10,000 reasons a bacon butty is better than sex
WHY YOU EAT WHAT YOU EAT by Rachel Herz (WW Norton £18.90)
How do you savour your food? By smacking your lips? with murmurs of appreciation and gasps of delight?
Be thankful you are not like flies. As Rachel Herz informs us in this eyeopening book, they use their knees to taste what they are about to eat. octopuses employ their whole bodies.
Humans have taste receptors all over as well. In our gut. In our lungs to detect noxious substances that need expelling. Even, if we’re men, in our testicles.
But for all practical purposes — for providing us with the sense we call taste — the important receptors are those inside the 5,000 to 10,000 taste buds on the tongue, the roof of the mouth, inside the cheeks and in the throat.
one popular misconception is that these receptors are arranged in a ‘taste map’ — specific areas of the tongue detect specific tastes. According to Herz, this is simply wrong. Yes, there are four basic tastes: sweet, sour, salt and bitter. But there is no such thing as a taste map.
Responsibility for the mistake belongs to a Harvard psychology professor with the unfortunate name of Edwin Boring. Back in the Forties, Professor Boring got his facts in a muddle — and the misapprehension still persists.
what is true is that our sense of taste is deeply entangled with our other senses. The Chinese have a proverb (they always do) which says that you eat first with your eyes, then with your nose and then with your mouth.
Certainly, the link between taste and smell is clear enough.
These senses are present even before birth. Herz quotes one study that looked at mothers who regularly ate garlic during pregnancy. Their babies, once they had made their appearance in the world, much preferred a garlic- scented rattle to an unscented one.
Throughout our lives, the aromas of foods can set us salivating. Freshly baked bread, coffee and bacon regularly top polls for favourite smells.
Bacon is so popular that there are bacon- scented candles on the market. one company even offers bacon- scented briefs, which it advertises as being like ‘a hot frying pan in your pants’. whatever turns you on.
As the Chinese noted, our appreciation of food begins with looking at it. we even like watching other people eat, which explains the odd Korean phenomenon of mukbang.
online ‘mukbangers’ tuck in to giant bowls of spicy meats, noodles and seafood while the audience types in feedback on a live-stream.
The most enthusiastic eaters become stars and are paid generously for their gluttony.
The aesthetics of what we eat ourselves are important. In a study at oxford, participants were given three salads with the same ingredients arranged in different ways.
one looked like a regular mixed salad. one had the different foodstuffs carefully separated. And the last had them arranged to resemble a painting by the early 20th- century abstract artist wassily Kandinsky. The Kandinsky salad was rated 20 per cent tastier than the others — even though all three contained exactly the same ingredients.
Most surprisingly, hearing and taste are linked. Participants in one experiment sat in a darkened booth wearing headphones and were fed bits of toffee.
when high-pitched melodies were played through the headphones, they reported the toffee as tasting sweeter than when low-pitched tunes were played.
Maybe this helps to explain our susceptibility to mood music in supermarket aisles. one U.S. store played French accordion music in its drinks section. Sales of French wines shot up.
when it changed to a German oompah band, up went sales of hock and riesling.
EvEn
our moral sense can change how we feel about what we eat and drink. In another experiment Herz quotes, committed Christians at the University of Illinois were asked to taste a lemon drink immediately after they had copied out a piece of text.
Many of them reported that the drink tasted unpleasant after they’d just written down several paragraphs by Richard Dawkins. The drink improved after they’d transcribed the preface from The Merriam-webster Dictionary.
This can be a frustrating book. It highlights the dubious usefulness of some academic research. Did it really need a professor at Cornell University to tell us that serving bigger portions means we eat more?
And we can all probably work out for ourselves that, if you want to eat less at an all-you-can-eat buffet, you should sit as far away from it as possible.
But, as Herz says, eating is ‘one of the top two pleasures of human existence and, unlike the other one, we have to do it every day to survive’. we are always going to be nearly as fascinated by food as we are by sex. Herz’s book, despite its faults, is a rich and enjoyable smorgasbord.