Eating in darkness…

Veronique Greenwood’s article (“Some Restaurants Around the World Offer Dining With a Difference – Guests Eat in Complete Darkness.  How Does This Change the Way We Taste?” 2023, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230411-what-dining-in-the-dark-does-to-your-tastebuds ) really gets you thinking about how vision and lighting affect how we live..

As Greenwood details that a study on dining in darkness “found that without vision to guide them, people can consume much more food than normal without realising it. Some dark diners in the study were given normal portions and some super-sized portions, and after the meal, all diners had a self-serve dessert in a well-lit room. Though the super-sizers ate 36% more calories than the others, they ate just as much dessert and were about as hungry afterwards as the others. That suggests that actually seeing the food before us might feed into our calculations of how hungry we should be. For my part, I eat everything I can scoop up with my fork, the excitement of the chase blunting whatever feedback I might be getting from my stomach.”

Greenwood found that without sight to fall back on she had the opportunity to use her other senses in new and intriguing ways as she ate—all of which reinforces how closely our sensory experiences are intertwined, as discussed in this article (also search “sensory” in our search bar top right on our website)