Unseen Forces – Part 3 – Tastes

Tastes are much more physically present than sounds or smells, something does indeed rest on your tongue and produce a particular sensation, but tasting is what is known as a “chemical” sense, like smelling. Unlike either sounds or smells, tasting is a very close-up sense—you can imagine, maybe quite accurately what a chocolate cake will taste like when you see it on a distant table, although you might be able to smell it and you certainly do see it, but you don’t taste until some of it ends up in your mouth.

How specifically can design influence what foods taste like?

• In loud spaces, such as airplanes, the ability to taste sweet things is compromised while umami tastes are particularly powerful—which may be why your last travel snack didn’t taste the same in the air as it did on the ground when you were making it.
• Foods with more angular forms seem more bitter and curvier ones sweeter. In one study, the same chocolate mix was poured into two different moulds, one with sharp 90-degree corners and one with rounded corners. The chocolate bars from the curvier moulds was pronounced sweeter by study participants and the chocolate from the more angular moulds was categorized as more bitter. Angular shapes are also associated with sour tastes and curved ones with creamy, rich textures.
• Spicy tastes are linked to very spikey forms, like the shapes shown for explosions in cartoons. Want to blast out the taste buds of your next dinner party guests (cause taste is just as malleable as our other senses)? Get some new plates, ones that look like they were made to commemorate the fireworks displays customary on the 4th of July and serve your food on them.
• Food seems sweeter and saltier in spaces that are quiet in quiet conditions, while the reverse was true in loud ones.
• If we like the background soundscape, we rate foods as tasting better.
• Standing reduces our sensory sensitivity, so we don’t eat as much of foods we find pleasant but do consume more of those we find less-than-pleasant.

Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating, by Charles Spence and published by Viking in 2017, is a great source of information on how design can influence tastes.