Read Online You May Also Like by Tom Vanderbilt - Free Book Online

better than one you just tasted,” Cardello said.
    Our confusion about our own tastes translates into trouble for people trying to measure those tastes. People in general tend toward a “regression to the mean” in terms of liking.Ask them ahead of time how much they like lasagna or liver, say, and then ask them again after they have actually consumed it, and subjects will mark their favorite foods a bit lower and their least favorite a bit higher. Expectations haunt our liking, but they confound us. Peer into the science of liking long enough, and you might begin to think this is something approaching a mantra:
The bad is never as bad as we think it is, the good never as good
.
    â€”
    One reason Natick has proven so influential is that, year after year, it has had an essentially captive audience of subjects to test. It is also a laboratory of pure liking, uncorrupted by the contexts of the outside world. Soldiers eating MREs do not see the price of food; they are not swayed by advertising. Nor do they have any choice. One of the research concerns has been food “monotony”—how long a soldier could be reasonably expected to eat nothing but MREs. The army’s own analysis, Darsch tells me, targeted twenty-one days. This was probably “on the conservative side,” he allowed. “You could probably go thirty-plus days and not have a statistical loss of body mass and muscle.”
    But more broadly, Natick has thought long and hard about how to plan menus that offer the most variety as is logistically feasible and that are most liked. Soldiers will not simply eat anything when they are hungry. Consumption, not to mention health and morale, drops off as food acceptability declines. Feeding an entire army means preferences must be broad and wide. As an early study observed, “Even foods that are extremely well-liked, but only by a small proportion of the consumers, are unsuited for military use.” Dishes like New England clam chowder have failed because, as Darsch put it, “a lot of the folks eating it didn’t really know what New England clam chowder was.”
    Howard Moskowitz, a prominent figure in the food industry, was working at Natick in the 1950s on mathematical models for “menu optimization.” Over breakfast at the Harvard Club in New York City, he said his inquiry was simple: “How frequently can we serve something so it doesn’t become tiring?” Menus, in his view, are driven by two dynamics: liking and time. There are things that we like, but how quickly will we tire of them?The thing most liked in a taste test, various studies have shown, often becomes the
least
liked after a number of samples. Crystal Pepsi might have seemed fresh and interesting in a taste test, but was it actually something consumers would restock the fridge with? That intense sugar rush or novel flavor may seem great the first time, “but you have to live with it,” Moskowitz said.
    â€œIf you like something a lot more,” he continued, “do you choose it more often?” Not necessarily.We begin to pick things we may like much less, perhaps as a way of protecting our liking for that loved thing. One wants to avoid “death by hamburger,” as he dubbed it. Why
should
we even tire of a particular food? I asked. Is it, per sensory-specific satiety, that our nutritional needs are being met? Is there some innate desire for novelty? “I don’t know,” he said, sighing. “Why do we habituate to the smell of a fragrance? Why is it when we sit in a house next to the railroad tracks, we don’t hear the railroad anymore?” Why should we need choice? “Go to a diner,” he said. “Diners have menus with seven pages. But you order the same thing. You don’t want choice. You want the illusion of choice.”
    Tyler Cowen, perhaps our most food-aware economist, noted that he is often puzzled to hear, as that day’s