Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (21 page)

“What?” I ask. Something on her plate must be fueling the gross-out.

“I don’t want to be insensitive or sound like I’m trying to be ironic, but there’s something on my plate that feels like a human eyeball.”

I poked around my plate and found that, indeed, she was right. The chef’s choice of a roasted cherry tomato as garnish for the chicken was probably not intended to have this ghoulish effect, but it did.

Since I began working in the field of food development, I’ve known that sight is critical to eating. In any food prototype-tasting meeting, someone will almost always say, “People eat with their eyes.” Usually, this is in response to a prototype that looks like crap, sometimes literally (chewy chocolate candy logs, you get the picture). Yet when we’re talking about visuals, we’re usually talking about how the color of a food or package or plate will affect how much consumers like it. By dining in the dark, I learned that it’s unbelievably difficult to discern what you’re eating without your eyes.

Is it really that hard to tell without your eyes that a mushroom is a mushroom and a carrot, a carrot? If you were to lose your sight suddenly, the answer most definitely would be yes. When the lights went out in the hotel banquet room, we sighted people became helpless. But most people are not thrown so jarringly into blindness. For example, people with retinitis pigmentosa, one of the diseases that FFB is trying to cure, lose their sight gradually. The gradual loss enables them to learn how to compensate with their other senses.

Janni Lehrer-Stein chaired our dinner. A five-foot-tall bundle of energy with long, curly brown hair, she describes herself as a foodie and a Jewish mother, two things I know and love firsthand. She’s whip-smart, funny, and does good work, serving on more than a few nonprofit boards; the Foundation Fighting Blindness being just one of them. I liked her the instant I met her.

Janni was twenty-six and practicing law in Washington, D.C., when a snowstorm that she will remember forever hit town. Unable to get out to a doctor to treat an eye infection, she went to see the ophthalmologist who lived in her apartment building. He dilated her eyes and pronounced very definitively, “You will be blind in six months.”
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Luckily for Janni, he was wrong about how long she would remain sighted. But he was correct about the disease she has that will steal her last bit of sight any day now. Janni is in her fifties, living very comfortably in San Francisco with her husband and three children. If she bumped into you in the grocery store,
she would look you straight in the eye and apologize in her warm and friendly manner, and you would probably just think she was klutzy, not suffering from a blinding disease. Janni still has “one last lap” in her, which is how she refers to the time left before she will be completely blind. She can see shapes, see contrasts, and read print if it is big enough and she can get close enough. But all of this is deteriorating.

To learn how Janni chooses her foods and cooks, I called and asked her if she would cook with me.

When we went grocery shopping, Janni parked her big black guide dog, Nanaimo, outside Cal-Mart and grabbed a cart with the confidence of someone who has been shopping at the same store for decades. Janni doesn’t shop there because it’s the closest supermarket to her home, but because they don’t move things around frequently, as other stores tend to do. Once, a few years ago, after the produce section had been rearranged, she was forced—overnight—to relearn the geography of the fruits and vegetables from scratch.

As we shopped in the produce section, Janni picked up plastic fruit containers, opened them, and fingered the individual berries before confirming that they were the correct ones she’d use to make a raspberry chicken entree. She grabbed bunches of beets while telling me the story of a beautiful salad she made recently. She had envisioned the earthiness and gorgeous red color of cooked beets, paired with contrasting sweet and sour orange segments, but when the salad was complete, she knew something was wrong. Her children laughed when she asked them why the red beets and the oranges didn’t look right. “Because they’re yellow beets,” they told her.

Janni and I continue to the tomato section and I watch her pick up tomatoes on the vine, then put them down and choose a firm heirloom instead. Janni didn’t fall for the smell of the vine that fools consumers into thinking the tomato has more volatile aroma than it really does. I wonder how much of the produce I buy is driven by how pretty it looks. If farmers were forced to market their wares specifically for the blind, we sighted people would also be the beneficiaries of tomatoes that would most definitely savor better.

Our sense of sight confounds what we think we savor. In test after test, researchers have proved that we default to our visual system even when our taste and
smell systems work just fine. When consumers taste miscolored beverages, they have trouble identifying the flavor. If you are given an orange-colored glass of apple juice to savor, you are likely to say that that you taste orange juice. If you are given a glass of clear but flavored liquid, you’re unlikely to recognize it as cola even if the beverage tastes exactly like the cola you drink every day. With other foods besides beverages, such as jelly, sherbet, and candy, each study comes up with the same results: changing the color of a food or beverage can change what you savor.

All these tests were done with normal consumers. You might think that professional tasters would not fall prey to this phenomenon. But they (we!) do. In two separate studies, both beer and wine professionals were completely fooled by their own eyes.

In one study, participants were given nine sample cups of three brands of beer. There were three cups of Pelforth (French), three cups of Ch’ti (French), and three cups of Leffe (Belgian). The researchers added flavorless color to the cups so the result was nine cups of beer in three color groupings: three light-colored, three medium-colored, and three dark.

First the beer professionals were asked to taste all nine beers without being able to see the color. The tasting session was done in a booth that was lit with colored neon, which rendered the beer color imperceptible. And just for good measure, the beers were served in black cups that further obscured their color. This way, the tasters were not clued in to the researchers’ attempts to hide some visual aspect of the product, as blindfolding the tasters would have done. Next, the participants were asked to taste the beer in a more normal situation, where they could see the color. In both cases, they were asked to sort the beer into category groupings.

When participants were able to see the beers, they sorted them by color. Even more interesting, when asked why they sorted them into the three different color groups, they didn’t report color as a reason. They thought they were using their professional sensory evaluation skills to separate the beers into what were clearly, for them, three flavor groupings.

When they tasted the samples without the benefit of seeing them, though, they sorted them by brand: in other words, by flavor. Without their eyes to function as the Dictator of the Senses, they had the freedom to use their senses of smell and taste. Even professional tasters’ sense of sight can overrule the actual sensory input they get from food.

Another famous color study was conducted on wine at l’Université de Bordeaux
in France. The researchers came up with a lexicon of descriptive terms for white wine (lemon, lychee, butter, white peach, and citrus) and for red (prune, clove, cherry, chocolate, and tobacco).

The researchers chose one characteristic white wine, an AOC Bordeaux vintage 1996 blend of semillon and sauvignon blanc grapes, and a characteristic red Bordeaux wine (also 1996) that was a blend of cabernet sauvignon and merlot grapes. Then they added flavorless red color to the white wine to match the color of the red wine to create a third entrant for the taste test. This third wine, the red-colored white, was different from the white wine only in color.

The wine tasters were given the list of wine terms and given samples of each wine in pairs. They were asked to choose which wine most closely fitted the descriptors. The tasters perceived the red-colored white wine as having the flavor of a red wine. The authors write, “The wine’s color appears to provide significant sensory information, which misleads the subjects’ ability to judge flavor.”

Why are we so easily misled by our eyes? One reason may be that our sense of sight is simply quicker on the draw than our sense of smell. Our ability to detect something visually—
that is a glass of wine and it’s red
—happens ten times faster than our ability to detect an odor. We humans are spectacularly bad at identifying smells without any other sensory clues, as demonstrated by the
Top Chef
Blindfold Challenge and my Spice Rack Aroma Challenge. We’re also really bad at describing odors even when we recognize them and they trigger strong emotional reactions. Saying, “It smells like Uncle George” or “It reminds me of third grade” is charming but doesn’t really give concrete information about what the odor is. We’re just not very good at applying our incredibly acute sense of smell to taking rudimentary tests. In contrast, it would be rare that you’d look at a glass of red wine and erroneously say it looked white. We’re very good at visual identification.

Your senses of sight and hearing function at a distance. You can be seated dozens of feet from the stage of
Iron Chef
’s Kitchen Stadium and still get the full benefit of the experience visually and sonically. Taste doesn’t work this way. Even if you can see and hear the chefs chopping onions, you can’t taste onions from a distance. To taste them, you have to put them in your mouth. Taste, like touch, is a contact sense. In order for the sense to be activated, something has to come in contact with a receptor.

Smell works both ways. You can smell onions at a distance as well as at close range, but the distance at which you can smell onions is far shorter than the distance at which you can see them. Once again, sight trumps smell.

We naturally rely more heavily on sight than smell or taste because of a distinction between the external and the internal. Sight and hearing happen outside us, but we need to put food close enough to smell or inside our mouths to taste and smell it. And this usually happens after we’ve seen it; that is why it’s so hard to override your eyes. When you see an orange beverage, you expect it to taste orange. When the beverage doesn’t match that expectation, you get confused. People who are asked to taste appropriate-colored drinks (orange-colored/orange-flavored) responded faster than those asked to taste inappropriately colored drinks (green-colored/orange-flavored), proving that when we can’t default to vision, our brain searches for more information—not always an easy task when the necessary input is our keen but emotion-fraught sense of smell.

Janni and her family live in Pacific Heights, one of San Francisco’s grandest neighborhoods. Their home is magnificent, four stories tall, with a kitchen that would make a sighted foodie weep with envy. Upon closer inspection, this is a kitchen for a woman who will soon be completely blind. The white marble countertops were chosen for their blank sheet-of-paper functionality. Janni placed a pea on each piece of stone she was considering before deciding that white was the best color for finding small food objects with her remaining limited vision. The counters are beveled and smoothed around the corners so she doesn’t bruise her hips when she bumps into them.

Cooking with Janni is a contact sport. When you can’t see what you’re doing in the kitchen, the best utensil to use is your hand, which gives you more input from the sense of touch. She mixes mashed potatoes and sour cream together for the knish filling we’re making in a way that reminds me of kids playing with wet
sand on the beach. She considers herself a baker and proudly shows me the enormous fifty-pound bags of flour and salt that she keeps in drawers for easy access. The sugar shares a drawer with Nanaimo’s kibble, which immediately conjured up for me a visual image of a pitcher of “sweetened” iced tea mistakenly made with tea, lemon juice, water, and dog food.