Noise can make foods seem crunchier and taste blander, a new study suggests. Andy Woods who is a researcher at the University of Manchester and also at Unilever ran the study, in which blindfolded participants ate and rated various foods while hearing nothing, quiet white noise, or loud white noise.
From the journal Food Quality and Preference:
The foods were then rated in terms of sweetness, saltiness and liking (Experiment 1) or in terms of overall flavour, crunchiness and liking (Experiment 2). Reported sweetness and saltiness was significantly lower in the loud compared to the quiet sound conditions (Experiment 1), but crunchiness was reported to be more intense (Experiment 2). This suggests that food properties unrelated to sound (sweetness, saltiness) and those conveyed via auditory channels (crunchiness) are differentially affected by background noise. A relationship between ratings of the liking of background noise and ratings of the liking of the food was also found (Experiment 2). We conclude that background sound unrelated to food diminishes gustatory food properties (saltiness, sweetness) which is suggestive of a cross-modal contrasting or attentional effect, whilst enhancing food crunchiness.
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Effect of background noise on food perception"
(ScienceDirect)
"Background noise affects taste of foods, research shows" (BBC)
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aha!
This maybe one reason my gf and I rate eating places by noise level.
At our favorate place we eat at the bar, because oddly, it is way more quiet than the main dinning room.
Why must people shout at others only feet away?
Interesting idea: Could this factor account for some differences in the flavours of traditional foods?
Someone eating in a noisy part of the world (let’s say, outdoor street market in India) might not have the same tastes as someone eating somewhere quieter. (Say, an English person at home in the countryside.)
Spicier foods would appear to come from noisier places, no?
Spicier foods come from hotter places and help to mitigate that heat. I’m also not too sure how many Indians eat in the street markets. I think most of them just shop there.
Sorry, I couldn’t hear what you were saying over this bowl of chilli.
Seriously, is this really news? Does anyone who enjoys food actually like eating it in a noisy environment?
Heston Blumenthal also demonstrated something along these lines in the Kitchen Chemistry series: he attempted to eat custard while listening to the sound of apples being crunched. Apparently the sound triggers some kind of jaw-opening reflex that tells you when to stop biting down while chewing. He found it nearly impossible to eat the custard because he kept trying to chew it.
That episode was really cool. I liked when he ate a potato chip next to a microphone that fed the sound into headphones. He said the texture definitely felt more crisp compared to the chip he ate without sound feedback.
He’s been serving the dish “Sounds of the Sea” at The Fat Duck for years: a fish entree that comes with an ipod and headphones playing the sound of crashing waves and gulls.