Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (24 page)

Loud music may make the environment less pleasant to some people, but it can positively affect sales of alcohol. In a study conducted in two different bars, the researchers found that revelers ordered more drinks and drank their beer faster when the music playing in the background was fast and loud. When the sound track was played at a lower decibel level, drink sales were lower and the pace of drinking was slower. In other words, fast tempos beget fast-moving partiers who also, not incidentally, spend more money on drinks.

Musical tempo also has an effect on the pace at which diners eat food. So, if restaurateurs want their customers to linger longer, they should play slow music. Conversely, if their objective is to get you in, get you out, and turn over your table, playing fast music will help. Next time you’re assaulted by frenzied club music in a crowded restaurant, you’ll know you’re being given a not-so-subtle hint to eat and skedaddle.

The takeaways from these studies refer to averages, however, and it’s dangerous to assume that one or two people will respond in an average way. Treasure cautions:

The effect of sound will vary hugely depending on occupancy. For example, the impact of switching on loud music where there was none in
an almost-empty bar is going to be very different in a busy bar with that music and a busy bar with no music. Where the customers experience the change in condition, that itself creates an effect—in the case of my friends, an adverse one. They were more minded to leave than to drink faster!

He also notes that other factors are at play. Do the customers like the music? Is it appropriate? For example, would Queen’s rock anthem “We Will Rock You” add the same thrilling vibrancy to fine dining as it does to sports arenas? Probably not. The quality of the sound is important, too. No matter how perfectly the music is matched to the food, a tinny sound says to your customers that you don’t believe in delivering a good-quality sonic atmosphere. When I can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch something on which a restaurant has clearly economized, I wonder in what other areas it is skimping. That’s a train of thought you don’t want restaurant customers taking.

My favorite study on how sound affects flavor perception was funded by Aurelio Montes, of Montes Wines in Chile, a man who believes so strongly in the power of music that he bathes his aging casks of premium cabernet sauvignon wine in the sound of Gregorian chant. Mr. Montes inspired a professor to test whether or not music could influence the taste of wine. The findings could be a boon to aging hair bands across the world. It turns out that listening to a heavy metal song while drinking a cabernet sauvignon—Guns N’ Roses’s “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” for example—can make the wine taste more robust. According to one theory, the wailing sound of Axl Rose lights up certain areas of your brain that, for example, might correspond to heavy, hearty, robust, and muscular. This stimulation then primes your brain to taste wine in the same way.

Source: Montes Wines

This type of research on sound has such delicious implications that chefs are already putting it into practice in the field. One such chef is Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck in England, which in 2010 took the number three spot in San Pellegrino’s survey “The World’s 50 Best Restaurants.”

Blumenthal has worked closely with Charles Spence, the professor who heads the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford.
Crossmodal
refers to how one of our sensory modes, such as sound, can cross sensory lines and influence another, such as taste. Together, Blumenthal and Spence crafted two experiments to illustrate how environmental sounds can influence flavor perception. The first one used a flavor of ice cream normally not found in nature: bacon and egg. Chef Blumenthal’s ice cream is served at The Fat Duck with a piece of fried bread, which unifies the dish and adds a crispy textural component that conjures up actual bacon and eggs. In the experiment, conducted at a conference on art and the senses, participants were asked to rate the “egginess” and “bacony-ness” of the ice cream while one of two sound tracks played in the background. When the sound of bacon sizzling, popping, and crackling in a pan was played, the tasters rated the bacon flavor higher than the egg flavor. When the researchers played a sound track of barnyard chickens clucking, eaters rated the egg flavor higher than the bacon. It seems that you can pull a flavor in one direction or another with auditory bait.

The second experiment was geared toward determining if they could manipulate the pleasantness rating of a food that, in the absence of culinary accoutrements, can look horrifyingly unpleasant: a raw oyster. Here I will invoke Jonathan Swift, who claimed that the bravest man who ever lived was the first one to eat a raw oyster. Who in his right mind would have thought to crack open what looks like a prehistoric rock formation, only to find inside
it a quivering, gelatinous, slimy gray mass—and think to himself,
That looks delicious
?

The first oyster in the experiment was served on the half shell, the way most restaurants serve them. In the background a sound track of waves crashing on the beach was playing. The second oyster was served in a petri dish, making that quivering, gelatinous, slimy gray mass look like an organ being readied for transplant.
¹¹
In the background they played the discordant sounds of clucking chickens. Not surprisingly, the participants rated the oyster on the half shell with ocean sounds much more pleasant than the petri dish oyster with clucking sounds.

Blumenthal demonstrates the oyster test results daily at The Fat Duck, when he serves a seafood course called Sound of the Sea. Diners are presented with a large seashell inside which is an iPod. Then they’re served a glass dish of edible foam and fresh seafood perched atop a box of sand. Diners are instructed to put on the iPod earphones to hear the sounds of the sea before digging in.

Blumenthal and Spence note that the dish does three things. First, it makes diners think more about the effect that sound has on the appreciation of food, something we often take for granted.

Second, as proved in their research, the soundtrack intensifies the seafood-y flavors in the dish. The sound of the waves lapping the beach transports you to the seaside, conjuring up aromas of salt spray and ocean air, which you ascribe to the food you’re eating.

And third, the earphones make diners focus on the dish more than on companions or conversation.

Your sense of hearing is also important once you put food in your mouth. Imagine eating a potato chip without hearing the shattering crispiness, a bowl of cereal without the cacophony of flakes and clusters collapsing in the mouth, or a bag of pretzels without the head-throbbing crunch. This is one of the reasons
that popcorn is the snack of choice in movie theaters. Imagine trying to eat a bag of Doritos in a theater. You’d probably get some angry glares. In fact, most theaters don’t even sell crunchy snacks at the concession stand. They’re simply too loud, both inside your head (affecting your ability to hear the movie) and outside your head (affect your seatmates’ hearing). Popcorn, on the other hand, compresses demurely in your mouth with a quiet, unobtrusive crunch that doesn’t interfere with the movie sound track.

As annoying as loud eating can be, the sounds of people eating can communicate a lot of information about their food. In laboratory studies, people who simply listened to the recorded sound of someone eating celery, turnips, and crackers gave the foods the same texture ratings as those who actually ate them. You can use this knowledge the next time someone is smacking his food obnoxiously loudly by saying something along the lines of, “I can tell from the loud sound of your chewing that the chips you’re eating are really fresh.” That might shush him down a bit.

If you wanted to conduct a study on how sound influences the perception of potato chips, you’d have to standardize the stimulus: the chip. If one tester got a thick, folded chip, his experience would be very different from that of another tester who got a thin, flat chip. Here—again!—scientists have come up with the perfect solution: Pringles. Because each double saddle–shaped crisp is identical, Pringles are a food researcher’s dream. One study showed that consumers rated Pringles crisper and fresher when they heard loud sounds of them being eaten. Chips with lower sounds were more likely to be rated as stale or soft. The same test was done with carbonated water. The louder the sound the bubbles made, the fizzier the water was rated.

This research led me to some obvious questions: What happens to a person’s experience with food if his hearing is compromised? Does he experience crispy foods as less crispy, bubbly foods as less bubbly, and so on? I couldn’t find any research on this, so I decided to do my own.

The Association for Late-Deafened Adults (ALDA) is composed of just the people I was seeking: those who had been born hearing but had lost this sense later in life. When I went to their San Jose, California, meeting, I discovered that losing their hearing had affected their experiences with food, but not in the ways I had anticipated.

“I can’t hear the teakettle whistling,” said Jim Letter, a former bartender, “so I have to watch for the steam.”

“There’s things—like the watermelon that we used to bang on to hear if it has that right hollow sound—that we can’t do anymore. So we have to assume that it’s going to be okay,” said Linda Drattell.

Could they still hear the crunch of a potato chip after losing their hearing?

“You
feel
it crunch in your head,” said Drattell. Tiffany Freymiller told us that she seeks out a Pop Rocks–like topping at the yogurt shop because she likes the way the candies feel as they’re popping. “I like the way they pop. I can’t hear them, but they’re adding something.”

Everyone in the group agreed that restaurants play a large role in their social life as late-deafened adults. Until recently, most movie theaters, plays, and concerts could not accommodate deaf people. Dining is one social event they can fully participate in, though it has frustrations, one of which is the lack of written specials.

“There are no gold stars that waiters get for memorizing the list and spitting it out quickly,” said Drattell, annoyed at having to read the lips of servers speedily reciting the specials of the evening so that they can get on to the next table.

The minimalist-decor trend and open kitchens generate a lot of noise that also poses a challenge. The deaf adults I spoke to wished for a quiet place set aside where they could dine in relative comfort. Yes, people who can’t hear want quieter restaurants. The bouncing cacophony of a bustling restaurant overwhelms what little hearing they’ve got left and completely frustrates hearing aids. Noise creates the illusion of energy for people with normal hearing, but frustration for those without.

The population that’s deaf is fairly small, but the population that’s aging and suffering from hearing loss is skyrocketing. A 2010 study from the University of Wisconsin reports that 37 percent of men born between 1944 and 1949 suffer from a hearing impairment. These researchers also predict that 50.9 million Americans will be hearing impaired by the year 2030. Restaurateurs, listen up.