5. Touch

At a number of the world’s top Michelin-starred restaurants these days, the first three, four or even five courses are all eaten with the fingers. This is happening at Noma in Copenhagen, at Mugaritz in San Sebastián, Spain, and even at The Fat Duck in Bray. Any self-respecting gastrotourist will know what I am talking about. But just think about it for a moment. This would have been unheard of in two- or three-Michelin-starred restaurants even a few years ago. Sure, we probably always eat with our hands while snacking in the car, and we mostly take the bread with our fingers, even in the fanciest of restaurants, and shellfish too for that matter, but to eat other dishes with our fingers? That is something new. And, going one stage further, Mugaritz declared in 2016 that they were no longer going to use traditional cutlery at all.

In this chapter, I want to show you just how important what we feel is to our experience and enjoyment of food and drink. Not only what we feel in our mouths but also what we feel in the hand. Mark my words, dining and drinking are slowly but surely becoming much more tactile activities. And I am not just talking about the increasing range of textures and mouthfeels that you might be exposed to while eating the latest creation of some famous modernist chef or other; rather, I am talking about our total tactile interaction with food and drink. Touch is, after all, both the largest and earliest developing of our senses, with the skin accounting for about 16–18% of body mass. Ignore it at your peril!

Does texture influence taste/flavor?

The answer is a very definite yes, although this is a hard subject to study empirically, as it is difficult to manipulate the sensory cues independently. So, for example, increasing the viscosity of a liquid will reduce the number of volatile aroma molecules released from the drink’s surface. So while you may be certain that the oral-somatosensory properties of a food or drink (basically the mouthfeel) will affect the taste/flavor of food and drink, determining the cause of that interaction can be a little harder to discern.

Not so long ago, though, sensory scientists finally managed to figure out a way of varying texture and aroma independently. Specifically, they delivered the latter by means of a tube placed into the mouth of their unfortunate subjects and were able to demonstrate that the addition of certain fatty aromas modified the “mouthfeel,” and perceived thickness, of liquids. On the other hand, increasing the oral viscosity of the liquid in the mouth (just think about the different mouthfeel associated with cream versus water) also affected the perceived aroma/flavor. This is true even when the aroma is delivered via a tube, and so one can be sure that the aroma release hasn’t changed as a result of the change in viscosity.

Why not try eating something like a strawberry or a cookie, or whatever you have at hand? Ask yourself where the taste/flavor originates. The answer, most likely, is that it appears to come from the food that you can feel moving around in your mouth. Am I right? However, as a food breaks down and is transported around the oral cavity via the saliva as a result of chewing (what my colleagues like to call mastication), you are probably tasting with all your mouth—and every time you swallow, with your nose too (via the retronasal olfactory route). Your brain does an amazing job of putting all of these sensory cues back together again and associating them in your mind with their presumed source, i.e., the food you feel in your mouth. Such a good job, normally, that we rarely, if ever, stop to think twice about it.

When you watch a film at the cinema, your brain ventriloquizes the voices from the loudspeakers located around the auditorium so that they appear to be coming from the lips that you see moving on the screen. Much the same thing happens whenever we eat and drink. The simplest way to illustrate this phenomenon is to take a teaspoon of a salty or sweet solution into your mouth and then run a tasteless Q-tip across your tongue. You should feel the taste coming from the tactile stimulus moving across your tongue, despite the fact that the swab itself has no taste. What this shows is how tactile stimulation in the mouth “captures” where we perceive taste to originate from. In fact, knowing that the brain does this has allowed us (in some of our more bizarre research) to mislocalize taste out of the mouth and on to a butcher’s tongue (or a rubber imitation of a human tongue)! Some people are convinced that they can taste what they see being applied (e.g., a drop of lemon juice) to a fake tongue outside of their body when, in fact, what is dropped on to their own tongue is water.

“Oral referral” describes the phenomenon of experiencing food attributes like fruitiness, meatiness and smokiness in the mouth, rather than in the nose, where such aromas are first sensed. For more than a century, it was thought that the tactile stimulation experienced in the mouth while eating and drinking explained the oral referral of odors to the mouth. However, this turns out not to be the case. The fact that the multisensory integration of flavor cues occurs so effortlessly, and so automatically, shouldn’t hide how incredibly complex it all is. So, in response to the question: “Can you feel the taste?,” the answer is: “No.” That said, what we feel, in the mouth or out, most certainly does affect both the taste and flavor of what we eat and drink.

Marinetti’s tactile dinner party

F. T. Marinetti, the founding father of the Italian Futurists, had a great interest in touch. He produced a tactile manifesto called Il tattilismo in 1921 and organized the very first tactile dinner parties back in the 1930s. Unfortunately, however, there was just one problem: the Futurists couldn’t cook. They were dismissed as “a fart from the kitchen” by the Italian press. Their approach to cuisine was never meant to last (their questionable political views didn’t help their cause much either). No wonder, then, that they disappeared without trace in the 1940s. Though, as we will see later in this chapter, contemporary chefs and culinary artists are starting to revive a number of Marinetti’s marvelously mad ideas about experience design (forget the food), with some surprising results.

Not being able to cook certainly didn’t stop the Futurists from throwing some of the most influential dinner parties. According to a description of one such dinner, the meals were to be eaten to the accompaniment of perfumes which were to be sprayed over the diners, who, holding their fork in their dominant hand, would stroke with the other some suitable substance—velvet, silk or emery paper. So, if you want to give your dinner guests the full Marinetti experience, insist that they turn up wearing pajamas made of different materials, such as velvet or silk. Then, when the food is placed on the table, encourage them to eat with some kind of textured implement, while feeling their next-door neighbor’s jim-jams with their other hand! And, if that seems a tad risqué for the suburbs, I have a couple of more modest solutions that all you budding Futurists out there could try instead.

You could, for instance, take inspiration from London chef Jozef Youssef, of Kitchen Theory. He served a dish entitled “Marinetti’s Vegetable Patch” as part of his sell-out “Synaesthesia” dining events in 2015. There were various different textures on the plate itself. But there were also a number of black cubes (designed to fit in the hand) scattered across the dining table, each surface, or opposing pair of surfaces, of which was covered with a different material: Velcro, velvet, sandpaper, that sort of thing. The diners were encouraged to taste the various elements of the dish while feeling the textured cubes. They were instructed to look out for any correspondence between what they were feeling in their hands and the textures in their mouths. Now, it has to be said, some people had no idea what was going on. This certainly wasn’t one of those dishes/experiments that works on absolutely everyone. But there were some diners (roughly a third, I’d say) who volunteered that their experience of the food had been altered by changing the surface they touched. Weird, almost synaesthetic, some would say. So maybe the Futurists were on to something after all!

Together with Professor Barry Smith of the University of London, we do something very similar when we run tutored multisensory wine-tastings. We get a selection of swatches cut from different materials and hand them out to everyone. We then serve a couple of reds and have people rate how well the different textures go with each of the different wines. This is something so simple, and yet it intrigues many people. And it is something that anyone can try at home. Why not try it yourself next time you open a bottle with some friends? It will, at the very least, get your guests to pay a little more attention to the tasting experience. It may also help to explain why all those adverts for red wine invoke textural metaphors: velvety, silky, and so on.

Is the first taste really with the hands?

In many parts of the world—think Africa, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent—people mostly eat with their hands. However, in the restaurant setting, especially in Westernized countries, we nearly always eat with the aid of cutlery, be it cold, smooth knife and fork in the West or chopsticks in the East. And whenever we drink, we always pick up the cup, glass, can or bottle first.* In a very real sense, then, the first taste is with the hands. According to sensory scientists and flavor chemists, the feel of the cutlery or drinking vessel shouldn’t exert any influence over the taste of the food and drink. Nor should it really affect how much you enjoy the tasting experience. After all, everyone—chefs, food critics and regular consumers alike—thinks that we can simply ignore “the everything else” and concentrate squarely on the taste of the food on our plate, or the flavor of the drink in our glass. But we cannot! By this stage of the book, I hope you are convinced that “the everything else” really does matter. And what we feel is no different. In truth, it has more of an influence on our experience of food and drink than many of us would credit, or even, perhaps, be willing to believe.

A growing body of research from the emerging field of gastrophysics now demonstrates how what we feel really can influence our tasting experiences. Some of the world’s top chefs, molecular mixologists, culinary artists and even packaging and cutlery designers are starting to pay much closer attention to what we feel when we eat and drink. They are playing around with changing everything from the texture and weight, through to the temperature and firmness of whatever it is that we happen to be holding in the hand while consuming. And take note: they are not stopping at the hands! The most creative experience designers out there are also thinking about how best to stimulate your lips, and even your tongue, more effectively.

Do you really like the feel of cold smooth metal?

We did not evolve to find the cold smoothness of stainless steel or silver cutlery particularly appealing to the touch. Rather, we were always meant to eat with our hands. So why are so many of our interactions with food mediated by metal cutlery? As top interior designer Isla Crawford once put it: “Surfaces made from natural materials are often preferable, as irregularity is far more sensual than clinically perfect surfaces.” To my way of thinking, it’s bizarre: so many of the world’s top chefs are doing such amazing things on the plate (assuming there is a plate—not always guaranteed these days), expressing culinary genius and creativity in ways we have never seen, nor could even have imagined back in the 1970s. And yet those self-same chefs have their diners eat with the traditional combination of knife, fork and spoon. It really isn’t very imaginative now, is it?

There are, after all, few other objects that you would put in your mouth after they had already been in who knows how many other people’s mouths beforehand. How would you feel if I suggested you use someone else’s toothbrush? So what, exactly, is so different about cutlery?

In the years to come, I believe, we are going to see some radical innovation in the way in which we move food from plate or bowl to mouth. I hope that open-minded cutlery makers out there will take the scientific insights about the receptor profile of the average human mouth, and all the latest gastrophysics research, and translate this knowledge into aesthetically pleasing cutlery designs that will enhance our tasting experiences. The likelihood is that the results of their labors will first be found within the confines of the modernist restaurant. And from there, signature cutlery will slowly start to appear in the marketplace, perhaps under the brand name of one top chef or another.

Would you enjoy eating with a textured spoon?

So, to get us started on this tactile journey, take the example shown in Figure 5.1. How do you think your experience would be if you ate something with the aid of one of these spectacular-looking utensils? More memorable, probably. More stimulating, absolutely.

Unfortunately, the spoon shown in Figure 5.1 is one of a kind. I very much doubt that you will find this designer’s work for sale on Amazon any time soon. A shame, really, given how boring the texture of most cutlery is currently. But at least one mainstream cutlery manufacturer has recently brought out a commercial range of sensorial spoons with added textural interest (see Figure 5.2). These four textured spoons caress your tongue in unusual ways, but we are still researching, together with chef Jozef Youssef and the top cutlery designer William Welch, into whether any of the spoons do an especially good job of enhancing a specific taste, flavor or texture of food.

Figure 5.1. “Tableware as sensorial stimuli cutlery” from the wonderful designer Jinhyun Jeon.

Figure 5.2. A set of four textured spoons from Studio William.

For those of you who haven’t yet acquired your own set of sensorial spoons, there are nevertheless some very simple ways to stimulate your guest’s tongues more effectively without having to invest in a whole new set of cutlery. Next time you invite them round for dinner, why not surprise them? Wet some spoons in lemon juice (best not try this with the silver ones, though, if you don’t want to get into trouble). Next, dip them into something crystalline or gritty, like sugar or a little ground coffee, say, and allow them time to dry. Then, just before you are about to serve, place a dollop of something tasty on top and hand them to your guests. This, anyway, is the technique that some of my culinary artist friends, like Caroline Hobkinson, use to tickle their guests’ tongues in ways that they might not have been stimulated previously. Even top restaurants have used this approach, for example, Alinea’s “Osetra” dish. At the very least, the unusual texture will surprise the diner and hence make them a little more mindful about what they are eating.

Another way in which to alter your guests’ experience of their food is to change the material properties of the cutlery itself. One cheap solution here involves laying the table with some wooden picnic cutlery rather than your normal knives and forks—it’ll probably save on the washing-up too! But bear in mind how one diner responded when Noma, currently one of the world’s top restaurants, tried something similar. They introduced some high-end wooden utensils into the service at their restaurant in Copenhagen (see Figure 5.3). While I have not yet had the opportunity to try them for myself, one colleague who visited the restaurant in 2015 was certainly disappointed. As she wrote to me after her return: “It was like eating with a spork from a takeaway.” It would be really interesting to conduct the appropriate study in a restaurant setting, to see whether this response would be true more generally.

Figure 5.3. High-end wooden cutlery, as served at Noma in Copenhagen. An unusual texture, yes, but too light for some.

Weight, what is it good for?

I cannot emphasize enough just how important weight is to the design of cutlery. You definitely want it to have a good heft in the hand, not to mention the right balance between one end and the other. One of the first things I noticed at Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck restaurant was how heavy the cutlery is (really hefty pieces, made from wood and steel, in the French Laguiole style).* The cutlery maker William Welch (the designer of the textured spoons we saw in Figure 5.2) knows intuitively that making sure his cutlery feels good in the hand is really important. As important, he told me, for most people as its looks.

In contrast, it is amazing to me how many young chefs skimp on their cutlery. It is understandable, of course. Imagine some Young Turks opening their first gastropub out in the countryside somewhere. They have poured their life savings into the endeavor, and are likely to be running short of cash when they open. Heavy cutlery might seem like more of a luxury than a necessity, right? But if they cut that corner, they’ll end up serving beautifully prepared food to be eaten with what feels like light canteen cutlery. It really detracts from the overall experience, as I am sure you’d intuitively agree. But what does the gastrophysics research say?

Given the differing priorities out there, it was obviously time for the gastrophysicist to step in and conduct an appropriate study. Of course, our first job was to check the scientific journals to see what had already been done. The really surprising thing was that the literature was pretty much silent on the topic (i.e., on the impact of cutlery on the experience of food and drink). How could something so fundamental have been ignored for so long? So, in our own research, we wanted to determine once and for all just how important the weight of cutlery in the hand really is to the experience of food in the mouth (or mind). We had already conducted a series of studies here at the Crossmodal Research Laboratory, demonstrating that if people tasted food with a heavier spoon they generally had better things to say about it than when exactly the same food was eaten with a lighter spoon instead. But evaluating store-bought yogurt from a heavy plastic spoon in the lab is a long way from the setting of a high-end restaurant. Would the same results also apply there?

In many of our highly controlled laboratory experiments, the same people taste putatively different foods with spoons varying markedly in terms of their weight. One of the benefits of using the same participants is that we can be sure that the results we obtain are due to our experimental manipulation and not to individual differences between people. However, on the negative side, it’s possible that the format of our studies might have focused the participants’ attention unnaturally on weight. Imagine yourself being asked to taste food over and over again, for up to an hour, when the most salient thing that varies is the weight of the cutlery that you are given to use. With nothing else to occupy your mind, there is a very real danger that the cutlery’s weight might capture your attention, and hence influence your behavior, in a way that it simply wouldn’t do in a restaurant, say.

Given such concerns (which, it should be said, apply to much laboratory-based research), I was looking out for an appropriate opportunity to test the cutlery idea out in the wild. Of course, I would love to carry out a study with the diners holding that oh-so-heavy cutlery in The Fat Duck. But that is just never going to happen. Why not? Well, which funding body would agree to pick up the tab for all my subjects (yes, those well-fed guinea pigs) at the end of the night? Currently the price at the restaurant is nearly £300 a head, and that’s before wine or service.

Luckily enough, though, at around this time, I was invited to give a talk at an International Egg Confederation conference. The organizers wondered whether I would mind awfully running a three-course experimental lunch for the delegates, so that they could get an idea of what real gastrophysics research was like. I couldn’t believe my luck! They had just offered me the perfect opportunity to test out the theory that weight in the hand really does matter to our enjoyment of food in the mouth. It was the moment that I had been waiting for. But would the experiment actually work, out there in an ecologically valid testing situation?

Imagine the scene: 150 international conference delegates in a swanky hotel restaurant somewhere in the center of Edinburgh. The diners were randomly dispersed across different tables. There was a scorecard by each place setting and pencils on the tables so that the diners could record their responses. They were asked how much they liked the food, how artistically they thought it had been plated, and how much they would have been willing to pay for the dish in a restaurant like the one they happened to be sitting in. While the conference delegates were very much aware of the fact that they were taking part in an experiment, they didn’t know what the specific research questions being addressed with each dish were. For the main course, a piece of Loch Etive salmon, the service staff had laid light canteen cutlery at half of the tables, and heavy, expensive cutlery at the rest.* But still, we weren’t asking people about the cutlery; we were only asking them about the food.

The results were unequivocal. Those eating with heavier cutlery thought that their food had been plated more artistically. And crucially, they were willing to pay significantly more for it than those eating the same food, on the same day, in the same dining room, but who just so happened to be holding lighter cutlery instead. So, it really is that straightforward: Adding weight to your guests’ hands will most likely make them think that you are a better chef! With that in mind, why not reach into the cutlery drawer right now and feel up some of your own. Are you sure that you are creating the right impression? But you don’t want to take things too far: I have heard rumors of one restaurant where the diners started to complain because the cutlery was just too heavy to lift comfortably.*

Furry cutlery, anyone?

Periodically, we have lab dinner parties at my house here in Oxford. On one such occasion, Charles Michel, the then chef-in-residence, decided to get rabbit from the market and prepare a stew. And it was delicious, I can assure you. But the most memorable thing about the evening, and about that dish in particular, was what the Paul Bocuse-cookery-school-trained chef had done to my wife’s cutlery. He had asked at the butcher’s for the cleaned rabbit pelts, the stuff that normally just gets thrown away. And in a stroke of genius he wrapped them around the handles of the spoon (see Figure 5.4, left). In an instant, the cutlery became a truly multisensory dining implement—F. T. Marinetti would have been proud! Sitting around the dining table, we all tentatively held the soft, furry skin in our “paws,” the faint aroma of the animal emanating from our hands. There was no doubt—straight away everyone had a much greater awareness of where our dinner had really come from (see Figure 5.4, right, for another famous example).

Figure 5.4. Left: Furry cutlery à la Charles Michel. Best served with rabbit. Right: Meret Oppenheim’s 1936 Object, a fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon. How would you feel about putting the cup to your lip to drink? This art piece was deeply subversive at the time, given its sexual connotations. There is just something about fur that you don’t want coming too close to your lips. One can only imagine what Freud would have to say on the matter!*

Imagine my surprise, then, when just a few months later the overweight furry white spoon shown in Figure 5.5 greeted me when I got to the last course of The Fat Duck’s revamped tasting menu. Now, I am not sure that this spoon was necessarily the ideal choice. The dish itself is all white, light and airy. So I could imagine a surprisingly light spoon working well here. Instead, what you get is a spoon that is noticeably heavier than you thought it was going to be. (The distinctive baby-powder aroma of heliotropin originates from the handle.) Though perhaps that is the idea: to create even more of a contrast with what you might have expected that you were going to feel. Diners may come away from the experience thinking a little more carefully about the weight of the cutlery, and the influence that it may have on their experience of food.

However, while you want the cutlery to enhance the taste of the food, you don’t necessarily want it to become the center of attention, to distract the diner from whatever they are eating. There is, I think, a very real danger of this happening with the “Counting Sheep” dish. At least there would be if it weren’t for the fact that your dessert is actually spinning on a pillow that is magically floating in mid-air! Yes, really: magnetic levitation, the likes of which you have probably never seen (unless, that is, you have stopped in at the Artesian bar at The Langham Hotel in London, where a cocktail with a balloon floating over it has been on the menu for a couple of years now). This, then, is the aim of much of the research from my lab: to figure out how to use the latest insights from gastrophysics to create better, more memorable tasting experiences.

Figure 5.5. “Counting Sheep,” the final dish on the tasting menu at The Fat Duck. If you saw a spoon like this, just how heavy would you expect it to be? (It is actually much heavier than that, believe me.)

Eating with your hands

Have you ever thought about the fact that the hamburger, one of the world’s most popular foods, is usually eaten with the hands? I would go so far as to say that it tastes better when grasped between one’s thumbs and forefingers than when eaten daintily with a knife and fork from a plate or plank. The same goes for fish and chips straight from the newspaper at the seaside too (at least it used to, before someone banned newspaper wrapping as unhygienic). Now, I am the first to admit that there is a lot more going on in the latter case to explain the pleasure of the experience than merely using one’s hands. Still, think about it carefully, and it is surprising how many foods really do seem to taste better when eaten like this. No wonder, then, that popular U.S. chef Zakary Pelaccio titled his cookbook Eat With Your Hands. He was very much “on trend.”

And it is not just fast food that people are eating with their fingers nowadays; it is also haute cuisine. For, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, a growing number of top Michelin-starred restaurants have been incorporating dishes that are to be eaten without cutlery, or else with totally new forms of cutlery.* Interestingly, though—and I am still trying to figure out the reason(s) behind this—finger food tends to make its appearance at the start of the meal rather than later on. If any of you have any ideas about quite why this should be so, please do let me know.

Many people write to me saying that, for them, food really does taste better when eaten with the hands. This seems to be especially true for those from India, say, who have grown up using their fingers for this purpose. A number of them report that food just appears to lose its taste whenever they have to eat using cutlery. The following, from the Indian narrator in Yann Martel’s book Life of Pi, illustrates the point: “The first time I went to an Indian restaurant in Canada I used my fingers. The waiter looked at me critically and said, ‘Fresh off the boat, are you?’ I blanched. My fingers, which a second before had been taste buds savoring the food a little ahead of my mouth, became dirty under his gaze. They froze like criminals caught in the act. I didn’t dare lick them. I wiped them guiltily on my napkin. He had no idea how deeply those words wounded me. They were like nails being driven into my flesh. I picked up the knife and fork. I had hardly ever used such instruments. My hands trembled. My sambar lost its taste.”

I have always wanted to compare what people say when eating and rating a range of foods with either their fingers or with a knife and fork, or even chopsticks. Of course, the answer is likely to depend on the food being served and on the context, not to mention on the individual diner and what they are used to, or have grown up with. Nevertheless, there are some intriguing results already out there showing that the food we feel in the hands really does influence our perception in the mouth. For instance, my colleague Michael Barnett-Cowan conducted a study in Canada in which he somehow managed to glue together two half-pretzels with the opposing ends sometimes having the same texture, either both fresh or both stale, and sometimes having different textures. Just imagine the situation: you might be holding a stale pretzel in your hand but munching on a soft one, or vice versa. The results revealed that the feel of the food in the hand really did influence what people had to say about their in-mouth experience.

Once again, this is a simple change that any one of us could try out the next time that we invite some friends round to eat: withhold the cutlery. A few of you readers may be worrying what Debrett’s Guide to Etiquette would have to say on the subject. Good news: the 2012 version of the guide finally acknowledged that finger food was acceptable in polite society, at least for certain foods such as pizza, calzone and ice-cream cones. Whatever you do, though, be sure not to lick your fingers afterward!

And finally, eating with the hands can also be a good idea on a first date, at least if you believe the results of a survey of 2,000 people reported in the papers recently. Men apparently find women making a mess while eating with their hands a big turn-on. So now you know! (And if you are a man hoping to make a good first impression on the ladies, the top tip was to make sure not to order a salad for your main course.)

How much would you enjoy food moving in your mouth?

My colleague Sam Bompas describes a dinner he attended in Korea where the tentacles of a live squid were cut directly on to his plate. His hosts earnestly recommended that Sam chew vigorously in order to prevent the still-squirming suckers from sticking to his throat on the way down! Disgusting, right? So it is ironic, then, that while our visual attention is undoubtedly drawn to food in motion (see the “Sight” chapter), once that food enters the oral cavity, movement is the last thing we want. This deep-seated aversion to things wiggling around in our mouths (and worse still, in our throats) was presumably partly what caused such a stir when Noma served live ants a few years back. (The entomophagy angle not helping much here either.)

It was also the thought of movement in the mouth that made everyone so squeamish when I was at school in Canada for a year, a long, long time ago. The prefects there challenged themselves to eat a live goldfish fresh from the bowl every time the home ice-hockey team scored (which was, thankfully, pretty rare).

Evolutionarily speaking, this dislike of movement in the mouth is probably an old mechanism that helped our ancestors to avoid the risk of choking.* That said, note how the language of menus often tries to give the impression that there is still life in whatever is being served. There’s a great line in Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s TV series The Trip where, after a dish is introduced as “resting” by the waiter, Rob Brydon points out: “Rather optimistic to say they’re resting. Their days of resting have been and gone. They are dead.” True, but “dead” just feels like a word that should never appear on a menu.

More generally, the texture of food in the mouth (even when it is not moving) seems to be a particularly strong driver of our food likes and dislikes. So, for example, many Asian consumers find the texture of rice pudding to be more off-putting than its taste (or flavor). By contrast, for the Westerner breakfasting in Japan, fermented black natto has a texture and consistency that won’t soon be forgotten. And take the oyster—it’s this shellfish’s slippery, slimy texture, not its taste or flavor, that people typically find so objectionable, many agreeing with the late British food critic A. A. Gill’s memorable description of them as “sea-snot on a half-shell.”

Of course, the textural (oral-somatosensory) properties can also constitute a key part of what we find so pleasing about the foods that we love. Indeed, a number of researchers have argued that this is a key part of the appeal of chocolate, one of the few foods to melt at mouth temperature. (Try eating a very cold versus a warm piece of chocolate to experience this difference.) Texture, then, plays a crucial role in determining our perception of a food’s quality, its acceptability and ultimately our food and beverage preferences. Just think about it: comfort foods typically have a soft texture (e.g., mashed potatoes, apple sauce and many puddings). In fact, it has been argued that foods having this texture tend to be thought of as both comforting and nurturing. By contrast, many snack foods are crispy, like chips and pretzels. Texture contrast is something that many chefs and food developers work with and, more generally, it is known to be something that consumers value in food. As Barb Stuckey puts it in her book Taste What You’re Missing: “Good chefs go to great lengths to add texture contrast to their plates, utilizing four different approaches: within a meal, on the plate, within a complex food, and within a simple food.”

What’s so special about bowl food?

Hard though it is to believe, five—yes five—books were published on the subject of bowl food in 2016. Why, you have to ask yourself, should serving food in a bowl matter? Well, apparently the main appeal is that it makes everything taste better. Even Gwyneth Paltrow thinks so. So it must be true. Of course, it isn’t just about serving the same old food in a new receptacle. Part of the appeal to the bowl foodies is filling their receptacles with foods that are wholesome, nutritious and, well, filling.

Serving hot food in a bowl allows, maybe even encourages, the diner to take a hearty sniff of the steaming contents. Most of us are less likely to do this if exactly the same food is served on a plate when it is placed on the table in front of us, say. And as we saw earlier, anything that enhances the olfactory hit associated with a dish is likely to lead to improved flavor perception and possibly also increased feelings of satiety. Holding the bowl in your hands means that you feel its weight too. And the evidence here shows that the heavier the bowl, the more satiated (i.e., fuller) you will expect to feel. This is a problem, of course, for the food and beverage companies, who are being advised by government to make their packaging lighter, especially those trying to promote a filling snack (a yogurt, say). Time and again in our research, we find that adding weight to a soft-drink can, to a box of chocolates or to a carton of yogurt leads people to rate the product, no matter what it is, more highly.

Holding a bowl, you feel the warmth of the contents, and possibly the texture and the reassuring roundness of the underside of the bowl. Note here that the texture of plateware has also been shown to modify people’s experience of food. In one of our recent studies, for example, we found that people rated ginger biscuits as tasting significantly more spicy when served from a rough plate than from a more traditional smooth plate. Holding a warm cup or bowl in your hand can even make those around you appear a little friendlier too. And, as if all that wasn’t enough, serving food from bowls without rims can trick our brains into thinking that there is more than when exactly the same amount is served from a bowl with a wide rim. It is supposedly more photogenic too. Ultimately, then, from a gastrophysics perspective, bowl food is indeed likely to work especially well for those looking for a filling, healthy meal.

Affective ventriloquism

But why exactly should what we feel have such an effect on our taste experiences, especially when what we are interacting with is not the food itself? One possible answer relates to the notion of “affective ventriloquism.” My colleague Alberto Gallace and I noted a few years ago that people appear to transfer the affective response generated by whatever they touch to what they think about the food or drink itself. That is, we find it hard to maintain separate impressions of the food or drink on the one hand, and of the cutlery, glassware or plateware on the other. Instead, what we think about one can all too easily bias our judgments about the other.

Given that we consume as much as a third of our food and drink direct from the packaging, it should come as no surprise to hear that product designers and marketers are interested in optimizing the feel of their product packaging. In fact, this may be how most of us will be exposed to the whole new world of tactile design. In some cases, the aim is to prime or convey notions of fruitiness, by treating the packaging surface to give it the same feel. The good old Jif lemon juice container is a classic example. In this case, the product itself imitates the size, color and even feel of a lemon (see Figure 5.6).

However, my absolute favorite comes from the high-end Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa, a fabulous range of hyper-realistic packaging prototypes, e.g., a drinks container that perfectly captures the experience of touching the fruit—which makes the Jif version of a lemon feel cheap by comparison. Amazingly, the designer has perfectly rendered the surface of a banana, of a strawberry and, most impressive of all, the hairy skin of a kiwi fruit.

Figure 5.6. From left to right: Granini glass bottle; hyper-realistic juice drink packaging by Naoto Fukasawa; and Jif lemon juice container. These examples of multisensory packaging probably enhance the consumption experience by mimicking the feel of the fruit they contain.

It is more than fifteen years ago now since we started working with Unilever on exactly this topic. Our idea then was to try to enhance the fruity notes in Lipton peach-flavored iced tea by treating the packaging to give it something of a furry-peach feel. At that time, the solution was just too expensive to be practicable, but—good news for food and beverage companies—giving packaging surfaces a unique and realistic feel is now becoming much cheaper. And I am more convinced than ever, given the research evidence of the intervening years, that getting the feel in the hand right is an important way in which to improve the consumer’s experience of food and drink in the future.

No matter whether it be cutlery, glassware, plates or bowls, the gastrophysics approach is providing the evidence and insights to support the creative tactile designs that are now emerging for the dining table. The most extreme and intriguing examples will come from designers, modernist chefs and molecular mixologists. However, my prediction is that the majority of us will be exposed to this new approach through food and beverage packaging—everything from the textured paint on a Heineken can (brought out in 2010, the special cans were intended to have a “signature” feel) to the silky surface of some high-end boxes of chocolates.