Dinner party hacks

The science of making food taste better

It is a cold, clear spring morning, and I am sitting in a double-height studio on the top floor of a former dental-goods factory in Barnet, eating crunchy ribbons of jellyfish from what look like a pair of surgical tweezers.

I can’t talk to my dining companion, because we are both wearing cordless headphones, and I am hypnotised by how the soundtrack of sea noises – not to mention the underwater footage projected onto the table in front of us – enhances both the taste and the texture of the gelatinous flesh.

Later, I learn that both the shape of a glass and the taste of chocolate can alter the perceived flavour of whisky, and that if you eat a peach and a chill-flavoured jelly bean with a swimmer’s nose-clip on, they will taste exactly the same.

The venue is Kitchen Theory, where ‘‘modernist’’ chefs led by Jozef Yousef test wild and wacky food on willing participants. The other man munching jellyfish is Professor Charles Spence, 48, whose quest to demonstrate the scientific effect of not just smell but sight, sound and touch on how we experience what we eat is summed up in his new book, Gastrophysics.

This is partly a serious tome – Spence is head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University – and partly an amusing guide for the layman to a new gustatory world. It may come as no surprise to you that Spence has worked with the gastronomic mad scientists Heston Blumenthal, who supplies a foreword to the book, and Ferran Adria, as well as for food giants such as Unilever and Pepsico. He also won the Ig Nobel Prize ( given for scientific research that makes you laugh, then think) for his ‘‘sonic crisp’’ experiment, proving that crisps taste better when they sound, well, crispier.

Gastrophysics is packed with such tasty factual morsels that could be served up at dinner parties. Heavier cutlery can make your guests think you’re a better chef, puddings will taste 10 per cent sweeter off white plates than black ones – and the more people like the background music playing, the more they’ll enjoy the food and wine.

“Anything that takes your attention away from the food, like television, makes people eat 25 per cent to a third more,” Spence adds. “Classical music increases the perceived quality of what you taste and the amount you spend on what you order, be it wine or food.” Supermodel Kylie Jenner’s belief that the pink wall in her living room acts as an appetite suppressant is, however, “based on some fairly dodgy research”. She’d be better off with blue light, apparently.

“We all think we can just taste what is in the glass, but there are thousands of studies now that show we can’t, that everything else affects it,” says Spence. “I think everyone would benefit from a greater awareness of thinking about the ‘everything else’. Eating is the most multisensory thing that you do, three times a day, and among the most enjoyable of life’s experiences. There are all these things you can do to enhance that experience so why wouldn’t you?”

Experimenting: Prof Charles Spence, the author of Gastrophysics

The answer, of course, is inertia. It is known that the QWERTY computer keyboard is not the most effective layout, but the thought of changing every single keyboard and everyone learning to type again is too daunting to contemplate. Similarly, Spence suggests, it might not make the most sense to eat with cold bits of metal that have been in hundreds of other people’s hands and mouths, but the thought of taking our own cutlery to a restaurant is anathema. (People who eat with their hands at least know where they have been.) As consumers get more attached to experiences than to things, and as Instagram and other social media make the visual presentation of food more important, Spence is convinced change will come. In the book, he says, he “wanted to catch the growing excitement not just from chefs, but product designers, perfume makers, composers” and also win over “some of my colleagues on the science side who too often say, ‘well, if it’s going in my mouth it can’t be scientific, or worthy of serious study’. The opposite is true; some of the hardest things to study are going on in the mouth. And it’s important to us all.”

Spence has a prop-forward’s build and looks like a man who enjoys his food. He grew up in Leeds and is married to Barbara, who teaches international political economy in Oxford. They have no children, and it is Spence who does the cooking. “My wife,” he says, “is terrified of the kitchen.”

Certainly, the likes of Blumenthal, Adria and the larky duo Bompas and Parr – who have created inhalable gin and tonic, and a £57 spoon with an MP3 player in it that seems silent until it’s in your mouth, when it sends soundwaves to your inner ear via your teeth – may seem like they are on the experimental (and expensive) cutting edge.

But actually, Spence says, 20 years before he and Blumenthal came up with the “sonic dining” dish, The Sound of the Sea, for the chef ’s Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, soundscapes were used to pacify psychiatric patients during mealtimes.

Some food companies have produced showy sensory gimmicks – a device that magnified the sound of Krug champagne bubbles; an audio file that lasted just long enough for a carton of Haagen-Dazs ice cream to soften – but others, Spence says, have been quietly experimenting to lower salt, fat and sugar in products without compromising taste.

They don’t tell the public this, because if people know something

‘Heavier cutlery can make your dinner guests think you’re a better chef ‘

has changed they believe it tastes different: as Cadbury’s discovered when it rounded the corners of its Dairy Milk bars in 2013, and received complaints that it had become sweeter and creamier. (Blobby or circular shapes are associated with sweetness, pointy shapes with bitter or savoury tastes, by the by).

This brings us to the practical and potentially beneficial applications of Spence’s research, beyond the spheres of upmarket gastronomy and expensive marketing gimmicks. “There are three realworld ‘good’ angles,” he says. “Improving hospital food; training people’s food behaviour towards eating less, and more insect-based food [more on this in a moment]; and combating obesity.”

He says anyone who believes food tastes the same wherever you eat it has clearly never eaten in a hospital. The fact that his own mother has dementia and is in care has made him ponder anew how the eating experience in clinical institutions can be improved (his book cites a study at Salisbury District Hospital that showed elderly and weak patients eat nearly a third more, from blue crockery).

If our worldwide hunger for protein refuses to abate, we are going to have to school ourselves to eat more insects (“an excellent source of protein and fat”) and he is working with Yousef and Kitchen Theory, of which he is a director, on ways to “make this currently most undesirable food source truly delicious”.

And research proves that those who concentrate on their food, who share meals rather than dining solo and who eat from heavier bowls, consume considerably less, and healthier foodstuffs, than those who don’t.

If Spence can percolate all these factual morsels to the mainstream, the benefits to all of us would be obvious.

‘Classical music increases the perceived quality of what you’re tasting’