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A growing body of scientific evidence now shows that what people taste when evaluating a wine, and how much they enjoy the experience, can be influenced by the music that happens to be playing at the same time...
This opinion piece takes a critical look at the current state of hospital food, with a focus on the UK’s National Health Service. Some of the unique challenges facing those serving food in this situation are i...
Currently little is known about how the non-edible items associated with eating and drinking (tableware items such as the plates, bowls, cutlery, glasses, bottles, condiment containers, etc.), or even environm...
The last few years have seen a rapid growth of research interest in the study of the role of touch and oral-somatosensation in the experience of eating and drinking. The various ways in which the sense of touc...
A growing body of evidence, both anecdotal and scientifically rigorous, now points to the fact that what people taste when evaluating a wine, not to mention how much they enjoy the experience, can be influence...
Sound is the forgotten flavour sense. You can tell a lot about the texture of a food—think crispy, crunchy, and crackly—from the mastication sounds heard while biting and chewing. The latest techniques from th...
Consumers reliably match a variety of tastes (bitterness, sweetness, and sourness), oral-somatosensory attributes (carbonation, oral texture, and mouth-feel), and flavours to abstract shapes varying in their a...
Wine writers sometimes compare wines to pieces of music, a particular musical style or artist, or even to specific musical parameters. To date, though, it is unclear whether such comparisons merely reflect the...
This review addresses a number of questions around the relation between food and decision-making/social behaviour, including the following: Can food be used as a tool of political persuasion? What role, if any...
We investigated whether consumers’ perception of a café latte beverage would be influenced by the colour (transparent, white or blue) of the mug from which it was drunk.
We report on what may well be the world’s largest multisensory tasting experiment. Over a period of 4 days in May 2014, almost 3,000 people sampled a glass of red wine in a room in which the colour of the ligh...
We report a cross-cultural study designed to investigate whether the type of receptacle in which a coloured beverage is presented influences the colour-flavour associations that consumers make. Participants fr...
For years now, wine writers have been tempted to describe certain wines in terms of musical metaphors and analogies. Until recently, however, it has never been altogether clear how widely shared, and hence mea...
Flavor perception depends not only on the multisensory integration of the sensory inputs associated with the food or drink itself, but also on the multisensory attributes (or atmosphere) of the environment in ...
The majority of the literature on sensory expectations has focused solely on those that are set by the eye, that is, by what we see. However, although we rarely think about it, the sounds we hear prior to tast...
In this article, we highlight some of the various ways in which digital technologies may increasingly come to influence, and possibly even transform, our fine dining experiences (not to mention our everyday in...
A scientific approach to plating needs to be based on perceivers’ responses and anticipate possible cultural and individual differences. It cannot just follow common sense principles, whose validity remain unt...
The new rounded Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate bar has got some consumers irate because they say it tastes sweeter than the original, more rectangular bar. The company says the formulation has not changed. Who...
Have you ever noticed how many people ask for a Bloody Mary or tomato juice from the drinks trolley on airplanes? The air stewards have, and when you ask the people who order, they will tell you that they rare...
It is well known that people serve themselves more, not to mention eat more, when dining from larger bowls and plates than from smaller ones. But what about the other visual qualities of the plateware? Does th...
The majority of researchers agree that olfactory cues play a dominant role in our perception and enjoyment of the taste (or rather flavour) of food and drink. It is no surprise then that in recent years, a var...
With high-end chefs being increasingly considered as artists, gastronomy offers a new domain for our understanding of creativity. As several claims have been made about the link between synaesthesia and creati...
A growing body of scientific research has recently started to demonstrate how both music and soundscapes can influence people’s perception of the taste, flavour, and mouthfeel of food and drink. However, to da...
Professor John Prescott
At a time when a growing number of chefs and innovative food industries are starting to set up their own research kitchens and work with renowned scientists, it is surprising to see that issues related to the ...
Researchers have demonstrated that a variety of visual factors, such as the colour and balance of the elements on a plate, can influence a diner’s perception of, and response to, food. Here, we report on a stu...
Colour is the single most important product-intrinsic sensory cue when it comes to setting people’s expectations regarding the likely taste and flavour of food and drink. To date, a large body of laboratory re...
Many researchers distinguish between two senses of smell—orthonasal (when we inhale or sniff) and retronasal (when volatiles are pulsed out from the back of the nose during eating). Orthonasal olfactory cues a...
Recent evidence has shown that changing the plateware can affect the perceived taste and flavour of food, but very little is known about visual and proprioceptive influences of cutlery on the response of consu...
Noise is currently the second most common complaint amongst restaurant-goers, behind poor service. In fact, over the last decade or two, many restaurants have become so loud that some critics now regularly rep...
We report a study conducted in a realistic dining environment, in which two groups of diners were served the same three-course meal. The presentation of the starter (centred vs. offset plating), the type of cu...
Champagnes (or sparkling wines that are made using the ‘méthode champenoise’) are composed of white and/or red wine grapes. Their relative proportions are thought to contribute to a sparkling wine’s distinctiv...
Nowadays, more and more importance is given to how restaurant dishes are visually presented. With regard to the color of the plate, several recent studies have demonstrated that identical foods served on plate...
We review the evidence suggesting that the bistable/multistable percepts that exist in the so-called higher senses of vision, audition, and touch do not seem to occur in the chemical senses (e.g. taste, aroma,...
There can be little doubt that plating food beautifully is becoming ever more important in the world of high-end cuisine. However, there is a very real danger that all the attention to how a dish looks (or pho...
Shape can play an important role in our perception of food. In this study, the consequences of crossmodal correspondences between shape and taste on the expected and actual experience of eating chocolate were ...
Can basic tastes, such as sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and possibly also umami, be conveyed by means of colour? If so, how should we understand the relationship between colours and tastes: Is it universal or re...
It is frequently asserted that somewhere between 75 and 95 % of what we commonly think of as taste actually comes from the sense of smell. However, empirical evidence in support of such a precise-sounding quan...
We report three online experiments designed to investigate how the visual presentation of a dish influences people’s rating of exactly the same ingredients. For this, participants were visually presented with ...
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