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Authors: Tom Vanderbilt
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lunch choice is being deliberated, someone utter something like âI donât want Thai food today; I just had that yesterday.â This rather neglects the fact that Thais are eating Thai food
every day
. âWould it be so terrible,â he wondered, âto eat only Indian food, whether at home or in restaurants, every day for a week?â Often, when we think we are tired of something, we may simply be forgetting how much variety we have actually had (in a phenomenon that has been called âvariety amnesiaâ). Curiously, while one might expect people to tire less quickly of flavorful food, food monotony research at Natick has shown the opposite: The more bland it is, the less quickly soldiers grew tired of it. Bland food, after all, fades from memory more quickly than exciting food. The less you remember having it, the less tired of it you get.
Natick also had to grapple with
where
food was being consumed. The very same food will be rated higher when served in a restaurant versus an institutional cafeteria or a lab. Soldiers in the field face two challenges: Not only are they eating MREs, with their limited variety and entrées of approximate flavor and dubious texture, but they are often eating them in the far-flung, inhospitable environments for which they were designed. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, a group of soldiers (bivouacked on an island in Hawaii) and MIT students (on campus) ate nothing but MREs. The soldiers ate them for thirty-four days straight, the students for forty-five days. Both groups deemed the food âacceptableâ (which did not speak well for MITâs canteen). Both groups lost weight. The students, however, ate more than the soldiers in the field. The experiments showed the importance of
context
on liking. For many reasons, it is more difficult to get people in the field to eat.
Context is no less important in the real world.People eating in an ethnic restaurant with appropriate decor rate the food higher; add some red-checkered tablecloths or a Sergio Leone poster, they eat more pasta. The loudness, and type, of music can affect the way we feel about our food. We eat more when we are in larger groups. The type of glassware, the weight of plates, whether the color of the food matches the color of the plateâeven how long people have to wait for their mealâall have been shown to influence how much we like, and eat, food.
There is a poignant scene in the film
Sideways
in which Miles, the hapless protagonist, in a fit of pique and despair over his dismal life prospects, brings his treasured bottle of 1961 Cheval Blanc to a fast-food joint. Amid the harsh light and the smell of grease, to the accompaniment of a burger and onion rings, he surreptitiously quaffs his âspecial occasion wineâ from a Styrofoam cup. The wine is still the same wine, and if consumption were always just about the thing being consumed, the level of enjoyment should theoretically be the same. But all the context factors are âoffâ: He is alone, he is eating mediocre food, he does not have a proper glass, the decor is terrible. He is drinking with vengeance, not appreciation.
Context is not just place but time. Your love of breakfast cereals probably does not, in normal circumstances, extend to dinner. Breakfast itself is a rather strange meal, as the Dutch researcher E. P. Köster has observed.The most adventurous gourmands will eat the same thing forbreakfast, day after day. They would hardly contemplate this at dinner. Sheer convenience explains much of it, to be sure, but research suggests there are whole classes of textures that are less liked at breakfast, varying by culture. By the time our after-dinner dessert rolls around, we are hungry for variety. It is as if we wake up less primed to desire novelty, our threshold for excitement slowly ramping up as the day progresses.
Back at the Warfighter Café, I contemplated the spread before me. How did
every day
. âWould it be so terrible,â he wondered, âto eat only Indian food, whether at home or in restaurants, every day for a week?â Often, when we think we are tired of something, we may simply be forgetting how much variety we have actually had (in a phenomenon that has been called âvariety amnesiaâ). Curiously, while one might expect people to tire less quickly of flavorful food, food monotony research at Natick has shown the opposite: The more bland it is, the less quickly soldiers grew tired of it. Bland food, after all, fades from memory more quickly than exciting food. The less you remember having it, the less tired of it you get.
Natick also had to grapple with
where
food was being consumed. The very same food will be rated higher when served in a restaurant versus an institutional cafeteria or a lab. Soldiers in the field face two challenges: Not only are they eating MREs, with their limited variety and entrées of approximate flavor and dubious texture, but they are often eating them in the far-flung, inhospitable environments for which they were designed. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, a group of soldiers (bivouacked on an island in Hawaii) and MIT students (on campus) ate nothing but MREs. The soldiers ate them for thirty-four days straight, the students for forty-five days. Both groups deemed the food âacceptableâ (which did not speak well for MITâs canteen). Both groups lost weight. The students, however, ate more than the soldiers in the field. The experiments showed the importance of
context
on liking. For many reasons, it is more difficult to get people in the field to eat.
Context is no less important in the real world.People eating in an ethnic restaurant with appropriate decor rate the food higher; add some red-checkered tablecloths or a Sergio Leone poster, they eat more pasta. The loudness, and type, of music can affect the way we feel about our food. We eat more when we are in larger groups. The type of glassware, the weight of plates, whether the color of the food matches the color of the plateâeven how long people have to wait for their mealâall have been shown to influence how much we like, and eat, food.
There is a poignant scene in the film
Sideways
in which Miles, the hapless protagonist, in a fit of pique and despair over his dismal life prospects, brings his treasured bottle of 1961 Cheval Blanc to a fast-food joint. Amid the harsh light and the smell of grease, to the accompaniment of a burger and onion rings, he surreptitiously quaffs his âspecial occasion wineâ from a Styrofoam cup. The wine is still the same wine, and if consumption were always just about the thing being consumed, the level of enjoyment should theoretically be the same. But all the context factors are âoffâ: He is alone, he is eating mediocre food, he does not have a proper glass, the decor is terrible. He is drinking with vengeance, not appreciation.
Context is not just place but time. Your love of breakfast cereals probably does not, in normal circumstances, extend to dinner. Breakfast itself is a rather strange meal, as the Dutch researcher E. P. Köster has observed.The most adventurous gourmands will eat the same thing forbreakfast, day after day. They would hardly contemplate this at dinner. Sheer convenience explains much of it, to be sure, but research suggests there are whole classes of textures that are less liked at breakfast, varying by culture. By the time our after-dinner dessert rolls around, we are hungry for variety. It is as if we wake up less primed to desire novelty, our threshold for excitement slowly ramping up as the day progresses.
Back at the Warfighter Café, I contemplated the spread before me. How did
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