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The science behind a good meal: all the sounds, sights, and tastes that make us like what we're eating—and want to eat more. Why do we consume 35 percent more food when eating with one other person, and 75 percent more when dining with three? How do we explain the fact that people who like strong coffee drink more of it under bright lighting? And why does green ketchup just not work? The answer is gastrophysics, the new area of sensory science pioneered by Oxford professor Charles Spence. Now he's stepping out of his lab to lift the lid on the entire eating experience—how the taste, the aroma, and our overall enjoyment of food are influenced by all of our senses, as well as by our mood and expectations. The pleasures of food lie mostly in the mind, not in the mouth. Get that straight and you can start to understand what really makes food enjoyable, stimulating, and, most important, memorable. Spence reveals in amusing detail the importance of all the “off the plate” elements of a meal: the weight of cutlery, the color of the plate, the background music, and much more. Whether we’re dining alone or at a dinner party, on a plane or in front of the TV, he reveals how to understand what we’re tasting and influence what others experience. This is accessible science at its best, fascinating to anyone in possession of an appetite. Crammed with discoveries about our everyday sensory lives, Gastrophysics is a book guaranteed to make you look at your plate in a whole new way.
The science behind a good meal: all the sounds, sights, and tastes that make us like what we're eating—and want to eat more. Why do we consume 35 percent more food when eating with one other person, and 75 percent more when dining with three? How do we explain the fact that people who like strong coffee drink more of it under bright lighting? And why does green ketchup just not work? The answer is gastrophysics, the new area of sensory science pioneered by Oxford professor Charles Spence. Now he's stepping out of his lab to lift the lid on the entire eating experience—how the taste, the aroma, and our overall enjoyment of food are influenced by all of our senses, as well as by our mood and expectations. The pleasures of food lie mostly in the mind, not in the mouth. Get that straight and you can start to understand what really makes food enjoyable, stimulating, and, most important, memorable. Spence reveals in amusing detail the importance of all the “off the plate” elements of a meal: the weight of cutlery, the color of the plate, the background music, and much more. Whether we’re dining alone or at a dinner party, on a plane or in front of the TV, he reveals how to understand what we’re tasting and influence what others experience. This is accessible science at its best, fascinating to anyone in possession of an appetite. Crammed with discoveries about our everyday sensory lives, Gastrophysics is a book guaranteed to make you look at your plate in a whole new way.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book
1. Taste
Can you list all of the basic tastes? There is sweet, sour, salty and bitter, for sure. But anything else? Nowadays, most researchers would include umami as the fifth taste. Umami, meaning "delicious taste," was first discovered back in 1908 by Japanese researcher Kikunae Ikeda. This taste is imparted by glutamic acid, an amino acid, and is most commonly associated with monosodium glutamate, itself a derivative of glutamic acid. Some would be tempted to throw metallic, fatty acid, kokumi and as many as fifteen other basic tastes into the mix as well-though even I haven't heard of most of them. And some researchers query whether there are even any "basic" tastes at all!
The mistake that many people make, though, when talking about food and drink is to mention things like fruity, meaty, herbal, citrusy, burned, smoky and even earthy as tastes. But these are not tastes. Strictly speaking, they are flavors. Don't worry, most people are unaware of this distinction. But how do you tell the difference? Well, hold your nose closed-and what is left is taste (at least assuming that you are not tasting something with a trigeminal hit, like chili or menthol, which activate the trigeminal nerve). So if we struggle to get the basics straight, what hope is there when it comes to some of the more complex interactions taking place between the senses? Taste would be simple, if it weren't so complicated!
Do you mean taste or do you mean flavor (and does it really matter)?
Most of what people call taste is actually flavor, and many of the things that they describe as flavors turn out, on closer inspection, to be tastes. Some languages manage to sidestep the issue by using the same word for both taste and flavor. In fact, in English, what we really need is to create a new word-and that neologism is "flave." "I love the flave of that Roquefort" would do the trick. Let's see whether it catches on. There are also challenges here from those stimuli that lie on the periphery. Just take menthol, the minty note you get when chewing gum: is it a taste, a smell or a flavor? Well, all three, in fact; and it also gives rise to a distinctive mouth-cooling sensation. The metallic sensation we get when we taste blood also has the researchers scratching their heads in terms of whether it should be classified as a basic taste, an aroma, a flavor or some combination of the above.
Most people have heard of the "tongue map." In fact, pretty much every textbook on the senses published over the last seventy-five years or so includes mention of it. The basic idea is that we all taste sweet at the front of the tongue, bitter only at the back, sour at the side, etc. However, the textbooks are wrong: your tongue does not work like that! This widespread misconception resulted from a mistranslation of the findings of an early German PhD thesis that appeared in a popular North American psychology textbook written by Edwin Boring in 1942. So now we have got that cleared up, let me ask, do you actually have any idea how the receptors are laid out on your tongue? No, I didn't think so. Something so fundamental, so important to our survival, and yet none of us really has a clue about how it all works. Shocking, no?
The taste receptors are not evenly distributed, but neither are they perfectly segmented as the oft-cited tongue map would have us believe. The answer, as is so often the case, lies somewhere in between. Each...
Reviews-
May 1, 2017 A spry book of cutting-edge food science.We taste sweet at the front of the tongue and bitter at the back, right? Wrong. Thanks to what Spence (co-author: The Perfect Meal: The Multisensory Science of Food and Dining, 2014) characterizes as "the general neglect of the 'lower' senses by research scientists," we're brought up on all kinds of misinformation about food and the way our bodies respond to it. Enter "gastrophysics," a new blend of various sciences with cultural and psychological elements of food preparation and presentation, which, in Spence's hands, yields all sorts of aha moments--e.g., if they're playing fast music in the restaurant you enter, it means they're trying to get you out of there quickly. Part of this book seems an extended advertisement for Oxford's Crossmodal Research Laboratory, which Spence, an experimental psychologist, directs and which conducts probes and disquisitions in what he calls "neurogastronomy." But part is a disinterested--and highly interesting--examination of the widely diverse food domains we inhabit, the recognition of which should help chefs put aside the notion that anyone who tinkers with their spicing by adding salt at the table is an evil creature. They're not, and seasoning a dish differently from how the chef prepared it is not an insult but, instead, "a form of customization that recognizes the very different taste worlds in which we all live." Spence has a light touch and a knack for framing research questions in provocative headings: "What's the link," he asks, "between the humble tomato and aircraft noise?" It's a question worth pondering should you have the dubious pleasure of being served an in-flight meal, just as you'll learn here why the barista at Starbucks puts your name on the cup (hint: it's not really a memory aid for said barista). A sharp, engaging education for food consumers and a font of ideas for restaurateurs and chefs as well.
COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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