Shaping the way we taste our food

巴里·史密斯

搜索“#食品”Instagram或其他社交媒体sites, and you will be bombarded with millions of pictures of more or less appetising dishes. Taking and sharing pictures of food might be one of the biggest trends of the last decade, one which calls perhaps as much for regulation as for an explanation. What is so interesting about the sight of food?

开始考虑它，并关注食物的外观似乎是一个核心人类学事实 - 人类关心的东西，而其他动物则不关心。Some of the oldest ceramics in the world，日期为18000年，揭示我们远方的祖先已经感觉到食物应得的装饰。如果食品的视觉美学不仅是一种新的时尚，那么当今最具创意的厨师肯定已经将其提升到了新的水平。

食客的经历

Heston Blumenthal and the Experimental Kitchen at the Fat Duck are among the ones to have explored and tested how vision can change a diner’s experience: Not by adding extra elements or dying the food red to make it taste sweeter, but by presenting it differently, and in a more aesthetic way.

人们可能会熟悉肉类果实，在您的盘子上精心制作的普通话隐藏了其美味的核心，例如烹饪的trompe-l'oeil（然后像trompe-langue一样）。但是，较少的象征性美学又如何使用相似之处，而是使用几何形状和图案呢？

The visual repertoire of high-end gastronomy nowadays uses spheres, cubes, lines, and abstract drawings, harmoniously arranged on plates – which seem to bring no association to mind. But is that right? Don’t we also have associations between categories of shapes and tastes, above and beyond the specific associations we have for specific foods and ingredients?

甜又圆，苦和角度

A way to address the question is to start with tastes, and see whether they bring certain shapes to mind. Our group and various others at the University of Oxford, Dijon and London, managed to show that sweetness is, almost invariably,associated to rounder shapes and bitterness to angularity。

The same cross modal ‘Gestalt’ principle, which Kohler thought linked sounds and shapes, seem to relate shapes and tastes. Using the same shapes and sounds that Kohler used, we can show that the sweet/bitter distinction fits perfectly with the prediction: a sweet food goes best with a rounded, cloud-like shape and is more likely to be called Maluma or Bouba, while bitter foods go best with spiky figures and names like Takete or Kiki.

至于声音和形状，问题是要查看对应是否比仅仅是唤起的深度：它会影响期望，并调节overall experience of flavour？如果甜慕斯圆形并称为“ bouba”甜点，它会比它看起来更甜美，而它看起来像是棱角分明的，并且作为“ kiki”甜点？

But turning these cross modal associations into edible solutions comes with challenges: basic tastes never come by themselves in real life, but with a bouquet of textures and aromas. What shape should a bitter-sweet dish take: Angular, rounded or something else? And what about the shape of the plate on which the food is served?

实验的配方

当我们决定结合胖鸭实验厨房的创意见解和科学方法时，这些问题是我们遇到的问题the Centre for the Study of the Senses,在伦敦大学。这是我们通过交流提出的食谱：

1. 由于交叉模态关联更有可能影响矛盾物体的感知，因此选择一种既痛苦又甜的菜，例如甜菜根。

2. Prepare two different visual presentations of the same ingredients, in exactly the same quantities, and make one look ‘round’ and the other look ‘angular’.

3. 通过将圆形演示放在圆形或角板中，并为角度板进行相同的操作，以完成您的两点设计。

4. To avoid drawing attention to your experiment, choose two groups and present them with two plates of the same shape – but with different presentations. Simply let them choose a name for each, before and after they eat, and rate their sweetness or sourness.

志愿者是在伦敦的“人类节日”举行的活动中招募的。数据为我们提供了两个交互，以查看：Within the same group，，，，we could see how changing the shape of the food, but not the shape of the plate, affected its perceived sweetness and sourness;跨小组，我们可以看到如何改变盘子的形状，以相同的食物形状会影响其感知的味道。

盘子的形状是否只是在背景中退缩，而食物的表现是否会驱动所有效果 - 正如Instagram和一些食谱所暗示的那样？

食物的视觉美感

我们的结果实际上表明了相反：食物的形状与板的形状之间存在相互作用 - 至关重要的是将圆形甜菜根的微妙甜度变成显着的效果。与其他所有组合相比，当甜菜根是球形并放在圆盘上时，这道菜的味道更甜，酸味。

当涉及食物的视觉美感，尤其是其抽象形式时，护理在容器上应该与其含量一样多。总体成分很重要，而不仅仅是食物的形状。考虑它的一种方法是看到盘子不仅是食物的画布或背景，而且是体验框架不可或缺的一部分。镀金的抽象艺术尤其表明的是为什么创建菜肴同时使用可食用的成分。

（（This work would not have been possible without the creative insights and expertise steaming out of the Experimental Kitchen of the Fat Duck, and Daniel Ospina’s and Deiniol Pritchard contribution. We wished also to thank Charles Michel and Natasha Block for their help during the event, and the AHRC/ Being Human festival for their support)