640 or visit mailbookshop.co. uk. p&p free on orders over £15.