Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (52 page)

Obviously, when your stomach is empty, it feels good to fill it. The more your body needs something, the more pleasant it feels to ingest it. In addition, when you’re hungry, your body is ripe with the hunger hormone ghrelin, which makes you sniff more. The more you sniff, the more aroma molecules you ingest, the more flavor you experience. You get more flavor from food, through your nose, when you’re hungry.

Being hungry puts you in the perfect space to really appreciate food. We often use this knowledge to our advantage at Mattson by scheduling prototype-tasting meetings at noon. Even reduced-calorie, reduced-salt food will taste better when you’re hungry for lunch.

When you have a bad experience with a flavor, such as peppermint, you can develop a conditioned aversion to it. This is probably the most common cause of disgust in the world of food. Remember the man who was averse to coffee after an embarrassing incident in a store with spilled roasted beans? I developed an aversion to enoki mushrooms having once made myself a lovely salad of them, only to become violently ill moments after finishing it. To this day I avoid these long, thin mushrooms that, to me, signal only the induction of vomiting.

Researchers have successfully conditioned aversions with as little as one exposure. Most food aversions are conditioned by stomach flu, food poisoning, seasickness, altitude sickness, painful breakups, or other bad patches of your life. Your experience with a particular food forever colors how you savor it from that point forward.

I
s it possible to create a meal that will appeal to all eaters when every single one of us lives in his or her own sensory world? When we eat—as with most things we experience—our personal perception is our personal reality. If I perceive Chef Keane’s risotto as too salty, that’s my reality, even if I misidentify the acid as salt. Chef Keane may tell me that it’s not too salty, but this is probably not going to change my perception.

Yet in the course of researching this book, I changed my ability to see. By dining in the dark I began to understand how vision affects what we savor. I enhanced my ability to hear by eating in an anechoic chamber. I cut off my sense of smell by plugging my nose with surgical tape to see what it’s like to eat without that sense. But in each of those cases, I still existed in my own reality. I wondered whether it would be possible to change my own reality to see how food would taste from a totally different mind.

My drug of choice is a floral Alsatian riesling or a grassy, grapefruity sauvignon blanc from New Zealand. But I have no love for the stinky herb
Cannabis sativa.
Getting high on pot would really mess with my mind. Marijuana, I decided, is how I would alter my reality.

When I was in graduate school, I often had friends over to my apartment for study sessions that diverged into full-on parties. One night someone broke out
a joint and passed it around. Then we passed around a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby. From the sound of things, you would have thought we were eating food for the first time in weeks. Someone raved about the brilliance of putting salty-sweet peanut butter pretzels in vanilla malt ice cream. Another person added that the fudge and peanut butter swirled throughout were strokes of genius. Without a doubt, we all agreed, Chubby Hubby was the best thing we’d ever tasted.

The following week I treated myself to a bowl of Chubby Hubby before bed on a Tuesday night. Was it delicious? Of course. Was it the best thing I’d ever tasted? No. The altered reality in which we tasted the ice cream had altered our perception of the product. From that point forward, I dubbed this
The Chubby Hubby Effect.
I decided to conduct some of my own pseudoscience to prove or disprove The Chubby Hubby Effect, a sort of lack-of-focus group.

Roger and I hosted eight friends, selected for their open minds and willingness to smoke pot. We set up tasting plates for each attendee. When they arrived—and before they could inebriate themselves—we asked them to sample five foods and fill out a sensory evaluation form for each. The samples included a southern fried chicken tender and a wedge of Parrano, a Dutch cheese that is semiaged and just shy of the umami wallop of aged Gouda. We threw in Belgian endive to represent bitter, an Italian dry riesling from the producer Germano Ettore as the sour entrant, and a milk chocolate bar from Scharffen Berger for sweetness and mouthfeel. Then we smoked the weed. Roger remained sober throughout to help administer the test and make sure things stayed on course. When he saw that we were all good and stoned, he made us taste the same five foods and fill out the sensory evaluation forms again, an exercise akin to herding cats.

The most articulate comment from the lack-of-focus group explains what we experienced:

Being high sharpens the things you love and elevates your experience of them and also dulls some details that may usually influence your experience of the food (ugly plates, not aesthetically pleasing presentation) so you can focus on the parts that are important to you.

I experienced the Belgian endive as less bitter and much sweeter when I was high. The wine was less sour, more sweet. Just like everyone else, I liked
the chocolate from the outset, but liked it a lot more when high. Sweet tasted
fantastic.

The common theme was that getting high intensified one’s perception of the five Basic Tastes, but our ability to focus on the subtle nuances of aroma, and thus flavor, was muted. The stoned tasters gave very few well-formed thoughts, scribbled in barely legible handwriting, but their comments focused on how sweet the cheese or chocolate was, or how sour the wine was or was not. Later, one guest e-mailed me: “Bland things are awful when you’re high. For instance, when I’m serving a roast chicken and simple salad for dinner, I will not let anyone smoke pot before. As a hostess, you want people in the right space to enjoy your offerings, so you have to be proactive and manage the experience. If you are ordering up a pepperoni pizza, then it’s OK to be stoned out of your mind!” A pepperoni pizza is loaded with salt, umami, sour, and fat. It’s certainly not subtle.

In fact, dozens of studies have been done on how cannabis affects the perception of taste, most of them double-blind and placebo-controlled. The majority of the studies are done with the active compounds in pot, known as
cannabinoids.
Rick Mattes of Purdue University College of Consumer and Family Sciences has studied many different routes of delivery of the drug, some of them more obvious than others: oral, intravenous, smoked, sublingual (under the tongue), and rectal suppository (the least likely form to be abused by buzz-seekers).

Mattes’s work was for medical purposes, to determine whether he could increase a person’s appetite using pot. If he could truly prove that this worked—as opposed to its being anecdotally believed to be true—the findings would be beneficial for patients undergoing chemotherapy or radiation treatment, when appetite disappears and nausea prevails.

In two of Mattes’s studies, the subjects were given the drug, then allowed to choose from a veritable stoners’ paradise: an unlimited supply of Oreo cookies, cupcakes, M&M’s, fruit, potato chips, peanuts, cheese, crackers, pickles, yogurt, sour candies, juices, bittersweet chocolate, radishes, walnuts, celery, and raw broccoli, among other munchies. Not surprisingly, sweet foods were chosen more than others. This tracks with my lack-of-focus group, which was drawn to sweet tastes.

Mattes was unable to prove in his study that pot increases appetite, but he’s not convinced he did the experiment properly. With hindsight, he thinks he used doses that were simply too strong. While he didn’t see the appetite-enhancing
effect in his study, he heard anecdotally from his subjects that after they went home and some of the drug wore off, they attacked their snack pantries and refrigerators with fervor. Another interesting aside: Mattes says that smoking is by far the best method for administering medical marijuana, because you can titrate (adjust) the dose on the fly. Once you’ve eaten pot, there’s little you can do to correct the dosage, other than grab a package of Oreos, queue up a Monty Python movie, and wait.

Mattes also conducted a similar study to see if cannabinoids affected the sensory perception of food. Other studies have shown that odor perception is not affected by pot, so he focused on the Basic Tastes, but did not find a significant effect of the primary psychoactive component in marijuana on taste intensity.

Other studies on sound, sight, and touch were also unsuccessful in demonstrating that they were enhanced by pot, and Mattes speculates that reported enhancements “may be more attributable to effects of the drug on memory and cognitive processes than to alterations to the sensory systems.”

In other words, the Chubby Hubby Effect may actually exist, but only in our heads.

When Steve Gundrum, CEO of Mattson, wants to eat Indian food, nothing will deter him. If something or someone threatens to do so, he simply employs his creative genius in a unique way. This happened when his elderly Aunt Tessie came to visit. She was fairly set in her ways and she absolutely, positively, did not want to go out for Indian food. Too hot. Too much spice. Too exotic. Steve’s cogent argument that not all Indian food was spicy did nothing to dissuade her. Instead, he changed tack, and decided to put her in the right frame of mind.

He told his Aunt Tessie that he was going to take her out for some of the best barbecue chicken she’d ever eat. She agreed to this and even got a bit excited. She loved barbecue chicken. When Steve and his family ushered her through the front door of the Indian restaurant, she immediately knew she’d been duped. And she was dually disappointed: she was really looking forward to eating barbecue chicken.

“Just trust me,” Steve said. “I promise you won’t regret it.”

When the perfectly cooked tandoori chicken legs arrived at the table, Tessie
melted. They looked exactly like what she’d been anticipating. And so she ate Indian “barbecue chicken” for the first time in her life and loved it. With a fresh perspective, given to her by someone else.

My mother and her partner, Bob, are avid restaurant-goers who love to find the little hole-in-the-wall restaurants that their home state, Florida, has in spades. They were thrilled to discover a tiny new Italian restaurant run by an authentically Italian family, as fresh from Italy as burrata cheese. They made reservations and went in with high expectations. Unfortunately it was a very busy night and they were given less-than-desirable seating. When they asked the chef-owner if they could change tables, he told them he didn’t have anything else available. When they asked if they could sit at the bar instead, the owner politely asked them to leave.

“Why?” they asked incredulously.

“Because you’re not gonna like the food. I’d rather have you come back with a fresh perspective.”

This was beyond brilliant. The chef knew instinctively that making people sit where they don’t want to is akin to serving them a bowl of uncured olives: it would leave a bitter taste in their mouth. His next move showed the chef to be a shrewd businessman. When my parents decided to stay seated at the drafty table by the door, he sent them a complimentary bottle of wine. Upon reflection later that evening, they realized how right the chef was, in both maneuvers. The key lesson learned from their experience is that if you are unhappy in any way about the dining experience you’re about to have, it might be best to get up and leave, sparing yourself the disappointment, rather than having to eat a meal in the wrong frame of mind.

When I talked to Baba Shiv, professor of marketing at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, he told me how pleasurable experiences can have a multiplier effect on one another. As an example, he told me that eating popcorn in front of a movie you’re enjoying can enhance the pleasure of the popcorn and
a pleasant bowl of popcorn can enhance the movie. This immediately made me think of an “only in San Francisco” example that I’ve experienced.

Every now and then the wonderfully quirky Castro Theatre in San Francisco runs my all-time favorite musical,
The Sound of Music
, on its historic wide screen. The Castro, in all its gaiety, runs subtitles at the bottom of the screen as encouragement for the audience to sing along with Maria and the Von Trapp children. People take this very seriously. Many even don costumes. (Think of large gay men in nuns’ habits and grown women in lederhosen.)

The Castro also happens to serve a killer tub of popcorn. As much as I love this event, perhaps reveling in the silliness and fun of the sing-along
Sound of Music
has enhanced my memory of the theater’s popcorn. According to Shiv, “The overall pleasure that the brain would code is going to be greater than if it just had the popcorn without watching the pleasurable movie.”