The Perfect Meal: The Multisensory Science of Food and Dining

The central idea behind this book is deceptively simple: that our perception of flavour is multisensory. Consequently, to serve up great tasting food is not simply a matter of tickling the taste buds but of engaging a whole range of sensory experiences. Drawing on recent innovative research carried out by Spence’s team at the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University, the authors argue that we must go beyond four or five individual taste sensations (which respond to particular sensory nodes on the tongue) to focus on the interaction of multisensory experiences as it is here that flavour emerges. They show how a host of sensory elements ranging from the colour of the plate to the frequency of concurrent sounds all affect the ways we perceive flavour. Spence and his team have published prolifically on the topic, and ‘The Perfect Meal’ is evidence of a wider aim to encourage those in the food industry to think about eating as a multisensory experience and therefore allow professionals to better deliver positive results to diners and consumers. Rather than looking at food itself the focus is on the particular performance of fine dining, shrouded in the mystery and spectacle that comes along with the molecular gastronomy oeuvre made famous by Heston Blumenthal or restaurants such as El Bulli. By engaging directly with this trend the authors ‘hope that chefs would want to find out more about how changing the aroma of a food (by adding the aroma of strawberry or vanilla, say) can change its perceived sweetness and how changing the colour of a food or beverages can send a very powerful signal to the diner’s brain about the likely taste and flavour they are about to experience’ (p. 22). Affiliating themselves with the recent term ‘gastrophysics’, this new, high-tech ‘science of the table’ uses ‘well controlled experiments’ to ‘investigate the way in which people... respond to sensory stimuli’ (p. 18) The physical responses that taste experiences elicit in us offer a potentially powerful tool in the context of the food industry by offering the scope to manipulate our experiences of food in much more precise and fundamental ways. Throughout the book the authors methodically build a case for the inclusion of a number of elements in the multisensory perception of taste. In Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5, they elaborate the role that different devices employed in restaurants can play in enhancing a meal. Addressing in turn the start of the meal (the menu, setting of the tables, waiters, etc.), the language and labelling used on the menu, the plate itself and the cutlery, these chapters summarize the latest research to show how these various elements affect the way we perceive flavour. A prominent example from the authors’ own research is the finding that a dessert on a round white plate tasted up Int. Jrnl. of Soc. of Agr. & Food, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 129–131