Eating with the Eyes. The Guardian
Eating with the eyes
Are our eyes the sense most used when we sit down to dinner?
Warm gelatin blocks containing the pure essence of vegetables at El Bulli. Photograph: Getty Images
Friday 28 January 2011 13.37 GMT Last modified on Friday 28 January 2011 13.57 GMT
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We know that our enjoyment of food is about more than how it tastes. Restaurateurs plough wodges of cash into swanking up their restaurants, chefs fiddle and fuss to make a dish sparkle aesthetically, coffee shops waft the smell of pastry and roasted beans into the street to seduce passers by. Eating, as the bald one with glasses said, is a multi-sensory experience.
But which of the senses is boss? It would be logical to assume that the eating part – the biting, chewing, swilling and swallowing part – is the bit that tells how food tastes. Our mouth is a behemoth of flavour receptors, primed to transmit information to the brain. This tastes bitter, that tastes like strawberries – all that information is processed via the mouth, isn't it?
On the contrary, much research suggests that it is in fact our eyes leading the way, our tongues merely follow. "People's perception is typically dominated by what their eyes see", writes Charles Spence, Oxford professor of experimental psychology.
This seems to make sense. Our eyes see the food. They tell our brain what it will taste like via a whole series of learned and natural responses, and we taste what we think we should. Peter Barham, professor of physics at Bristol, told me: "if we start by seeing a bright orange drink, we are very likely to think it will taste of oranges. Provided the taste is at least somewhat sweet and a little acid we will say it is orange – even if it is just coloured, sweetened water or apple juice."
In extreme circumstances this, of course, doesn't work. Blumenthal dresses up bulls' testicles as pieces of fruit and delights in watching his guests' surprise when they discover that it is an altogether different kind of plum they have just put in their mouth.
But when the difference is more subtle our taste buds are less discerning. Food writer and gastronaut Stefan Gates experimented on some students from Reading University with a tin of peas, feeding them canned peas with and without food colouring. Despite the flavour compounds being absolutely identical, every student said the coloured peas tasted fresher, or "the pea with less colour tastes less strong". Similarly, white wine doctored with a little food colouring was perceived to be red by a group of professional wine tasters. They all later said they had suspected something was afoot; yet trusted what they saw above what they tasted. After revealing his cruel ruse Gates asked the mortified wine tasters their thoughts on the matter. "Working in the wine trade," replied one girl, "the way we've been taught how to taste is the first thing you do is look at the colour".
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You might deduce that with the eyes taken out of the equation our palates are sharper, more accurate, less biased. Restaurants have played on this very theory. Dans Le Noir, where you eat in pitch black, encourages the diner to "re-evaluate the notion of taste and smelling through our gastronomic and pedagogical process". But it isn't that straightforward. "Because your eyes have nothing to go on, you're slightly at a loss," says Stefan Gates. Bereft of the relied-upon "combination response" to food, the end result is "deep confusion". Gates had friends who couldn't tell the difference between lamb and pork, something that, with the benefit of sight, we would find obvious.
Marina O'Loughlin agreed. "... I don't buy the initial premise ... why would colour and presentation be so important if the taste is intensified by other senses being dimmed?" As an exercise in raising awareness of visual impairment, it's commendable, and it's an interesting concept. But as a way of heightening your sense of taste it's ludicrous. My (admittedly biased) preconceptions were confirmed by general manager Dominique Raclin, who said that "the majority of customers come for the experience", not the food.
I've thought about decanting some cheap plonk into a good claret bottle to see if friends could spot the difference, or serving disguised cuts of lamb with a pot of horseradish. I haven't done so, mainly because eating with friends is about sharing rather than trickery - experimenting on willing participants is one thing; being mean to your friends another. But I do wonder if they - or indeed I - would be able to distinguish beef from lamb if the context has been so distorted. Perhaps we should just put the lights out at dinner and see how it affects us all.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/jan/28/food-multi-sensory