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by Tom Vanderbilt

  “There were no failures”: See Clara M. Davis, “Results of the Self-Selection of Diets by Young Children,” Canadian Medical Association Journal, Sept. 1939, 257–61. For an excellent account of the context and impact of Davis’s work, see Stephen Strauss, “Clara M. Davis and the Wisdom of Letting Children Choose Their Own Diets,” Canadian Medical Association Journal, Nov. 7, 2006, 1199–201. Strauss notes that Davis had planned a follow-up experiment that would measure what would happen if infants could pick from less healthy, processed foods: “But alas, it was not to be: ‘The depression dashed this hope,’ she laconically remarked, after a lack of funding forced the original experiment itself to end in 1931.”

  Sensory-specific satiety: F. Zampollo et al., “Food Plating Preferences of Children: The Importance of Presentation on Desire for Diversity,” Acta Paediatrica 101 (2012): 61–66. That same study noted that children seemed to desire the maximum number—seven—of food items and colors.

  When people were offered: Barbara J. Rolls, Edward A. Rowe, and Edmund T. Rolls, “How Sensory Properties of Foods Affect Human Feeding Behavior,” Appetite 12 (1989): 57–68. Interestingly, the researchers also conducted an experiment to see if the “shape” of food would affect sensory-specific satiety, using pasta (“bow ties,” “hoops,” and “spaghetti”). They reported that “there was a larger decrease in the pleasantness of the taste of the shape of the pasta eaten…[t]han of the other shapes of the pasta which were not eaten.”

  In a potato chip study: Andrea Maier, Zata Vickers, and J. Jeffrey Inman, “Sensory-Specific Satiety, Its Crossovers, and Subsequent Choice of Potato Chip Flavors,” Appetite 49 (2007): 419–28.

  In the so-called ice cream effect: Robert J. Hyde and Steven A. Witherly, “Dynamic Contrast: A Sensory Contribution to Palatability,” Appetite 21 (1993): 1–16.

  the so-called dessert effect: As Elizabeth Capaldi notes, “Our habit of eating dessert at the end of a meal will increase preference for the sweet taste of the dessert because the postingestive consequences of the meal are more closely associated with the flavor of the dessert than the flavor of the meal.” See Capaldi, “Conditioned Food Preferences,” in Psychology of Learning and Motivation, ed. Douglas Medin (San Diego: Academic Press, 1992), 9.

  “A few bites”: Elizabeth Rode, Paul Rozin, and Paula Durlach, “Experience and Remembered Pleasure for Meals: Duration Neglect but Minimal Peak, End (Recency) or Primacy Effects,” Appetite 49 (2007): 18–29.

  Our memory for meals: Ibid.

  “desiccated vegetables”: William C. Davis, A Taste for War: The Culinary History of the Blue and the Gray (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2003), 22.

  Tell people a coffee is bitter: This effect may only work when the intrinsic experiences align with the extrinsic information. In one fascinating study, subjects were given samples of wine they were told was sour due to an off year (while some weren’t given any information about its potential quality). Some subjects were merely given the wine; others were given the wine spiked with a dose of “miracle fruit,” which turns the sour into sweet. People who tasted the wine without the miracle fruit (but with the “sour” information) liked it less than those who simply drank the wine without any taste information. Those who tasted the miracle fruit version and were told it would taste sour actually liked the wine more than those who were not told what to expect. The authors write, “In the face of expecting to taste potentially sour elements, but having a disrupted ability to do so, the wine was rated as tasting better than in the absence of such a contrast with an extrinsic taste signal.” In other words, people were not merely blindly swayed by the information that it would be sour when it in fact could not be. See Ab Litt and Baba Shiv, “Manipulating Basic Taste Perception to Explore How Product Information Affects Experience,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 22, no. 1 (Jan. 2012): 55–66.

  The opposite can happen: See Issidoros Sarinopoulos et al., “Brain Mechanisms of Expectation Associated with Insula and Amygdala Response to Aversive Taste: Implications for Placebo,” Brain, Behavior, and Immunity 20, no. 2 (March 2006): 120–32.

  Tell subjects that an orange juice: See Gerard J. Connors et al., “Extension of the Taste-Test Analogue as an Unobtrusive Measure of Preference for Alcohol,” Behavioral Research and Therapy 16 (1978): 289–91. The authors note, “When subjects were asked to estimate how much alcohol they had consumed during the two taste-tests, the average estimation was 3.31 oz; individual values ranged from 1 to 10 oz.”

  People will still like it: See Joel Wolfson and Naomi S. Oshinsky, “Food Names and Acceptability,” The Journal of Advertising Research 6 (1961): 21–23.

  In one well-known study: Martin R. Yeomans et al., “The Role of Expectancy in Sensory and Hedonic Evaluation: The Case of Smoked Salmon Ice-Cream,” Food Quality and Preference 19, no. 6 (Sept. 2008): 565–73.

  “If we say something”: Melissa Clark, “The Best in the Box,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 2003.

  “novel foods”: Armand Cardello et al., “Role of Consumer Expectancies in the Acceptance of Novel Foods,” Journal of Food Science 50 (1985): 1707–14.

  Three months after: See Wei Xiao, “The Competitive and Welfare Effects of New Product Introduction: The Case of Crystal Pepsi” (Food Marketing Policy Center, Research Report No. 112, University of Connecticut, Nov. 2008).

  A blind taste test: Larry Brown, “A New Generation: Pepsi Offers Clear Choices,” Seattle Times, Jan. 13, 1993.

  “taste enough like Pepsi”: David Novak, “It Tasted Great in the Lab,” Conference Board Review, http://​tcbreview.​com/​tcbr-​quick-​insights/​it-​tasted-​great-​in-​the-​lab.​html.

  “principal use”: Lawrence Garber, Eva Hyatt, and Richard Starr, “The Effects of Food Color on Perceived Flavor,” Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice 8 (2003): 59–72.

  The program itself: For a good history of food research at Natick and its predecessor agencies, see Herbert L. Meiselman and Howard G. Schutz, “History of Food Acceptance Research in the U.S. Army,” Appetite 40 (2003): 199–216.

  “11-point scale”: See, for example, Warren D. Smith, “Rating Scale Research to Scale Voting,” http://​www.​rangevoting.​org/​Rate​Scale​Research.​html. Original source is D. R. Peryam and F. J. Pilgrim, “Hedonic Scale Method of Measuring Food Preferences,” Food Technology, Sept. 1957, 9–14.

  “Perhaps surprisingly”: G. J. Pickering, “Optimizing the Sensory Characteristics and Acceptance of Canned Cat Food: Use of a Human Taste Panel,” Journal of Animal Physiology and Animal Nutrition 93, no. 1 (2009): 52–60.

  Other methods, like polygraphs: See Meiselman and Schutz, “History of Food Acceptance Research in the U.S. Army.”

  The number eight: This is a problem that other, more complex methods, like “magnitude estimation scales,” have tried to factor.

  As work by Timothy Wilson: Timothy Wilson et al., “Introspecting About Reasons Can Reduce Post-choice Satisfaction,” Personal Social Psychology Bulletin 18, no. 3 (June 1993): 331–39.

  There is just one problem: See Richard Popper and Daniel R. Kroll, “Just-About-Right Scales in Consumer Research,” Chemosense 7, no. 3 (June 2005). As the authors note, other scales, such as those that measure for “intensity” of a certain attribute, often have less bias, even though the attributes being measured are the same. “The difference between the two scale types is that in answering JAR questions respondents need to consider how products differ from an ideal, which may focus them on reasons why they like or dislike a product, something that intensity scales may not.”

  Ask them ahead of time: It is as if, as Cardello once wrote, “our stated preferences for foods reflect a quintessential or idealized image or memory trace of the food, and that actual preparations of the food item are never as good or as bad as this mental image.” See A. V. Cardello and O. Maller, “Relationship Between Food Preferences and Food Acceptance Ratings,” Journal of Food Science 47 (1982): 1553–57.

  “Even foods that are extremely”:
Lyle V. Jones, David B. Peryam, and L. L. Thurstone, “Development of a Scale for Measuring Soldiers’ Food Preferences” (paper presented at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Institute of Food Technologists, Los Angeles, June 29, 1954).

  The thing most liked: See, for example, Seo-Jin Chung and Zata Vickers, “Influence of Sweetness on the Sensory-Specific Satiety and Long-Term Acceptability of Tea,” Food Quality and Preference 18 (2007): 256–64. In this study, they found that subjects’ view of the ideal sweetness of tea changed over time. “Liking ratings for the low sweet tea increased over the 19 days of the test, becoming equal to the optimally sweetened tea in the latter half of the study.” In another study, Vickers and colleagues found that while a very sweet yogurt received the highest test scores, less of the high-sweet yogurt was actually eaten. Our likes are not always the surest, or only, guide to our preferences. See Z. Vickers, E. Holton, and J. Wang, “Effect of Ideal-Relative Sweetness on Yogurt Consumption,” Food Quality and Preference 12 (2001): 521–26.

  We begin to pick things: See Rebecca K. Ratner, Barbara E. Kahn, and Daniel Kahneman, “Choosing Less-Preferred Experiences for the Sake of Variety,” Journal of Consumer Research 26, no. 1 (June 1999): 1–15.

  “Would it be so terrible”: See Tyler Cowen, “But We Just Had Indian Food Yesterday!,” Marginal Revolution, Oct. 16, 2013, http://​marginal​revolution.​com/​marginal​revolution/​2013/​10/​but-​we-​just-​had-​indian-​food-​yesterday.​html.

  “variety amnesia”: See Jeff Galak and Joseph P. Redden, “Variety Amnesia: Recalling Past Variety Can Accelerate Recovery from Satiation,” Journal of Consumer Research 36 (Dec. 2009), accessed Nov. 1, 2013, http://​papers.​ssrn.​com/​sol3/​papers.​cfm?​abstract_​id=​1344541. Per Cowen’s dilemma, they suggest, “The current findings likely provide more actionable advice to consumers fighting satiation. The recommendation is straightforward: If consumers wish to keep enjoying their favorite experiences, then they should simply think of all the other related experiences they have recently had. For example, the next time you find yourself in the all too common situation of not wanting to eat the same thing for lunch, try to recall all of the other things you have eaten since yesterday’s lunch. Our findings suggest this will make your current lunch taste just a little bit better.”

  People eating in an ethnic restaurant: Meiselman and Schutz, “History of Food Acceptance Research in the U.S. Army.”

  The most adventurous gourmands: E. P. Köster, “The Psychology of Food Choice: Some Often Encountered Fallacies,” Food Quality and Preference 14 (2003): 359–73. In a correspondence, Köster elaborated: “My guess was that at the brink of day eating is not our primary concern other than to satisfy needs. Day planning and organizing activity are more important.” There is also the case, he notes, that some people seem essentially content to eat the same thing day after day, something he once thought not likely. “This illusion was disturbed by two exceptional experiences. The first one was in a little Indian village in Surinam where people ate cassava every day for lack of other things and seemed quite satisfied in doing so. They would introduce variety when they could get it, however. More perplexing was my experience in Nepal, where the people eat a rice dish called Bat every day. The only variation is that they eat it with cucumber in the summer and with cauliflower in the winter. Bat is indeed a delicious dish very well spiced and with an exquisite sensory complexity. I lived for about two weeks with a family and to my surprise I loved it still. They obviously did too, because when I invited them to a restaurant in Kathmandu, they chose one that offered exactly the same dish as the one we had at home. It taught me that variety seeking can not be necessary when there is sufficient variety and complexity in the dish.”

  Terpenes triggering receptors: Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence make this point in “Assessing the Role of Visual and Auditory Cues in Multisensory Perception of Flavor,” in The Neural Bases of Multisensory Processes, ed. M. M. Murray and M. T. Wallace (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2012), accessed Oct. 28, 2013, http://​www.​ncbi.​nlm.​nih.​gov/​books/​NBK92852/​#ch37_​r118.

  How we perceive something: Paul Rozin, “ ‘Taste-Smell Confusions’ and the Duality of the Olfactory Sense,” Perception and Psychophysics 31 (1983): 397–401.

  “reading is a longer”: The Woolf quotation comes via Katerina Koutsantoni, Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader (London: Ashgate, 2013), 71.

  What we like is sometimes: As one well-known study found, people’s preference for Coca-Cola over Pepsi in a taste test was influenced by having access to brand information. Samuel McClure et al., “Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks,” Neuron 44 (2004): 379–87.

  “The same cognitive”: See Astrid Poelman et al., “The Influence of Information About Organic Production and Fair Trade on Preferences for and Perception of Pineapple,” Food Quality and Preference 19, no. 1 (Jan. 2008): 114–21. The authors noted an interesting effect. “When the subjects are considered as a uniform group, the individual differences indicating different outcome of underlying cognitive processes will be kept hidden.” However, “when subjects were grouped according to their affective attitudes towards organic or fair trade products, perception differed as a result of the information provided. Subjects with a positive attitude towards organic or fair trade products perceived products to have a stronger sensory impact in the presence of such information than in its absence. Similarly, subjects with a negative attitude towards organic or fair trade products perceived products to have a weaker sensory impact in the presence of such information than in its absence.”

  The power of this conditioning: See, for example, Kevin P. Myers and Margaret C. Whitney, “Rats’ Learned Preferences for Flavors Encountered Early or Late in a Meal Paired with the Postingestive Effects of Glucose,” Physiology and Behavior 102, no. 5 (March 2011): 466–74.

  In her study, people who downed: See M. L. Pelchat and G. M. Carfagno, “GI Glucose Enhances ‘Mere’ Exposure in Humans,” Appetite 54 (2010): 669.

  One way to avoid the treatment: Graciela V. Andresen, Leann L. Birch, and Patricia A. Johnson, “The Scapegoat Effect on Food Aversions After Chemotherapy,” Cancer 66, no. 7 (1990): 1649–53.

  “Mere repeated exposure”: R. B. Zajonc, “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 9, no. 2, pt. 2 (June 1968): 1–27.

  In one typical study: Leann L. Birch and Diane Wolfe Marlin, “I Don’t Like It; I Never Tried It: Effects of Exposure on Two-Year-Old Children’s Food Preferences,” Appetite 3, no. 4 (Dec. 1982): 353–60.

  Try it: Or, as the food writer Jeffrey Steingarten put it, “after repeatedly sampling ten of the sixty varieties of kimchi, the national pickle of Korea, kimchi has become my national pickle, too.” Steingarten, The Man Who Ate Everything (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 4.

  They often abandon efforts: See B. R. Carruth, P. J. Ziegler, and S. I. Barr, “Prevalence of Picky Eaters Among Infants and Toddlers and Their Caregivers’ Decisions About Offering a New Food,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 104 (2004): 57–64.

  In an English study: A. Bingham, R. Hurling, and J. Stocks, “Acquisition of Liking for Spinach Products,” Food Quality and Preference 16, no. 5 (July 2005): 461–69.

  People liked peas: But what about those spinach dislikers? Is mere exposure a form of liking, or does it merely reflect “weaker distaste”? The psychologist Christian Crandall set out to answer this in an innovative experiment at a salmon cannery in Alaska. Rather than introduce something unfamiliar, he introduced, in a fairly controlled setting, something already liked, though novel to the factory: doughnuts. The longer doughnuts were in the factory break room, the more of them people ate. Considering other explanations, Crandall suggests that sheer boredom might have led cannery workers to eat more sweets, although parallel consumption of other desserts did not rise during this time. One wonders, however, if there was also some novelty effect at work, and w
hether doughnut consumption would have itself stabilized and even dropped over time. Or perhaps there is just something inherently likable—even addictive—about doughnuts. See Crandall, “The Liking of Foods as a Result of Exposure: Eating Doughnuts in Alaska,” Journal of Social Psychology 125, no. 2 (1995): 187–94.

  In one study, people began: Lisa Methven, Elodie Langreney, and John Prescott, “Changes in Liking for a No Added Salt Soup as a Function of Exposure,” Food Quality and Preference 26, no. 2 (Dec. 2012): 135–40.

  the soup was not labeled: See D. G. Liem, N. Toraman Aydin, and E. H. Zandstra, “Effects of Health Labels on Expected and Actual Taste Perception of Soup,” Food Quality and Preference 25, no. 2 (Sept. 2012): 192–97. Although, as Fredrik Fernquist and Lena Ekelund have noted, the type of food seems to determine whether health information has an effect on hedonic liking. Earlier studies include cases where health aspects do not affect liking, suggesting that food which is already considered healthy is not affected by information about, for example, fat content. Fernquist and Ekelund, “Credence and the Effect on Consumer Liking of Food—a Review,” Food Quality and Preference, in press, manuscript accessed online on Nov. 1, 2013.

  In another experiment: Richard J. Stevenson and Martin R. Yeomans, “Does Exposure Enhance Liking for the Chilli Burn?,” Appetite 24, no. 2 (1995): 107–20. The authors note that “no subject referred specifically to liking or preference in describing the purpose of the experiment. However, some subjects thought that the experiment concerned some form of sensory adaptation to the chilli burn.” One wonders if this in itself could predispose the subjects to “like” the chili more the hotter it got, to please the researchers or show their own bravery. But before and after the trial, subjects drank a tomato juice mixture with capsaicin added, and they reported no increased liking for that.