Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (25 page)

At a wonderful brasserie in San Francisco called Café des Amis, a clangingly
loud space with gorgeous tile floors, marble tables, and polished wood everywhere, the owners have cleverly set aside a room in the back, blanketed in “plush bordeaux-colored mohair” surfaces—exactly what the ALDA members were requesting: not a sterile banquet room in the back, but a fashionable space where they, too, can eat with dignity. It’s a smart business move. There are plenty of youthful sixty-, seventy-, and eightysomethings who have money for dining out even if they can’t hear as well as they used to.

In 2010, Frito-Lay’s SunChips brand of snacks launched what was claimed to be the world’s first 100 percent compostable snack package. Immediately Frito-Lay started to receive complaints from consumers about the sound of the bags. Here was a snack food company trying to do the right thing for the Earth, and consumers were complaining. In fact, they were more than mad. They were frustrated. No longer could the cheating dieter sneak a handful of chips in the middle of the night without rousing his spouse. Consumers created a Facebook page called
SORRY BUT I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THIS SUN CHIPS BAG
. The company responded that a loud compostable bag is “the sound of change.” Then they pulled them off the market.

Actually, Frito-Lay was on to something. Amanda Wong and Charles Spence of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory found that people tasting Pringles (again, to assure that each crisp was exactly the same as the next) while hearing a recording of snack bags rated the crisps crisper when they heard the bags rattling than when they heard the canister of Pringles popping. SunChips could have parlayed this learning into some kind of response to the complaints, or they could have used this knowledge in the advance marketing of the compostable bag to head off the complaints in the first place:
OUR EXTRA LOUD COMPOSTABLE BAG WILL NOT ONLY SAVE THE EARTH, IT WILL GIVE YOU MORE SENSORY STIMULATION.

Much of the sound that influences our food behavior is “heard” without our conscious attention, perhaps because we’re so used to constant low-level noise
in the background of our daily lives that we unconsciously tune much of it out. Yet even without your knowing it, the music that a food retailer or restaurateur plays can influence what you buy.

One study showed that playing French music in a supermarket makes people buy French wine more than wine from other countries (in this study, specifically, Germany). Playing German music had the same effect, making customers buy more German wine than French. Yet fewer than 14 percent of the shoppers admitted that the type of music that was playing might have influenced their wine choice.

The tempo of the music that’s played in a store can also influence your purchase decisions. Slow music makes grocery store shoppers slow down; that means they spend more time in the store, and this translates to more revenue per customer—a pretty awesome result from simply changing the radio station. We are so sure that we’re in charge all the time, but in fact we can be manipulated like puppets.

Perhaps the most sonically challenged food venue is the grocery store. What are the signature sounds of a grocery store? I only recently considered this and I’m in the business. The soundscape at the front of the store is the ringing and dinging of the cash registers. The center of the store hums along with the cycling of freezer cases. The produce section sounds like, well, nothing. Retailers might consider adding the sounds of nature to influence sales of their fresh produce. If a clucking chicken can make bacon-and-egg ice cream seem eggier, wouldn’t the pleasant sounds of the outdoors make produce seem fresher?

In fact, a few retailers are dabbling in this area. Safeway, a U.S. grocery store chain based in California, spritzes some of its produce displays with water. Just before the water starts, you hear the sound of gathering thunderclouds. Boom! With a crack of thunder, the “storm” hits the lettuce section. Produce grows outdoors and that’s the sound that Safeway has re-created inside. It’s an incredibly powerful reminder of where the food comes from.

I love casual Mexican restaurants and, in fact, just about any restaurant that offers fajitas. It’s not just the flavor, it’s the sound. They arrive at the table sizzling hot,
alive
on the platter; by contrast, burritos and enchiladas sound dead on arrival. Restaurants don’t leverage this type of service enough. Their diners don’t get to hear the satisfying sound of the raw meat hitting the grill. They miss the sizzle and pop of eggs on the flattop, bubbling in butter. I want more of these experiences to happen at the table, as at Korean barbecue restaurants, which offer raw meat that you cook at the table. It’s a fantastic auditory, gustatory, and olfactory
feast. You watch bright pink beef hit the grill with a sizzle, change color, release volatile aromas, and develop more umami with every second it remains on the grate.

hedonic
adjective.
1: of, relating to, or characterized by pleasure 2: of, relating to, or characterized by hedonism.

hedonics
noun.
The branch of psychology that deals with pleasurable and unpleasurable states of consciousness.
¹²

Auditory cues are more than chemical reactions—they are the hedonic beginning of a food experience. And this hedonic experience should start when you’re shopping, as at a farmers’ market. There, repetitive electronic sounds are absent and in their place is the pleasant buzzing of human beings talking to one another. This has to be somewhat responsible for their resurgence.

Traci Des Jardins is chef-owner of a number of restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area, most notably the fine-dining Jardinière in San Francisco and Manzanita at Lake Tahoe. She said that it’s difficult to cook by sound in a commercial kitchen because “you’re always under the din of a hood.” But at home, there are no loud hood systems or washing stations.

“If you’re cooking in a fairly quiet environment,” she says, “without even looking at your stove or your oven, you can tell how fast something is cooking. Sound becomes a cue to what’s happening when you’re cooking. I can really tell a lot just by listening. I notice . . . that if I’ve got my back to the stove, I can totally tell—if I’m sautéing something—if it’s going to burn, or if it’s going to color if I don’t want it to color. The sound of food sweating, versus sautéing, versus frying—there’s a different sound to each of these different temperatures.”

A show called
Cooking Without Looking
bills itself as “the first television show produced especially for people who are blind and visually impaired.” When I first heard about it, I thought it was a snarky
Saturday Night Live
skit, so I immediately went to YouTube to see it for myself.
Cooking Without Looking
features visually impaired hosts talking with visually impaired chefs as they cook without their sense of sight. In an episode on making pizza from scratch, a guest chef teaches the host how to listen for the sound of the yeast going to work on the flour. But it was Chef Des Jardins, a sighted chef using her sense of hearing, who helped me see sound anew.

A Dutch study asked people to rate how important they considered each of the five senses to be for certain products they consume, everything from using a computer mouse to riding a bicycle to brushing their teeth. The scores for foods and drinks show that consumers rate sound as the least important sense by a long shot.

How important is it to you how (a) cookie/meat/apple/cheesetastes/smells/sounds/feels/looks?

Source: N. J. Hendrik, “The Perceived Importance of Sensory Modalities in Product Usage: A Study of
Self-reports,”
Schifferstein Acta Psychologica
121 (2006): 41–64.

Julian Treasure introduced me to an anechoic chamber, a special room designed to eliminate the echoic effect of sound, which bounces around and gets reflected back to us in normal situations. I decided I had to visit one so I could eat in it.

Luckily, there is such a room at the University of California, Berkeley, just across the Bay Bridge from my home. I e-mailed Professor Emeritus Ervin Hafter, who ran the Auditory Perception Lab at University of California, Berkeley, and explored aspects of hearing such as the spatial perception of sound and how noise reduction affects speech cognition. It turns out Hafter is a fellow foodie who had just returned from Bordeaux, so he was keen to talk about sound and food.

No one had ever asked to eat in Professor Hafter’s chamber, but he was game. We took my bag of food in and Hafter closed the foot-thick outer door, and then another inner one. We were closed off from all the sound in the world, it seemed. Hafter told me to scream as loud as I could. I yelled. Once. Twice. Again. The. Sound. Stopped. So. Abruptly. It. Seemed. To. Disappear. When I crunched into a celery stick, the sound was pure, clean, crisp, and beautiful. The first bite of an apple—in sound isolation from everything else in the world—punctuated the air with absolute clarity and an unmistakable imprint. If I were given the choice between eating an apple or a piece of chocolate in the chamber, I would choose the apple. Eating it was like making music.

I chewed a few other foods: a sourdough hard pretzel, a carrot, and a potato chip, recognizing each one’s signature tones. When I left the chamber, I had a new appreciation for the stark beauty of the sound of food, often lost in the normal thrum of daily life.

We don’t need to eat in anechoic chambers in order to appreciate the sensory thrill of sounds like that first bite of apple. We just need to listen more carefully to what our food has to say and find a new appreciation for its audio output. If only we could learn to take sensory pleasure from the sound of food, similar to the way we revel in the aroma or appearance of a dish. We might eat more healthfully if we fully realized that an apple delivers the type of sonic performance that you could never get from a bowl of ice cream. Even if all we did was pay more attention to the sound of the food we eat, we might take one less bite and enjoy it twice as much.