FOOD FOR EYES

Why do we love meatballs, fish fingers or chocolate eggs? The reasons are not purely in the taste, but also in the form, the colour, the textures and surfaces, and the parts that are surrounded or filled with other parts, and let’s not forget the sound they make when we take a bite. According to studies of the university of Bremen the texture is responsible for 60 % of how much we enjoy what we eat. While biting, sucking or chewing our brain sends a multitude of electronic impulses, that are decoded as complex, sensorial and emotional perceptions.

Surface, texture and temperature make for biting resistance, which in turn lets us make suprising implications about taste, freshness and edibility of food. A crunchy potatoe crisp for instance signals freshness, whereas a lumpy french frie makes us think it is old and less appetizing. (Unless it is very late at night and you are very drunk, that is when things turn around completely, but that is a whole different story.) Food companys of course take this knowledge to better their offering. For instance icecream is regarded as especially creamy, when small crystals of ice are produced during freezing. On the other hand, if small bubbles of air are introduced into the icecream it is regarded as especially soft: voila, soft ice. Two thirds of the ice cream for double the price.

Red jelly bears always test best in tasting competitions, yet blind tests bring forth completely different results. Red is connected with the idea of ripe, fresh fruits in our brains, with sweet taste and high nutritional value. In direct choice we would most probably always prefer red food. That is why there are double as much red jelly bears in any package as there are white, yellow, orange or green ones. And of course there are no violet, black or blue ones, because these dark and unnaturl colors are connected to bitter taste, inedibility and also the danger of poison. But it is also true for other food: margarine is colored slightly yellow because then we regard it as having a more intensive taste.

Of course, texture and the feeling we have when biting is finally a matter of taste. The „right“ mixture is not only connected to instinct and subconsciously decoded signals such as „fresh“ or „expired“, but also gives us hints at the psyche and the eating habits of people. According to studies, eating habits fall into two categories: „high sensation seekers“ and „low sensation seekers“. Vital, lively and strong people are looking for higher biting resistance, prefer cross surfaces and strong textures. As much as they are apt at solving problems in real live and would never just „eat up“ their troubles, they love to chew on the food before they are able to swallow. „Low sensation seekers“ on the other hand prefer creamy, easy tasting food with as little resistance for biting or chewing as possible. In the same way they also seem to try to avoid conflicts also aside of meals.

Acoustic impressions also seem to play a role just as important as visual impressions. Sounddesigners have made blind tests to find out that the sound of ripping finely toasted bread is more appealing than the sound of ripping bread toasted too lightly or too darkly. Next to the eyes, also the ears seem to take part in a meal. Moreover, looking at the phylogenetic development of the human the ear is one of our most sensible organs to control our environment. A cracker seems fresher the lighter the sound is that is made by biting into it. If the sound of food does not adhere to the expectations we have, we will most probably spit it out. A damp and incongruent sound gives us a subconscious warning that we may be eating rotten food.

The sound of eating food does not only help us to judge the freshness but also the nutritional quality of what we have eaten. Crackers made of popped rice produce a very high and shrill sound when being chewed, very much like eating styropor, a definite sign for our brain that almost no nutrition is to be expected. Dark tone frequencies signal sweetness and high nutritional value. The secret of good food sound design therefore is a good mixture of high and low frequencies. Chewing should be a real symphony of sounds. These sounds become lower and lower during the process of chewing and when they move below a certain treshold our brain knows that chewing is done and the food may be swallowed.

In Italy there are more than 300 forms of pasta. Many of them are true classics, for instance Penne. Their design is perfect and also matched to a certain purpose, yet the success of the most favorite designs is not a matter of coincidence. Each form of noodle fits to a certain kind of sauce. Concentrated sauces with intensive taste fit best to a form of pasta which take them on very slightly. Noodles, which sauce sticks to very easily, are better for thinner variations of sugo. There are laboratory tests about the time it takes sugo to drip from certain kinds of pasta, especially the long and slick spaghettis, while the little bowlshaped parts of gomiti act like tiny spoons and thereby transport sauce to the mouth.

Take Penne rigata for instance, whose fine longitudenal stripes optimize the grip of the sauce on the pasta which is like the profile of a snow tire on a frozen winter road. This behaviour of the sauce is also influenced by the surface texture of the dough, the mixture of it and the material of the noodle pressing equipment. More expensive noodles with porous surface are made from bronze machinery, cheaper ones with slicker surface and less stickiness are made in teflon coated machinery.

In our society food is more successful that fits to the lifestyles of the consumer. A faster life style also demands a faster food, which totally in line with the modern multi tasking society may be eaten while walking, driving a car or while working on the computer. (There, you caught me out...) This development is not at all new, though. From the huns who allegedly hid meat underneath their saddles until it was dry and better conserved to the invention of the hot dog around the beginning of last century, with its sausage between two buns, so it can be eaten with hands while walking or standing without the fear of making yourself all greasy. There is no limit to fantasy in this respect nowadays. Edible packaging, edible cutlery, finger food, and other trends are only at their beginning. Whatever else, these products will be profitable because today it is after all always a calculation of profitability that will decide in mass production.

One of the most complicated and challenging tasks in modern food consumption is eating and drinking in zero gravity, for instance in a space station. Bread is not allowed to lose crumbs which may be travelling through space uncontrolled. Therefore in the bread used in spaceships there is a special softener in the dough, which keeps the bread from crumbling. Then it will be portioned and put into airtight foil. Spacefood is a special challenge for food design.

Human culture has formed its food in many ways ever since the start of civilization. The manipulation of basic ingredients, which basically means any kind of cooking, is always an abstraction of food in its most origin form. There is nothing left of the image of a dead animal in a nice pink piece of sausage, creamy red ketchup is pretty far from tomatoes and frozen spinach is nowhere close to the form, colour and texture of leaves of spinach straight from the field. Fish fingers are the most perfect abstraction: frozen blocks of fish meat cut to cubes by heavy machinery and then covered in wheat and crumbs. Their success is in the very old formula of not the taste but the form being responsible for how we judge food. That is why many people it cubic fish who would never touch real fish.

More food for thought reserved for other times: The next big thing in food design will be nanotechnology. Just you wait and see (there is no need to taste). How does food shape a society, ie. the first Döner in Germany was sold in 1971, where does that take us 38 years later?

Georg Cracked, August 2009.