Amuse Bouche

“Open wide!” she said, in her most seductive French accent, and so I did. And in it went. In that one moment, in that one movement, and in that one mouthful, I was taken back to the haziest memories of being spoon-fed as a baby (or at least my imagining of what that must have been like). That dish, or rather the way in which it was served, also foreshadowed what my last meals may well be like as the darkness draws in. So, if you want just one example to illustrate how food is so much more than merely a matter of nutrition, then that was it—that mouthful of lime gelée at The Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, many, many years ago. It was an incredibly powerful experience, shocking, disturbing even. But why? Well, I guess in part because no one had fed me that way, at least not in the last forty-five years or so.* Yet there I was, at what was soon to become the world’s top restaurant, being spoon-fed my three-Michelin-starred dinner. Well, one course of it, at least. Just enough to make the point that dining is about much more than merely what we eat.

The pleasures of the table reside in the mind, not in the mouth. Get that straight and it soon becomes clear why cooking, no matter how exquisitely executed, can only take you so far. One needs to understand the role of “the everything else” in order to determine what really makes food and drink so enjoyable, stimulating and, most importantly, memorable. Even something as simple as biting into a fresh ripe peach turns out, on closer inspection, to be an incredibly complex multisensory experience. Just think about it for a moment: your brain has to bind together the aromatic smell, the taste, the texture, the color, the sound as your teeth bite through the juicy flesh, not to mention the furry feeling of the peach fuzz in your hand and mouth. All of these sensory cues, together with our memories, contribute much more than you would believe to the flavor itself. And it all comes together in your brain.

It is the growing awareness that tasting is fundamentally a cerebral activity that is leading some of the world’s top chefs to take a fresh look at the experiences that they deliver to their diners. Just take Denis Martin’s modernist restaurant in Switzerland (see Figure 0.1). The chef realized that some of his guests were not enjoying the food as much as he thought they should, given how much effort he was putting into preparing the dishes. Too often his diners were stiff and buttoned-up—“Suits on account,” as he put it. How could anyone who walked in the door sporting such a sour expression be expected to enjoy his food? The solution was brilliantly simple, and involved putting a cow on each and every table.

Nothing happens at the start of service until one of the diners, curious as to whether what they see before them on the table is a Swiss take on a salt shaker or pepper grinder, picks up their cow. When they tilt it to look underneath, it lets out a mournful moo. Diners often laugh in surprise. Then, within a few moments, the dining room erupts into a chorus of mooing cows, and the restaurant is full of chortling diners. The mood has been lifted and that is when the first course comes out from the kitchen.* This wonderfully intuitive mental palate cleanser is far more effective than any acidic sorbet—the traditional means of cleansing the palate—at enhancing the diners’ enjoyment of the food to come. After all, our mood is one of the most important factors influencing our dining experience, so best try to optimize it.

It turns out that modernist chefs are especially interested in the new sciences of eating (what I will here call gastrophysics), given their habit of recombining ingredients in new and unusual ways, not to mention their desire to play with diners’ expectations. How exactly they are using this emerging knowledge to enhance the experience of eating constitutes the subject matter of this book. Many of the food and drinks companies are also becoming increasingly curious about the science of multisensory flavor perception. The aspirations of the latter, though, tend to be somewhat different from those of the chefs. Their hope is that the new gastrophysics insights may help them to use the so-called “tricks of the mind” in order to reduce some of the unhealthy ingredients in their branded food products without having to compromise on taste.

Figure 0.1. The only item of tableware to greet the expectant diner at Denis Martin’s two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Vevey, Switzerland. But what exactly are you looking at, and why has the chef placed one on each and every table?

Gastrophysics: The new sciences of eating

Many factors influence our experience of food and drink, whether we are eating something as simple as a luscious ripe peach or a fancy dish at one of the world’s top restaurants. However, none of the existing approaches provides a complete answer as to why food tastes the way it does and why we crave some dishes but not others. After all, the focus of modernist cuisine is primarily on food and its preparation—often described as the new science of the kitchen. Sensory science, meanwhile, tells us about people’s perception of the sensory attributes of what they eat and drink in the lab, how sweet the taste, how intense the flavor, how much they like the dish. And then there is neurogastronomy—basically, the study of how the brain processes sensory information relating to flavor. This new discipline helps shed light on the brain networks that are involved when people taste liquidized food pumped into their mouth via a tube while lying flat on their back with their head clamped in a brain scanner. Do I have any volunteers? Interestingly, you now find mention of the diner’s brain on the menu at top restaurants like Mugaritz in San Sebastián in Spain, and at The Fat Duck restaurant in Bray. In fact, many of the science-inspired trends one now sees coursing through restaurants across the globe can be traced back to Bray, where Heston Blumenthal and his research team, together with their many collaborators, have been pushing the boundaries of what dining could be for more than two decades now.

However, neither modernist cooking nor sensory science nor even neurogastronomy offers a satisfactory explanation as to why our food experiences, be they special occasion or mundane everyday meal, appear to us as they do. What is needed is a new approach to measuring and understanding those factors that influence the responses of real people to real food and drink products, ideally under as naturalistic conditions as possible. Gastrophysics builds on the strengths of a number of disciplines, including experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, sensory science, neurogastronomy, marketing, design and behavioral economics, each subject contributing a part of the story with specific techniques designed to answer particular questions.

As an experimental psychologist, I have always been interested in the senses, and in applying the latest insights from cognitive neuroscience to help improve our everyday experience. While I started out investigating sight and sound, over the years I have been slowly adding more senses to my research. Eventually this led me to the study of flavor, which is, after all, one of the most multisensory of our experiences. Given that my parents never went to school (they were constantly moving around the country, as they grew up on the fairground), I have always had a clear sense that research findings need ultimately to have real-world application. In 1997, I started my lab, the Crossmodal Research Laboratory, which is nowadays funded largely by the food and beverage industry. There are psychologists, obviously, but also marketers, the occasional product designer, musicians, and we even have a Chef in Residence. (Guess who has the tastiest lab parties in Oxford!) I have also been lucky enough to work with leading chefs, mixologists and baristas, and for my tastes the most exciting gastrophysics research lies at the intersection of these three areas—the food and beverage industry, the culinary experience designers and the gastrophysicists. I believe that gastrophysics research will come to play a dominant role in understanding and improving all of our food and drink experiences in the years to come.

What is “gastrophysics”?

Gastrophysics can be defined as the scientific study of those factors that influence our multisensory experience while tasting food and drink. The term itself comes from the merging of “gastronomy” and “psychophysics”: gastronomy here emphasizes the fine culinary experiences that are the source of inspiration for much of the research in this area, while psychophysics references the scientific study of perception. Psychophysicists like to treat the human observer much like a machine. By systematically observing how people respond to carefully calibrated sets of sensory inputs, the psychophysicist hopes to measure what their participants (or observers) perceive, and then to figure out what really matters in terms of influencing people’s behavior.

Generally speaking, gastrophysicists aren’t interested in simply asking people what they think. Better to focus on what people actually do, and how they respond to specific targeted questions and ratings scales, such as: How sweet is the dessert (give me a number from 1 to 7)? How much did you enjoy the food? How much would you pay for a dish like the one you have just eaten? They tend to be skeptical of much of what people say in unconstrained free report, given the many examples where people have been documented to say one thing but to do another (see “The Atmospheric Meal” chapter for some great examples of this).

Importantly, the findings of the gastrophysics research do not apply only to high-end food and beverage offerings. If they did, they would still be interesting, certainly, but perhaps just not all that relevant in the grand scheme of things. How often do most of us get to dine at a Michelin-starred restaurant anyway? But many of the modernist chefs are incredibly creative. What is more, they have the authority and capacity to instigate change. If they are intrigued by the latest findings from the gastrophysics lab, they can probably figure out a way of putting a dish inspired by the new science on the menu next week. The large food and beverage companies, by contrast, often find it harder to engage in rapid, not to mention radical, innovation, much though they would like to. In the food industry, everything just tends to happen at a much slower pace!

In the best-case scenario, some of the most inventive ideas first trialed in the modernist restaurant provide genuine insights that can subsequently be used to enhance the experience of whatever we might be eating or drinking, whether we are on an airplane or in the hospital, at home or in a chain restaurant. The multisensory dishes and experiences first dreamed up in some of these top dining venues provide the proof-of-principle support that gives others the confidence to innovate for the mainstream. So when the collaboration works well, it can lead to emerging gastrophysics insights being turned into amazing food and drink experiences that people really want to talk about and share. Get it right and it can result in dishes that are more sensational, more memorable and possibly healthier than anything that has gone before.

For example, just take the research that we conducted together with Unilever fifteen years ago. We demonstrated that if we boosted the sound of the crunch when people bit into a potato crisp we could enhance their perception of its crunchiness and freshness. Research, I am proud to say, that led to our being awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for Nutrition. This isn’t the same as the Nobel Prize, but a rather more tongue-in-cheek award for science that first makes you laugh, and then makes you think. It was around this time that the chef Heston Blumenthal started coming up to the lab in Oxford, having been introduced by Anthony Blake of the Swiss flavor house Firmenich. As soon as we stuck the headphones on Heston and locked him away in the booth, he got it (see Figure 0.2)!

In fact, when interviewed on a BBC Radio 4 show at the time the chef stated: “I would consider sound as an ingredient available to the chef.” This realization, in turn, provided the original impetus that led to the “Sound of the Sea” seafood dish, at The Fat Duck, which became the signature dish at one of the world’s top restaurants. Other restaurants and brands then started working on adding a sonic element to their dishes, often facilitated by technology.

Figure 0.2. Chef Heston Blumenthal gets to grip with the “sonic chip” in the golden booth at the Crossmodal Research Laboratory in Oxford, c.2004.

Subsequently, we worked together with The Fat Duck Research Kitchen on sonic seasoning—basically, a way of systematically modifying the taste of foods by playing specific kinds of sound or music. These insights eventually made their way on to the menu at The House of Wolf restaurant in north London, courtesy of culinary artist Caroline Hobkinson. Culinary artists are more artist than chef, but use food and food installations to express themselves and their ideas. And it was on the basis of such research that British Airways launched their “Sound Bite” menu in 2014, providing the option of sonic seasoning for their long-haul passengers. More recently still, a number of health authorities have started to research whether they can generate “sweet-sounding” playlists to help, for example, those diabetic patients who need to control their sugar intake—the idea being that if you can “trick” the brain into thinking that the food is sweeter than it actually is, you get better-tasting food without the harmful side effects of consuming too much sugar. From the gastrophysics lab to the modernist restaurant, and on to the mainstream (though I worry that the follow-up studies have yet to be done to check just how long-lasting the effects of music and soundscapes are). And it may be that the direction of travel is reversed, with some of what is already going on in the top restaurants providing the impetus for the basic research back in the lab.

What’s the difference between “crossmodal” and “multisensory”?

Many of the insights of gastrophysics are built on the latest findings coming out of crossmodal and multisensory science. Now, these complex-sounding terms describe the fact that there is much more interplay between our senses than previously thought. While scientists used to think that what we see goes to the visual brain, what we hear to the auditory brain, and so on, it turns out that there are far more connections between the senses than we ever realized. So changing what a person sees can radically alter what they hear, changing what they hear may influence what they feel, and altering what they feel can modify what they taste. Hence the term “crossmodal,” implying that what is going on in one sense influences what we experience in the others (as, for example, when someone puts on some red lighting and suddenly the wine in your black glass tastes sweeter and fruitier).

The term “multisensory,” by contrast, is more often used to explain what happens when, say, I change the sound of the crunch you hear as you bite into a crisp. In the latter case, what you hear and feel are integrated in the brain into a multisensory perception of freshness and crispness, with both senses intrinsic to your experience of one and the same food item. Don’t worry if the distinction sounds like a subtle one—it is. Nevertheless, is just the this sort of thing that gets my academic colleagues fired up.

I would certainly like to take issue with the conceit of one recent BBC TV show (Chef vs Science: The Ultimate Kitchen Challenge) in the U.K., in which chef was set against scientist. Ridiculous, if you ask me. For no matter whether the competition is between Pierre Gagnaire and Hervé This (one of the godfathers of molecular gastronomy), or Michelin-starred MasterChef regular Marcus Wareing versus materials scientist Mark Miodownik, the answer isn’t really in any doubt—stick with the chef. What is much more interesting, at least to me, is how much of a lift the chef, molecular mixologist or barista can get by working together with the gastrophysicist. In the chapters that follow, I hope to convince you that, more often than not, the combination will win out. Not only that but the fruits of this collaboration are starting to percolate down to influence our food and drink experiences no matter where we eat and regardless of what we choose to consume.

Not everyone is happy about what they see happening in the world of gastronomy, though. MasterChef judge William Sitwell, for instance, promised to destroy any square plates you brought to him. He absolutely hates the new fashion in plating. Don’t get me wrong, I understand where he is coming from. There are undoubtedly some practitioners out there who have definitely lost the plot. You know what I mean—when the dish you ordered arrives at the table served in a mini frying pan, atop a plank suspended between a couple of bricks. But let’s be clear about this: the mere fact that some people take things too far does not invalidate the more general claim that our perception of, and our behavior around, food is influenced by the way in which it is plated and what it comes served on. What is particularly exciting to me is that one can take some of the latest trends in plating from the high end of gastronomy and translate them into actionable insights that hold the promise of enhancing the food service offering in, for instance, a hospital setting.

Is cutlery the best way to move the food from plate to mouth?

How much do you really like the idea of sticking something into your mouth that has been inserted into who knows how many other mouths beforehand? Think about it carefully—is a cold, smooth stainless steel knife, fork and/or spoon really the best way to transfer food from table to mouth? Why not eat with your fingers instead? Is it mere coincidence that this is how one of the world’s most popular foods—the burger—is typically eaten? Given what we now know about the workings of the human mouth and the integration of the senses that give rise to multisensory flavor perception, shouldn’t we all think about designing things a little differently, moving forward? Why not give spoons a texture to caress the tongue and lips? After all, the latter are among the body’s most sensitive skin sites (at least of those that are accessible while seated at the dining table).

Figure 0.3. Will the tableware of the future look like this? A selection of utensils created by silversmith Andreas Fabian in collaboration with Franco-Colombian chef Charles Michel, as displayed at the “Cravings” exhibition at London’s Science Museum.

Why not cover the handles of one’s cutlery with fur, much like the Italian Futurists might have done at their tactile dinner parties in the 1930s? We have tried both here in Oxford (see Figure 0.3). There is inertia to change, certainly. But since we have (mostly) accepted such radical innovations to our plateware in recent years, why not do the same with our cutlery? This question holds true no matter whether your implements of choice happen to be Western cutlery or chopsticks. Excitingly, gastrophysicists are now working with cutlery makers, industrial designers and chefs in order to deliver a better offering to the table.

I am convinced that change really is possible in the world of food and drink, and that progress will come at the interface between modernist cuisine, art and design, technology and gastrophysics. Thereafter, the best ideas will be disseminated out to the mainstream by the food and beverage industry. And by chefs . . . and eventually by you.

Testing intuitions

What the gastrophysics research often does, then, is assess people’s intuitions. Typically, the results provide empirical support concerning the relative importance of various different factors that people already suspected were somehow relevant. However, on occasion, the research can turn up a surprise result, one that may, for instance, show that some age-old kitchen folklore is just plain wrong. Let me give you a concrete example to illustrate the point: many chefs are taught in cookery school to place an odd rather than even number of elements on the plate (i.e., serve three scallops or five, rather than four). However, when we tested this practice by showing several thousand people pairs of plates of food and asking them which they preferred (see Figure 0.4 for an example), it really didn’t matter. Instead, people’s choices correlated to the total amount of food that was on the plate. The more food, the better! Of course, even when the gastrophysics research simply backs up people’s intuitions, it can nevertheless help put a monetary value on something, which often aids in decision-making (i.e., is the extra effort/cost of doing things a particular way really worth the effort?).

In the remainder of this introduction, I want to focus on some of the questions that gastrophysicists are currently thinking about, and bringing to the public’s attention. These are some of the key themes that will be discussed in the chapters that follow.

Figure 0.4. Which plate of seared scallops do you prefer? The latest research shows that we care more about how much food there is than whether there happens to be an odd or an even number of elements on the plate.

Just how much influence does the atmosphere really have?

Now, whenever we eat, be it in a dine-in-the-dark or Michelin-starred restaurant, the atmosphere, the sights, the sounds, the smell, even the feel of the chair we happen to be sitting on (not to mention the size and shape of the table itself), all influence our perception and/or our behavior, however subtly. From what we choose to order in the first place to what we think about the taste of the food when it comes, the speed at which we eat and the duration of our stay, the atmosphere affects everything. People will tell you that they were always going to choose what they ordered and to eat and drink as much as they actually did. However, the emerging gastrophysics research shows that this is simply not the case.

In our research with the food and beverage industry, we have been quantifying just how much of an impact the atmosphere really has on people’s ratings of taste, flavor and preference. We found, for example, that people’s ratings of one and the same drink may vary by 20% or more as a function of the sensory backdrop where it is served. No wonder, then, that—as we will see later—top chefs and restaurateurs are increasingly recognizing the importance of such environmental effects. In some cases, they have sought to match the atmosphere to the food they serve, the image that they wish to create or the emotion that they wish to provoke. In the “Airline Food” chapter, for instance, we will take a look at how our growing understanding of the impact of the atmosphere on multisensory taste perception is now enabling some of the world’s most forward-thinking airlines to improve their food offering at 35,000 feet.

Have you heard of off-the-plate dining?

One of the trends that has been sweeping high-end modernist dining in recent years is the growing focus on off-the-plate dining (see “The Experiential Meal”). This term is used to describe the more theatrical, magical, emotional, storytelling elements that one increasingly finds in contemporary haute cuisine. Nowadays, it all seems to be about delivering meaningful, memorable and stimulating multisensory experiences (or journeys); selling “the experience,” the total product and not just the tangible product in Philip Kotler’s marketing terminology. Better still if those experiences also happen to be shareable (e.g., for the millennials on their social media).

And while the tops chefs fight over who should get the credit for first coming up with the idea of multisensory experiential theatrical dining, the irony is that the Italian Futurists were already matching meals to sounds eighty years ago, not to mention adding scents and textures to their dinners, and they were among the first to experiment with miscoloring the foods that they served. We’ll take a closer look at whether modernist cuisine really was invented back in the 1930s in the final chapter (“Back to the Futurists”).

Doesn’t good food speak for itself?

Some commentators, including a few Michelin-starred chefs, dismiss gastrophysics as nothing more than “sensory trickery.” “Good food,” you hear them proclaim oh-so-earnestly, “should speak for itself.” To them, a great meal is all about the local sourcing, the seasonality of the ingredients, the detail and technique in the preparation, and the beautiful cooking. Don’t mess with the food; keep it simple, keep it slow, even. This was certainly the line I heard from Michael Caines MBE, then the Michelin-starred chef at Gidleigh Park in Devon, when I met him in 2015. He’d have you believe that none of this other stuff matters, that the world would—heaven forbid—perhaps be a better place without gastrophysics.

According to the likes of Caines,* the honest chef lets their dishes do the talking. They don’t need to worry about the weight of the cutlery to make their food taste great. And yet I don’t need to go to Gidleigh Park to know that the cutlery will be heavy. There is just no way that any self-respecting chef would ever serve their food with a plastic or aluminum knife and fork. It would spoil the experience! Tell me, am I wrong? And, hold on a minute, let’s take a look at the decor and context. Gidleigh Park just so happens to be a beautiful manor house set in the heart of the Devonshire countryside. I am sure that you don’t need a gastrophysicist to tell you that the chef’s dishes are going to taste better there than if exactly the same food were to be served in a noisy airplane cabin or in a hospital canteen. In other words, you cannot avoid “the everything else,” however much you might wish to.

My point, then, is that wherever food and drink is served, sold or consumed there is always a multisensory atmosphere. And that environment impacts both what we think about what we are tasting and, more importantly, how much we enjoy the experience. Ultimately, there is just no such thing as a neutral context or backdrop. It is time to accept the growing body of gastrophysics evidence demonstrating that the environment, not to mention the plateware, dish-naming, cutlery and so on, all exert an influence over the tasting experience. Once you have got that straight, then surely it makes sense to try and optimize “the everything else,” along with whatever you happen to be serving on the plate. And this holds true no matter what one is trying to achieve, be it a more memorable, a more stimulating or a healthier meal. Or, I suppose, you can simply stick your head in the sand and pretend that none of this other stuff really matters. To me, the choice is clear. (And my advice for those who choose to ignore all that the emerging science of gastrophysics has to offer is to simply make sure that you are serving your food in a fancy venue with your diners holding heavy cutlery!)

So, without further ado, having polished off the amuse bouche (not to mention the naysayers), let’s move on to the first course!