Trying to look backward, to the last remembered experience of a meal—if only to make a new choice—invites its own distortions. In one experiment, psychologists were able to change how much people liked something (in this case, a “microwavable Heinz Weight Watchers Tomato & Basil Chicken ready meal”) after they had eaten it—not, as has been done with rats, by physically manipulating their brains. Instead, researchers simply had subjects “rehearse” the “enjoyable aspects” of the meal. This, the idea goes, made those best moments more “accessible” in memory, and thus they popped out more easily when people were later thinking about the meal. Voilà! The food not only suddenly seemed better; the subjects wanted to eat more of it. If you want to like a meal you have just eaten more, talk about why you liked it so much.
At Del Posto, I finally made my choice. This might be the key to liking: the fact that I have chosen it. Where before I might have considered the choices equally valid, the one I have chosen is bathed in a new glow. Already the pork seems better than when it was just one of a number of enticing-sounding entrées. There are a couple of things going on. First, since Leon Festinger’s 1957 theory of “cognitive dissonance,” psychologists have argued that we try to avoid any post-decision choice malaise (What if I really wanted the fish?) by increasing our liking for what we have chosen (Oh, this pasta is divine!) and boosting our disliking for the unpicked alternative, a kind of built-in system to avoid perpetually experiencing buyer’s remorse. This is not always successful: Many is the time I have looked at a companion’s choice in a restaurant and said, “You won.” Buyer’s remorse, it has been argued, happens because we buy something in an “affective” frame of mind (I really want this) and reflect back in a more “cognitive” state (What was I thinking?).
As much as preferences influence choices, choices influence preferences. Even amnesiacs who could not remember making the choice seemed to like what they had chosen more. The same effect, interestingly, has been shown in non-amnesiacs, who might temporarily have forgotten their choices. Even when people were making purely hypothetical choices of vacation destinations, the neuroscientist Tali Sharot and colleagues found, there seemed to be more robust brain activity in subjects when they thought about what they had “chosen” versus what they had “rejected.” In other words, they were already feeling better about the destination they picked and “deflating” that which they had not. In a follow-up study, the team had subjects pick “subliminally” presented vacation destinations. In fact, all they ever “saw” were nonsense phrases. When they next saw their “choice”—a randomly presented location they had actually not seen before—they rated it higher than the alternative they had “rejected.” We seem to have a preference that we prefer our preferences.
You might argue that they were tricked. But consider what may really be going on when you hear the phrase “What would you like?” when asked to select among some range of options. What we are really being asked is, “What do you choose?” The liking often comes afterward. Some even suggest that we are already beginning the “reappraisal process” as we choose—as opposed to rationalizing ex post facto.
When I finally make my pick, something else is probably happening: I think more people would want to pick what I have chosen than actually do. This is the well-known “false consensus effect.” In a study done at the University of Michigan, subjects were asked to rate various combinations of sundae flavors. When students were asked how many other people they thought shared their opinion, more people thought others would agree than disagree, particularly if they liked the flavors. I have my own ice cream example of this. My father-in-law, for years, has been offering me ice cream whenever we have pie at family gatherings, despite my loudly proclaimed aversion to pie à la mode. I have come to think that this is less about his forgetting my preference than his simply reasoning the following: I like pie with ice cream, so Tom probably does too. What’s not to like?
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At Del Posto, the waiter, doing double duty as sommelier, has asked us about the wine list. I mentioned the Friulian red, a 2004 Antico Broilo. He did not, of course, simply say, “It’s good,” or “You’ll like it.” I will talk about experts like sommeliers later. For now, let us simply hear what he had to say. “It’s a bit fuller in body, some notes of pepper; it pairs well with the pork,” he said. “It shows the geography of the place, because you’ve got the Dolomites, and so on the palate you have this minerality coming out. It’s the same latitude as the Bordeaux region, so you have all this herbal quality as well, a little mint, a little sage.” We ordered the Friulian red.
As I took a sip, another fact about liking came into play: What you like something as influences how much you like it. Is it a good wine? Is it a good red wine? Is it a good wine from the refosco grape? Is it a good red wine from Friulia? Is it good for the price? Experts, as we shall see, are able to more finely delineate categories than nonexperts. This categorization, says Zellner, works in several ways. Once you have had a really good wine, she says, “you can’t go back. You wind up comparing all these lesser things to it.” If a bottle of Château Margaux 1990 is your ideal benchmark for red wine, your liking of most other red wines will probably decrease.
Is there a way to still appreciate all of the other wine in the world? Can we find something to like in even the most bog-standard plonk? In studies Zellner has done with beer and coffee, she interviewed people about their drinking of, and liking for, “specialty beer” and “gourmet coffee” versus their “regular” equivalents (for example, Budweiser and Folgers). The ones who tended to put the drinks into categories actually liked the everyday beverages more than the people who simply lumped everything together as “beer” or “coffee.” Their “hedonic contrast” was reduced. In other words, the more they could discriminate what was good about the very good, the more they could enjoy the less good (even if they were enjoying it as the less good). Almost instinctively, you have no doubt said something like “It’s not bad, for fast food.” You are not only limiting the scope of what you are judging it against; you have arguably freed yourself to enjoy the experience more—or at least to lessen your discontent.
It was on to the food itself. As has become standard in fine-dining restaurants, a meal at Del Posto begins with a set of amuse-bouches, French for “mouth amusers.” The name is well chosen. “Just having a little something in your mouth releases insulin, which causes the glucose in your bloodstream to be taken up by cells,” Zellner said. “That signals hunger. So if you just have one little thing, you become even more hungry than you were to begin with.” It’s been dubbed the “appetizer effect.” A more palatable opening course, evidence suggests, might actually increase our appetite—even how fast we eat. We eat to remind ourselves how hungry we were.
There is, however, a flip side to this initial burst of joy. What many may overlook in the moment is the tragic irony of food pleasure: As we eat something, we begin to like it less. From a heady peak of lustful wanting (“Oh my God!”), we slide into a slow despond of dimming affection (“This is good,” you say, half convincing yourself), hovering around a plateau of ambivalence (“save room for dessert!”), then into a slow, fraught decline (“I really shouldn’t have another,” you say, nervously laughing), before finally slouching into a bout of revulsion (“Get this away from me,” you say, pushing away a once-loved plate).*
The peak of our sudden disliking seems to occur a few minutes after we have eaten something. In the phenomenon known as “sensory-specific satiety,” the body in essence sends signals when it has had enough of a certain food. It is not simply that we are “getting full”; it is that we are getting full of that particular food. “The pleasantness of foods which have been eaten,” as one seminal study noted, “declines more than the pleasantness of foods which have not been eaten.” Simply having food in the mouth, without swallowing, lowers that pleasantness. In monkeys, the mere sight of a kind of food they had already consumed excited neurons less than food that had not been eate
n.
The presence of variety stimulates not only minds but also appetites. Some studies have seen subjects eating up to 40 percent more food when there was variety. Scientists have speculated that “sensory-specific satiety” is a kind of evolutionary advantageous mechanism to help us eat a nutritionally varied diet. It lurks behind our choices. On weekend mornings, you may enjoy a leisurely family breakfast of carb-heavy, syrup-drenched pancakes. By lunch, you probably desire something more savory, less bread-like. In some abstract way, you still like pancakes as much as ever—just not in that moment. It is as if we have little hedonic thermostats inside us, always readjusting based on our bodies’ needs. In the famous experiments of the food researcher Clara Davis in the 1920s and 1930s, postweaning infants in a state hospital were free to pick what they wanted (“a self-selective feeding method”) from a tray of options that were generally healthy, if very much of their time (“brains,” “bone jelly”). It was less “free range” parenting than trying to solve the common problem of infants not eating “doctor-prescribed diets.” Her report, severely lacking data, was nonetheless emphatic: “There were no failures of infants to manage their own diets; all had hearty appetites; all throve.”
Liking is stable but temporal, even as we eat. Do you savor the last few milk-sodden flakes you fish out of a bowl of once-crispy cereal as much as you enjoyed the first few bites? You may like the burst of intense cinnamon you get in an Altoids mint, but what if the taste still lingered a few minutes later? Sensory-specific satiety is one reason that we break meals into courses (and we seem to prefer some optimal mix of three food items and three colors on a plate): Once you have had the mixed greens, you are not going to like or want more mixed greens. But pork is a different story.
Curiously, sensory-specific satiety is not triggered simply by taste. When people were offered differently colored Smarties candies, they said they liked the taste of the colors they had not consumed more than those they had eaten. In a potato chip study, Ruffles—with their prominent ridges—seemed to trigger satiety faster than other varieties. Along with similar findings for baguettes, this suggests we “tire” more quickly of things that are actually harder to eat. In the so-called ice cream effect, the food scientists Robert Hyde and Steven Witherly have argued that ice cream is so pleasurable because its texture, temperature, and other sensory properties change as we eat it. It thus ping-pongs among different sources of pleasure, in essence buying a bit more time in our mouth before satiety arrives to spoil the party.
Speaking of ice cream, it is suddenly time at Del Posto for dessert. Sated as we are, we are suddenly faced with a whole new range of flavors and sensations. So different are these from what has come before that we always seem to have “room for dessert.” We are also falling under the spell of the so-called dessert effect. When we eat dessert—or whatever other flavors come at the very end of a meal—we are beginning to get the “post-ingestive” nutritional benefits of the food we have eaten earlier in the meal. Sure, that chocolate tastes good, but it may be the vegetables that are making you feel so satisfied (if we ate dessert at the beginning of a meal, it would not be nearly as exciting). Because things begin to taste less good to us the more full we are, Zellner suggests, “at the end, you really have to have something that tastes good, so you go for the desserts, which are over the top.” Death by Chocolate never kills us.
In the end, memory blurs it all. Curiously, studies by Rozin suggest that the pleasure we remember from a meal has little to do with how much we consumed or how long we spent doing it. It is called “duration neglect.” “A few bites of a favorite dish in a meal,” he writes, “may do the full job for memory.” Or, as he told me in Philadelphia, “when you double the size of the favorite food, it doesn’t have any effect on how much you like the meal.” Score one for the “small plates” movement. Our memory for meals, according to Rozin’s research, seems less beholden to well-known phenomena like “end” or “peak” effects—in which people remember the most recent or intense moments of an experience. In other words, we do not necessarily like a meal more when we eat our favorite part of it last. Rozin thinks “beginnings” in general are underrated, and indeed studies of “dynamic liking” in food sometimes find pleasure to be higher in the first few bites than in the last. But I have had enough of this thinking ahead to my remembered pleasure, when so much is sitting on the plate in front of me.
BETTER THAN I EXPECTED IT TO BE, BUT NOT AS GOOD AS I REMEMBER
We go to a good restaurant expecting to have a good meal. But another way to think about what food we like, and why, is to think about food that we are expected to not like.
I am talking here about the military rations arrayed before me on a camouflage tablecloth in the “Warfighter Café,” located inside the U.S. Army’s Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Massachusetts, where I have traveled to understand the challenges of making a much-disliked food—the MRE, or meals ready to eat—more likable. Natick, as it is generally dubbed, a sprawling collection of low-slung 1960s-era institutional buildings, is home to camouflage laboratories, wind and rain tunnels, and drop towers. It also hosts the Combat Feeding Directorate of the Department of Defense (DOD). “Coming soon to a theater near you!” announced the trademarked slogan above a list of menu items. My hosts, Gerald Darsch and Kathy Evangelos, spearhead the DOD’s Combat Feeding Directorate. “You put diesel in to fuel a tank,” Darsch said. “Our job is fueling the war fighter.”
The most startling thing about the spread before me—from trans-fat-free vanilla pound cake to herb focaccia to “caffeinated meat sticks”—is that I could return to this room in three years and eat the same meal. I mean the same meal.
“The MRE requires a minimum shelf life of three years,” Darsch told me. It has its own special constraints. “Kraft doesn’t have to worry about air-dropping their food.” An incredible amount of engineering goes into ensuring that the food, and its package, will survive rough handling; sandwiches get MRI scans at a local hospital to make sure too much moisture—and thus mold—isn’t moving through them. It is an old challenge. One new technology pioneered at Natick—“pressure-assisted thermal sterilization”—has its origins in the “retorting” process developed by the Paris chef Nicolas Appert, who responded to a call from Napoleon to improve food preservation techniques. “Napoleon was losing more soldiers to malnutrition and food poisoning,” Darsch said, “than to adversaries’ bullets.”
For all the technology that goes into ensuring the food’s survivability—“this is like the Willy Wonka factory for combat feeding,” Evangelos joked—an even more important issue is ensuring the food’s palatability, or “acceptability,” as it is called here. This is the barest threshold of liking: You agree to put it into your mouth. “We knew we could pack as many calories and nutrition into the smallest amount of space possible,” Darsch said. “That’s a good thing on paper. One tiny element of the formula we didn’t pay as much attention to was whether war fighters would even find it acceptable—would they even eat it?” At the end of the day, that ration has “to look good, to taste good, and provide one-third the recommended military nutritional allowance.”
One of the biggest ongoing campaigns the Combat Feeding Directorate wages is fighting expectation. This is a virtual law of liking: There is a greater chance we will like something when we expect we are going to like it. Military rations, unfortunately, have a long and broad history of low expectations. As the historian William C. Davis notes in A Taste for War, the U.S. Civil War produced a range of such novel foods as “desiccated vegetables”—large circular disks, compressed to about two inches, formed of everything from cabbage leaves to parsnips to “a large residue of insoluble and insolvable material.” When later boiled, they expanded, reminding one soldier of a “dirty brook with all the dead leaves floating around promiscuously.” Soldiers, not surprisingly, called them “desecrated vegetables.”
While the food scientists work to make dishes more palatable, researchers like Ar
mand Cardello, a senior research scientist at Natick, have for decades been trying to crack the psychology of how soldiers eat and what they like. This work, in turn, has been enormously influential in the commercial food industry. “No matter what kind of survey you do, looking at what it is that drives people’s choice or consumption of food, whether it’s price, or nutrition, you name it,” Cardello tells me, from behind a cluttered desk in a small office, “taste always comes out as the most important factor. When we talk about taste, we’re talking about the liking of the food.”
With military food, there is often a lot more to dislike than to like. Soldiers receive a strange-looking package containing a just recognizable food that, as Cardello noted, “has been sitting in a warehouse in the desert at 120 degrees for the past three months.” It might be better than they expect, but they might also start to wonder what strange alchemy has gone into keeping that food edible under the extreme conditions of combat. Which is why the team, when possible, tries to make food look as much like its referent in the real world. Or to just use the real thing.
Darsch handed me a plain-looking package labeled “Toaster Pastry, Brown Sugar.” “It’s a Pop-Tart!” he said. Not a military Pop-Tart, but a real Pop-Tart, albeit clad in military drab. The directorate knows, based on Cardello’s research, that soldiers would like it more if it actually came packaged like the Pop-Tarts they know. Why not simply give them off-the-shelf Pop-Tarts? “The package the Pop-Tart comes in does not have the barrier properties that we need,” Darsch told me, “to prevent the migration of moisture, oxygen, and light.” Mil-spec shelf stable is not supermarket shelf stable. This Pop-Tart wears Kevlar.
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