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You're wondering whether food presentation affects taste, and you aren't alone. This has been the subject of many studies over the past several decades. Could food presentation actually affect your perception of taste?
Food presentation does, in fact, affect how food tastes. Scientists have concluded that our sight has a great influence on how we experience taste. If food is not presented in an attractive way, that will affect our overall perception of how the food tastes.
If you want to know more about how food presentation affects taste, then you're in the right place. Keep on reading for more!
Food presentation is known to affect the way something tastes. If your food is delivered to your table with a sauce that appears unappetizing, this could affect how you perceive the food's taste.
This is also the case in contrasting situations where the food looks like it was crafted by angels in heaven- if the food looks good, it may taste a little better to you.
According to Terry E. Acree, Ph.D., a speaker at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, people are able to "see" how food tastes before they even take a bite of it.
From Acree's words directly, we can infer that our eyes play a part in how foods ultimately taste to us. The way foods look can help us determine whether we like them or not, from a taste standpoint.
It may seem ridiculous, but it has been observed that the shape of food items has an effect on how it tastes.
A chocolatier, Alasdair Garnsworthy, knows without a doubt that shape affects taste. Because of that, he makes sure that the shapes of his chocolate mesh well with the flavor that he is trying to create.
So, right when he starts crafting a new flavor, he considers how long the shape will take to melt in the mouth. If he wants a flavor to come on slowly, he'll form it into a shape that will take a while to melt in the mouth. Conversely, when he's working with flavors that he wants to come through strong, he'll choose a shape that melts quickly.
Color also affects taste, and the following studies provide evidence.
When participants of a study tasted drinks that were changed to a color other than what was familiar, they were not always able to correctly name the drink. Conversely, when they drank the same drinks in the correct color, they were able to correctly name the drink 100% of the time.
To further demonstrate the power of our sight and food presentation, a study was conducted with wine. The color of white wine was changed to red with food coloring (which had no flavor), and people were asked for their opinion of how it tastes.
The result of the study was that when people tasted the white wine, they tasted flavors that you'd expect from red wine. Their eyes had tricked their taste buds into tasting something that was not even there.
What you do with this information will depend on who you are. For those who are in food service, it's crucial to remember that the way that food is presented can have a considerable effect on how a customer experiences the flavors in the food.
So, you'd do well to make sure every meal that's delivered to a customer looks delectable.
Here are some steps that you can take to make your dishes look delicious:
When your customers like the way that their food looks, they are more likely to enjoy the taste of it.
Note: If you are trying to get a picky eater to eat some vegetables, consider making the meal a bit more visually appealing. You can try cutting your child's veggies into silly shapes or chopping them up and strategically decorating the plate with them. Your picky eater may start to believe that vegetables are not so bad after all!
While food presentation can have a large impact on taste, in some situations, a food's appearance doesn't matter at all when it comes to taste.
For instance, we love to eat a ton of things that are not appetizing to the eye - think blood sausage, chicken feet, or hog head cheese. These foods are not the most visually appetizing, but people all over the world eat them with pleasure.
Yet, the way food is presented still has a very real effect on how we perceive its taste.
Food presentation's effect on taste has its limits is because of the fact that there are other factors that affect how something tastes. The next section will look at this in detail.
Aside from food presentation, there are many other factors that affect how food tastes, and we will examine some of them in this section.
This is not an exhaustive list. There are many other factors that affect the way food tastes.
You may have gathered by this point that the way a food looks has a measurable effect on how it tastes. We hope that this article was of help to you in your pursuit of information on food science.
