How to make food taste better – with psychology
It’s been a while since I’ve been on a plane, but I have a vivid memory of the food being awful. Some of this is down to the constraints of making food on the ground and then reheating it in a large airborne tube – but some of it is because your sense of taste and smell can change when you’re in a plane. It’s not totally clear why this happens, or why it seems to affect some of us more than others, but it’s probably a combination of low pressure, dry air and background noise. Low pressure and dry air both affect how much we can smell, which is an important aspect of flavour. The background noise affects your sense of taste, probably by causing vibrations in your middle ear. Why would vibration matter? Well, the nerve that carries information from your tastebuds to your brain, called the chorda tympani, passes through your middle ear – and those vibrations could be messing with the signals.
When tasting goes awry
In a minute, I’ll tell you some tips for making food taste better – but it’s important to know that being on a plane isn’t the only place and time that your sense of taste gets messed up.
Your sense of taste is also affected by a lot of other things, including…
Age. Unlike vision and hearing, we don’t usually measure taste sensitivity, but for some people it does get worse as we get older, with bitter and sour taste sensitivity falling faster than other aspects of taste.
Sleep. The more sleep the older men in this study had, the easier they found it to identify sweet tastes – which might be because we tend to want high-calorie foods (which are often sweet) when we’ve not had enough sleep, so becoming less sensitive to how sweet those foods are might make us want more of them.
Medical conditions. Zinc deficiency can cause a drop in taste sensitivity. Illnesses like cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and even depression can also cause reduced or distorted taste perception, though it’s not clear in many cases whether it’s the illness itself or the treatment for the illness that is causing the problem.
In other words, even if you currently have good taste and smell perception, you’re probably going to be very lucky indeed if they remain that good for your whole life. If you’re someone who’s not particularly into food as a source of pleasure, you might be thinking, That’s not so bad – but for some people reduced or distorted taste and smell can make it difficult to get the right nutrition. This is a pretty big problem all by itself given how much our bodies need food to keep going, and it could be an even bigger one if you’re facing other challenges like being treated for cancer.
Sadly, there are not many medical interventions for reduced or distorted taste. Though there are lots of promising pilot studies and case studies of things like miracle fruit or cooling the mouth with ice cubes, the larger studies we need to assess whether interventions actually work are often inconclusive. Based on zinc deficiency causing a drop in taste sensitivity, you’d think zinc supplements would help, but this large-scale review found no evidence one way or the other – and as zinc supplements can cause side effects like nausea, the treatment might be worse than the original problem.
If there’s no medical help, then what can we do? Why, the same thing we do every night, Pinky – turn to psychological trickery!
Psychology tricks to make food more delicious
As always, please be careful how much reliance you place on the following suggestions. Everyone is different, and psychology studies often have a WEIRD problem. That is, the people who take part in them tend to be Western, educated, live in industrialised countries, are rich, and hold democratic political opinions (in the American sense). On top of that, they’ve volunteered to take part in psychology experiments, which many people wouldn’t want to do. Consequently, we don’t know much about whether a lot of psychology findings hold true for people who aren’t WEIRD/willing to take part in experiments. So, when you read this list, think of it as a menu of things you can try, not a recipe for success. (Did you like my food pun?)
One other thing before we get to the trickery. The flavour of food is not just about taste. Every researcher working in this field would say that smell also matters, and many would also include the temperature of the food, how it feels in the mouth, the sound it makes as we bite into it, and other sensory information that contributes to the overall experience of eating. These tricks all rely on the non-taste aspects of flavour.
Trick 1: Learn about your own hedonic responses
Child smiling at a lollipop
A hedonic response is the extent to which we get pleasure out of something. If we do the same thing repeatedly, then our pleasure response becomes less extreme. Liked things become less pleasant, disliked things become more pleasant, and things which we have mixed feelings about can sometimes do both at once. A good example of this mixed response is the first time I ever ate whey butter, which is very umami and slightly sweet. To me, it tasted like the offspring of parmesan and Nutella. It was disgusting. I wanted more of it.
No-one is quite sure how hedonic responses to food work, but we know some things that affect them, including physiological factors like blood sugar levels, how much variety there is in your sensory input, what else you’re thinking about, and your beliefs about hedonic responses. We also know that it can reset itself after a while without eating a certain food, so you'll go back to your original level of pleasure in the food.
Here are some suggestions for how you can use this information to your advantage:
Even if you really like a food, don’t eat it every day of the week, because the repetition will make it less pleasant. Instead, have days (even weeks or months) when you don’t eat it – give yourself some time for the hedonic response to reset. This includes not thinking too much about a food you’re looking forward to, since imagining eating a food can trigger a decrease in pleasure.
If you’re in the middle of a meal and you find your hedonic response dropping, try not to think about the quality of the food as that can make pleasure drop faster. You could try a reset by focusing on something that’s not your food for a minute or two – what can you see around you? What does your dining companion think about their food?
If you’re enjoying a food, try focusing on its different aspects. If it has lots of flavours, you could try focusing on a different one each time you take a mouthful. Creating variety by attending to different aspects of the same thing can even result in an increase in pleasure.
If you really hate a food and want to get to like it, eating it relatively frequently should make it more pleasant. (Yes, this is basically how many parents get kids to eat spinach, broccoli and other acquired tastes.) You will probably have to keep this up over time, though, because the reset mechanism on hedonic response could take you back to your initial dislike if you stop eating it.
Trick 2: Know when to share your food and when to eat alone
Close-up on plate of nachos with two people’s hands pulling off bits
Shared experiences are usually amplified, which is mixed news. That amazing plate of nachos you want to keep for yourself will actually taste even better if you give some of it to a friend and eat it with them. The cake you overcooked? Don’t be tempted to hand some of it to your unsuspecting partner or child, because their displeasure will amplify your own (also, they will be annoyed with you).
Trick 3: Avoid background noise (or match it to your food)
Aeroplane in flight, backlit by the sun
As we learned earlier, one of the reasons why plane food tastes weird is the hum of the engines vibrating a nerve, altering the taste messages that are passed from the tongue to the brain. Background noise also means it’s harder to hear the noise food makes as we eat it. This might be good if you have misophonia, but it also means we lose some of what makes crisp foods like apples and Magnum ice creams delicious: the cracking noise as you bite in.
Avoiding background noise seems like a no-brainer, but that might be difficult in a world where planes have to have their engines going in order to get to their destination, restaurants are filled with music and chat, and you can’t guarantee that your neighbour won’t decide to mow the lawn or put a shelf up in the middle of your lunch.
Fortunately, there are a few things you can do even in these circumstances.
Put on a pair of noise-cancelling headphones to muffle sounds that aren’t related to your food, or try to make your background noise match what you’re eating, like putting on a soundtrack of waves breaking while you eat seafood.
Eat foods that are high in umami, like tomatoes, mushrooms, or cheese. Umami seems to be somewhat resistant to the flavour-deadening effects of background noise compared to other tastes.
If you’re on a plane, opt for spicy foods, ice cream and crispy or crunchy foods, and avoid fish, poultry and wine. You could also try ordering foods that are relatively wet, like soups or juicy fruits, in order to combat the effects of low air humidity.
Trick 4: Dye your drinks
Blue dye dropped into a glass of water
You could also dye your food, but it’s generally a lot easier to mix dye into a liquid! The colour of a food or drink, and even the colour of the label on the packaging, can have a huge effect on how you expect it will taste… which could be good or bad depending on whether it then lives up to your expectations.
This is a technique to use with caution and with consideration of your own expectations, since the expected flavour of a food or drink based on its colour can vary a lot from one place to another. For example, as a Brit I typically expect a purple sweet I encounter to be blackcurrant-flavoured, but if you’re an American, you’d probably expect a purple candy to be grape-flavoured.
Trick 5: Think about cutlery and glassware
Golden and black cutlery lying on a marbled surface
This might sound pretty strange. You might think that as long as you’re eating from clean, functional plates with clean, functional cutlery, that’s pretty much all there is to be said about it.
Nope! If you’ve got the choice of a plastic spoon and a metal spoon, go for the metal. Not only can you bask in the glow of an environmentally sound choice, you will literally like it more. In a fancy dining situation, heavy cutlery seems to make food more likeable than light cutlery. It’s not really clear why this happens, but it’s not just fancy dining situations – ‘nicer’, heavier cutlery also affects how much we like yoghurt.
You might also want to consider the shape of any glassware you’re drinking out of, as this can affect your expectations of what the drink will taste like. Again, draw on your own experiences to make this kind of decision for yourself, as different people make different associations.
This research will get us to Mars
At some point, we’re going to need to get off this planet. One of the problems we’ll face when we do that is feeding people on the journey – though probably not for the reason you’re thinking. On the International Space Station, astronauts typically eat about 20% fewer calories than they need to sustain their weight. No-one’s totally sure why, but it’s probably a combination of food in foil packets looking unappetising, microgravity affecting astronauts’ ability to smell, higher levels of carbon dioxide in the air affecting their ability to taste, and, yes, the incessant background hum of machinery, just like on a plane. On the ISS, this isn’t a huge problem, because you can come back to Earth. On our first journey to another planet, it could be devastating. Mars is seven months away at our current spaceships’ travel speed, and being in a small space with a few people for that long is a huge psychological stress in itself. Following that, you’ve got to land successfully with no help from anyone outside the ship (because by the time an emergency message gets back to Earth, it will likely be too late for anyone to help you) and then – then! – you must survive in a barren and inhospitable place, unsure if you will ever return home safely.
Now, imagine doing all that when you’ve been consistently undereating for months. What a difference it would make to know how to make food just slightly more pleasant.
This research isn’t only about making life more enjoyable on Earth. It will help us get to another planet.