Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (26 page)

YOU WILL NEED

1 person to be the Eater (you), plus as many Guessers as you’d like, but this works best with a small number (1 to 5) of Guessers A handful of tortilla chips

A handful of pretzels

An apple

A celery stalk

A carrot

Any other loud foods you can assemble

A plate and an opaque cloth to cover the sound stimuli

Paper and pens or pencils

DIRECTIONS

1. Prepare your samples before the Guessers arrive. Put them on a plate and cover with a cloth so the Guessers can’t see them.

2. Tell the Guessers you’re going to eat several foods while they keep their eyes are closed. Their objective is to try to identify the foods by their signature sound.

3. Have the Guessers close their eyes and keep them closed until you say it’s okay to open them. (I like to make the Guessers hold up their right hand and promise not to cheat. It’s no fun if you cheat!)

4. Eat each food as loudly as you can. Announce the samples as “the first food,” “the second food,” etc. You can spit them out to speed the exercise along.

5. When you are done, have the Guessers open their eyes and write down the foods they thought they heard.

OBSERVE

1. How many did each person get right?

2. What did you notice about the sounds?

3. Do you think you could do this with softer foods, like a pear or a cookie? Try!

Sensory evaluation makes use of the remarkable virtuosity and range of the human senses as a multipurpose instrument for measuring the sensory characteristics of foods.

Michael O’Mahony, 1986

R
oger and I walked into Delfina, our favorite neighborhood restaurant, on a random Monday night. We had arrived unannounced, and the staff tried their best to accommodate us. We ended up at a table placed at the end of a long row of banquettes, those sofa-like seats that line a restaurant wall. Due to an odd wall configuration, my seat was adjacent to another two-seat table. If that party of two had added a third diner to their table, she would have sat exactly where I did. This thrust me into the midst of their discussion whether I wanted to listen to it or not. But once I started paying attention, the conversation was as irresistible as Delfina’s olive-oil mashed potatoes.

The diners were two men, about twenty-five years apart in age. My first challenge was to figure out their relationship. When the young man spoke to the older one, he had an underlying level of disgust in his tone: they were father and son. For the next hour I—unavoidably—listened to their excruciatingly painful reunion after many years of estrangement.
You were not there for me. You would be healthier if you’d just let it go. You missed important events in my life.
It was like listening to a movie while dining.

I couldn’t tell you what I ate that night. Yet I can vividly recall the intense family dynamics at the adjacent table. The drama had simply overridden my meal.

To explore the connection between attention and food, and how to get the most out of every bite, I turned to Herb Stone, who in 1974 cofounded Tragon, one of the world’s premier taste-profiling firms. High profile companies hire Tragon to analyze a food or beverage when they’re about to implement a change in ingredients, process, or suppliers, or when they experience a dip in sales or a clobbering by a new competitor. Tragon uses a technique called
quantitative descriptive analysis
to develop a sensory map of a food, using human tasters as compass and surveying tools. This map helps its customers understand the similarities and differences between their products and their competitors’ products. After more than thirty years in the business of training thousands of panelists to become “multipurpose instruments,” Stone has remarkably simple advice for anyone who wants to learn how to taste food more intensely.

“Pay attention,” he says with absolute certainty. This is the single best way to get more from every bite. “Most people eat food unconsciously. It’s sort of like, ‘Look out, tongue: I’ve got stuff to get into my gut.’”

I agree. The simple act of focusing on your meal is critical to appreciating food. If you want to get more sensory input from your food, show it some respect. If you want to revel in your meal, it’s important not to seat yourself next to an unfolding multigenerational family drama. To get more sensory input from your food, tune out the surroundings, juicy as they may be, and pay attention.

If you want to taste more of what you’re missing, take a cue from wine tasters and apply their techniques to food. The instructions for savoring wine almost always begin with an evaluation of its appearance. The taster spends significant time simply looking at the wine before even smelling it. Is it cloudy? Is it clear? Deep dark red? Golden yellow or with a greenish hue? How saturated is the color? Swirl it around in the glass and watch how it streams down the sides. What does the appearance of the wine tell you about how it will savor?

If we put this type of effort into analyzing each meal we ate, our meals would progress more slowly and we would absorb much more sensory input. In
the same way that the nutrients nourish our body, sensory input nourishes our psyche and makes a meal truly satisfying.

Consider your weekday morning breakfast, which you are likely to eat without devoting much attention to it. You may eat something similar every day and even completely divorce yourself from the food by fixing your attention on something else, such as a newspaper, a computer screen, or (shame on you!) the highway unfolding under your car. If you recognize these sensory-obfuscating behaviors, try something different tomorrow morning: pay attention.

Make eating breakfast your priority. Multitasking reduces the quality of your performance of all tasks. Before digging in, spend thirty seconds just looking at your breakfast. Is the color of each piece of cereal brown, golden, or ivory? Do the pieces vary in size and shape? Is the milk you poured over them thick and opaque or thin and watery? Is your coffee brown or black? Do the color and opacity change when you add milk? Did your toast brown evenly? Are the berries on your yogurt bright red or deep blue?

Start to view your quotidian breakfast as a sensory event. Observe a full sixty-second moment of alimentary appreciation before lifting a single utensil or eating a single bite. Put the newspaper aside for a day and simply pay attention to your breakfast and see how it changes the way you start your day. Visually inspect it as if you were seeing it for the first time. Smell it deeply before putting a bite in your mouth. Wait until you get to the office before checking your e-mail. If you must eat during the commute, find a car pool or use public transportation. Friends don’t let friends eat and drive.

Eating mindfully is a way to make your experience with food more satisfying. For food professionals, eating mindfully is a job requirement. Being a professional means doing whatever it takes. For real estate agents, it means working every weekend. For doctors, it requires being on call. For lawyers it might mean representing a jerk of a client. For me, it means tasting food I hate.

When I taste something in a professional capacity, I consider it from two completely different perspectives. The first approach is to think critically about what I taste. The second—which may not even occur if I’m at work—is to consider whether I like it or not. For me to be successful at my job, making this distinction is critical.

You can appreciate the taste of something, but not really like it. You may appreciate the complexity of single malt scotch, but not want to drink it. Or you may appreciate the flavor and heat of a spicy salsa, but not enjoy the physical sensation (pain) involved in eating it.

As a professional food developer, I have to be completely objective. I am a human instrument. Personally, I despise eggs and I’m not really a huge fan of mayonnaise. Put the two together to make egg salad and you’re likely to send me running out of the room gagging. The smell alone is enough to turn my stomach. Yet I have worked on many different projects where my professional responsibility was to taste mayonnaise or eggs or egg salad. Plain. Without spitting (because I don’t believe in spitting). Over and over and over. In another context, Barb the human being would gag and scream “Blech!” at this affront to my taste buds. But Barb the human instrument is able to verbalize very objectively which of the egg salads I’m tasting has more acidity, which is sweeter, and which is saltier.

Consumers aren’t professional food developers, so we don’t make them taste things they don’t like. But when we test the foods we develop at Mattson, we always have our target customers taste them to get their opinion of the early prototypes. For example, if we’re developing a sports drink, we’ll have athletes taste it. If we’re developing a low-calorie meal, we might have weight-conscious women taste it. You don’t want to try to improve egg salad for someone who will never, ever, in a thousand years order egg salad. Why? Because as a consumer who hates eggs, I would suggest improving egg salad by removing the eggs and the mayonnaise. You want to perfect your egg salad recipe for someone who loves egg salad.

We ask our target consumer both types of questions, depending on what we’re trying to learn. The first type of question refers to the sensory attributes of the food: taste, smell, touch, vision, and hearing. We take an average of the scores from people who say they buy the product. If you’d never buy it, we don’t want your opinions screwing up our data. One egg salad hater can skew our test results in the wrong direction. As a result of someone like me slamming our egg salad formula, we may make changes to it that make it less appealing to lovers of the product. When we ask about sensory attributes, we’re not asking people whether they like the food, we’re just asking what they think about the level of salt, sourness, or color. Notice the subtle difference.

Let’s go back to the (hated) egg salad. When I’m at work in the food development lab, I am the proxy for consumers of egg salad in the early phases of
development, before we’re ready to give consumers a sample. If I ask myself a certain set of sensory questions, about the levels of certain tastes, textures, or aromas, I’ll be much better able to communicate to my chef colleague than screaming “Blech!” and spitting it out in disgust. I may taste it and think that it’s unpleasantly salty, or that the eggs are not quite firm enough, or that the color is too dark. To get at the sensory attributes of a product, we use a “just about right” scale that usually has an odd number of choices so you can anchor yourself with the “just about right” middle point (here, a 3) and indicate your score by marking “just about right” or choosing another rating on either side of the middle.

How is the level of salt in this egg salad?

We ask “just about right” questions only for attributes that we have the ability to adjust. For example, if we’re working with a certain egg farmer who raises a certain breed of chickens, we might not want to ask about the color of the egg yolk if there’s no way we can change it.

Finally, after we’ve captured the sensory attributes, we may ask consumers: How much do you
like
this product? The food industry standard is a 9-point scale ranging from “like extremely” to “dislike extremely.” If I were to taste egg salad, I’d score it very low in terms of liking. But I can’t very well taste a prototype in our food lab, turn to my chef or food technologist colleague, and say, “I dislike this extremely. Please change it.”

The following is an example of a typical scale we use to let the target consumer note his personal preference. The 9-point scale is referred to as
hedonic
, a word that shares its Greek origin with hedonism, for obvious reasons: What’s more hedonistic than a food that has a “just about right” level of fat, salt, and sugar? There’s a clear midpoint that allows you to anchor yourself with a neutral middle score (5) and adjust your score up or down from there. Note that the “best” score on the “just about right” scale is in the middle while the “best” score on the hedonic scale is at the far right hand (or highest number).