Eating with our eyes: From visual hunger to digital satiation

Abstract

One of the brain's key roles is to facilitate foraging and feeding. It is presumably no coincidence, then, that the mouth is situated close to the brain in most animal species. However, the environments in which our brains evolved were far less plentiful in terms of the availability of food resources (i.e., nutriments) than is the case for those of us living in the Western world today. The growing obesity crisis is but one of the signs that humankind is not doing such a great job in terms of optimizing the contemporary food landscape. While the blame here is often put at the doors of the global food companies - offering addictive foods, designed to hit 'the bliss point' in terms of the pleasurable ingredients (sugar, salt, fat, etc.), and the ease of access to calorie-rich foods - we wonder whether there aren't other implicit cues in our environments that might be triggering hunger more often than is perhaps good for us. Here, we take a closer look at the potential role of vision; Specifically, we question the impact that our increasing exposure to images of desirable foods (what is often labelled 'food porn', or 'gastroporn') via digital interfaces might be having, and ask whether it might not inadvertently be exacerbating our desire for food (what we call 'visual hunger'). We review the growing body of cognitive neuroscience research demonstrating the profound effect that viewing such images can have on neural activity, physiological and psychological responses, and visual attention, especially in the 'hungry' brain.

Pairing flavours and the temporal order of tasting

“…Optimality, here, being defined in terms both of what is good for the eyes of the diner and also for their palate. 16 And looking to the future, while in this review, the focus has been squarely on what is going on within a mouthful or a single dish. One can, of course, broaden things out to consider the temporal sequencing of the courses within a meal, say, or the meals within a day (e.g.…”

“…However, if you watch how people actually eat their biscuits, it would appear that the majority eat them with the chocolate side facing up. Perhaps, people want to see the chocolate as they eat the biscuit (appealing to the eye; see [16]), even though, given the distribution of receptors in the oral cavity, it could be argued that a better tasting experience would be had were the biscuit to be eaten in the "proper" orientation (i.e. with the chocolate side facing downward).…”

“…15 Olfactory and gustatory adaptation effects can be thought of operating along much the same lines. 16 One intriguing culinary challenge here, then, is to try and find a combination of elements that individually taste just fine and in combination taste much better in one order than another.…”

“…Thinking about this, and properly designing the sequence of flavour experiences, is a topic that is becoming increasingly important. Many chefs are becoming ever more obsessed with the eye appeal of the dishes they prepare (see [15,16], for reviews). At the same time, diners often want to choose the sequence in which they taste the various elements in a dish (see Fig.…”

Olfactory dining: designing for the dominant sense

“…Although rarely mentioned, such a piece of serviceware presumably also functioned to keep the aromas of the food trapped under the hood until the appropriate moment. It is perhaps worth noting that in today's climate of plating for the eye (see [12] for a review), what the cloche delivers in terms of surprise (and tradition; the cloche apparently going out of vogue with traditional 'silver service'), it loses in terms of eye (or visual) appeal. The fact that the dish is hidden from the diners' view until the very last moment is perhaps not the ideal way to retain a dish's aroma in today's image-obsessed age (the terms gastroporn, or food porn, come to mind here).…”