Tasting spoons: Assessing how the material of a spoon affects the taste of the food

Self Cite

Currently little is known about how the non-edible items associated with eating and drinking (tableware items such as the plates, bowls, cutlery, glasses, bottles, condiment containers, etc.), or even environmental factors (such as the lighting and/or background music), affect people's perception of foodstuffs. Here, we review the latest evidence demonstrating the importance of these contextual variables on the consumer's behavioural and hedonic response to, and sensory perception of, a variety of food and drink items. These effects are explained by a combination of psychological factors (high level attributes, such as perceived quality, that may be mediating the effects under consideration), perceptual factors (such as the Ebbinghaus-Titchener size-contrast illusion and colour contrast in the case of the colour of the plateware affecting taste/flavour perception), and physiological-chemical factors (such as differences in the release of volatile organic compounds from differently-shaped wine glasses). Together, these factors help to explain the growing body of evidence demonstrating that both the tableware and the environment can have a profound effect on our perception of food and drink.Keywords: Cutlery, Tableware, Contextual factors, Flavour, Liking, Multisensory, Weight, Colour, Size, Material ReviewResearch on the topic of flavour perception has grown rapidly over the last decade or so (see Figure 1). In particular, the relative contributions of the various sensory cues (i.e., olfactory, gustatory, somatosensory, auditory, visual, and trigeminal) to multisensory flavour perception have been examined for a wide variety of different food and beverage items (see [1,2] for reviews). While a number of recent studies have also highlighted the importance of atmospheric/environmental cues in determining what, how much, and how quickly, we eat and drink, and even how much we report liking the experience ([3,4]; for reviews, see [5,6]), far less research has studied the role of the tableware on eating, drinking, and flavour perception. Below, we review the latest evidence highlighting the significant effect that the non-edible components of eating and drinking (e.g., the cutlery, plateware, glassware, condiment containers, menus, and atmosphere) can have on people's perception of, and response to, foods and beverages. CutleryCutlery, by which we mean forks, knives, and spoons, has been in widespread use for nearly 200 years now (e.g., [7,8]). Traditionally, it was made from a wide variety of different materials, such as wood, bone, ceramic, iron, brass pewter, etc. Nowadays, though, the range of materials used for cutlery is much narrower, mainly limited to stainless steel, silver, plastic, or wood (for chopsticks and the cutlery often found in ecofriendly coffee shops). This streamlining of materials has probably resulted from a combination of factors including: the ease and cost of manufacture/production, the ease of cleaning, environmental impact, and any taste transferred from the cutlery to the food.Lau...

Section: Cutlerymentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the impact of the tableware and other contextual variables on multisensory flavour perception

Spence

Harrar

Piqueras‐Fiszman

2012

Self Cite

“…Weights were hidden in the handles of the cutlery so that, upon visual inspection, the spoons were expected to be light. Other than the weight, all other aspects of the spoon were the same (that is, they did not vary in material, which is is important given the results of [36]). Note that this aspect of the design represents an improvement over previous experiments [33].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The taste of cutlery: how the taste of food is affected by the weight, size, shape, and colour of the cutlery used to eat it

Harrar

Spence

2013

Self Cite

The taste of cutlery: how the taste of food is affected by the weight, size, shape, and colour of the cutlery used to eat it Vanessa Harrar * and Charles Spence Abstract Background: Recent evidence has shown that changing the plateware can affect the perceived taste and flavour of food, but very little is known about visual and proprioceptive influences of cutlery on the response of consumers to the food sampled from it. In the present study, we report three experiments designed to investigate whether food tastes different when the visual and tactile properties of the plastic cutlery from which it is sampled are altered. We independently varied the weight, size, colour, and shape of cutlery. We assessed the impact of changing the sensory properties of the cutlery on participants' ratings of the sweetness, saltiness, perceived value, and overall liking of the food tasted from it.Results: The results revealed that yoghurt was perceived as denser and more expensive when tasted from a lighter plastic spoon as compared to the artificially weighted spoons; the size of the spoon only interacted with the spoon-weight factor for the perceived sweetness of the yoghurt. The taste of the yoghurt was also affected by the colour of the cutlery, but these effects depended on the colour of the food as well, suggesting that colour contrast may have been responsible for the observed effects. Finally, we investigated the influence of the shape of the cutlery. The results showed that the food was rated as being saltiest when sampled from a knife rather than from a spoon, fork, or toothpick. Conclusions: Taken together, these results demonstrate that the properties of the cutlery can indeed affect people's taste perception of everyday foods, most likely when expectations regarding the cutlery or the food have been disconfirmed. We discuss these results in the context of changing environmental cues in order to modify people's eating habits.

“…Specific contextual variables include, but are not limited to, background music [22]; the size, weight, and composition of cutlery [23]; a product's packaging [24]; colour lighting [25]; and menu item naming [26].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plate shape and colour interact to influence taste and quality judgments

Stewart

Goss

2013

Background: Research has demonstrated that factors external to the food source can influence consumers' perceptions of food. Contextual factors including cutlery or tableware (for example, size and composition), the atmosphere (for example, noise levels and odours), and packaging (for example, shape and colour) have all been shown to influence the perceptual experience. Plateware has also been shown to influence taste perception since ratings of a dessert (strawberry mousse) were modified by plate colour but not by plate shape. In the current study, which used a 2 × 2 between-subjects design, the effect of plate colour (black versus white) and plate shape (round versus square) on taste perception is re-examined. Through sweetness, intensity, quality, and liking ratings of cheesecake, the current study extends the previous investigation to include an examination of the plate colour by plate shape interaction while using plates with more angular corners.