The Perfect Meal: The Multisensory Science of Food and Dining

"I’ve chosen a book by Charles Spence and his co-author Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, The Perfect Meal . I was hugely influenced by Charles Spence’s work in the understanding of taste and flavour. Charles is one of those people who, in a very early stage of my thinking about this topic, made me understand just how multisensory our experiences of flavours are. Charles wrote some classic articles about the identification of the multisensory elements that enter into and fuse together to give us a unified perception of flavour. He taught us how taste and smell combine; he tells us how touch makes an impact. The trigeminal nerve, that’s the facial nerve that fires if we have too much mustard — we get a pain in the bridge in our nose rather than in our mouth — that’s what makes things taste peppery; it makes peppermint seem cool in the mouth, and mustard hot in the mouth. So, all of these neurological systems combine, but they combine to create a unified experience of flavour. When we taste the flavour of something — say watermelon, or anchovies — we don’t realise that it’s actually a complex interaction effect. Our experience doesn’t tell us that, so we need science to do that. We need to get below the level of our own introspection and find out how things are working to produce these effects in us. Charles’ work ranges across all the senses. He’s got some very interesting work on sound, and the fact that what we hear can affect what we taste, or the flavours we enjoy. He won the Ig Nobel prize for his work on potato chips: on Pringles. Pringles — are an experimenter’s dream as they’re all exactly the same size; you don’t have to control for difference there. If you leave them out of the box for a couple of days, they taste stale. But if you put headphones on and amplify the high frequency sound of your own crunching, they taste fresh. So is tasting fresh an auditory experience? Is there such a thing as auditory flavour? These are the challenges that he puts to philosophers and to people thinking about what the boundaries of flavour and flavour-experience might be. For a long time, you had to hunt down Spence’s work all over. But now, very handily, he has brought much of this together in a book called The Perfect Meal . He starts with the rather familiar story of how we might be sitting at dinner on holiday in some wonderful restaurant, the sun is on our face as we sit outside and we’re sitting with our loved one and we’re eating what we think is one of the best meals we’ve ever tasted, and the wine is exceptional, and we might even buy a case of it and bring it home. And then we try that same wine on a cold February in London and think ‘Oh, that’s not so good.’ Spence is interested in the various factors that contribute to making something the perfect meal: perhaps this isn’t just what’s on the plate, or in the glass, it’s not just about what you put in your mouth. He knows perfectly well that many food and drink manufacturers work very hard to get the product right, but they don’t always then think of the right name for the product. Will that have an impact on people? What should the packaging look like? What about the feel of the packing in your hand? What sensory expectations do they give the brain about what they’re about to taste? He’s done a range of fascinating work on the science of tasting and eating all in the service of improving and enhancing our experience. That’s why The Perfect Meal has now become the Bible for food and sensory scientists. We value experiences, but I think we’re now very choosy and fussy people. We’re very lucky and live in a developed western economy and we don’t just eat what’s given to us: we can choose and select and every day we can make those choices. From looking at the food on our counter saying oh that looks good, notice that you’re making a visual judgement about how something will taste, and that will probably have an influence on how you experience that. Similarly, the cues that we get from the sound of a liquid being poured into a glass matter: people can — although they don’t think they can — tell the difference between the sound of soda water, Prosecco, or Champagne being poured into the same size of glass at the same rate. Our brains pay attention to these things. Yes, our experience is very nuanced and subtle, and we can rely on our existing ‘folk’ categories, but it’s also fascinating to find out how they’re affected, influenced, tweaked, and even sometimes manipulated by clever food and drink industry professionals and marketers. If you’re interested in your experience and you’re fascinated by how it comes to be the way it is and how you could enhance it, then you need to know a little bit about the science, and of course the place where it really matters is for chefs because today chefs actually need to know the science if they’re going to give us better experiences. They are. The boundary between the scientist and the chef is disappearing. Some of these fancy experimental chef kitchens have laboratories. Then there are the sorts of experiments being run by Charles Spence and his colleagues, and also by some of my colleagues and myself here at The Centre for the Study of the Senses in the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London. We’re all interested in exploring the effects of food and drink in very controlled environments in a laboratory, and putting people through some very strange and unusual testing. But even if we find some nice effects of how sound can modulate flavour and how high-pitched sounds can make something taste sweeter or more acidic and low-pitched sounds can make something taste more bitter, we want to know how that will scale up when you’re in a noisy restaurant. Will it scale up when you’re having a meal with many other things going on around you? So, that’s where chefs want the insights from science, but they’re actually better placed to know how these experiences are actually experienced by diners, and they can feed that back to us. There’s a very healthy interaction: we want to know about immersed environments, and the chefs want to know whether there any insights that they can actually develop and use when creating new dishes."