Tastes could not be discussed

I often hear that all store-bought food doesn't taste good and we can never make anything even close to home-cooked food. I, of course, disagree. I know for sure that this is not entirely true; there are a lot of worthy products on sale. It's just about different tastes.

We humans are extremely biased in our perception of the world around us. Let's forget for a moment the scientists who have sophisticated and not so complex instruments that allow them to judge the structure of the surrounding reality. An ordinary person does not have them, but has a standard set of senses that he is forced to rely on. Some people think that our senses give an adequate idea of ​​the world around us, but this is not so. Feelings are a set of electrical impulses that in themselves do not have any meaning. We do not see with our eyes, do not hear with our ears, do not smell with our nose and do not touch with our hands. Only the brain, having received a set of signals from different sense organs, comparing these signals with each other and comparing them with those stored in memory, gives us a subjective interpretation of the surrounding reality, which we perceive as objective. Can our feelings really lie?

An example of visual “self-deception” is the phenomenon of pareidolia, the ability to see images that do not exist. Some see images of faces in random geological formations on Mars. Others are images of “saints” in spots on the wall.

With vision, however, it is quite simple; the mechanism for processing visual signals is quite straightforward and does not often fail. The sense of smell, which plays a decisive role in evaluating food, is fertile ground for self-deception. Smell, which is based on much more emotional than rational and logical.

We humans are actually pretty bad sniffers. We are very bad at identifying objects by smell. You can conduct a simple experiment among your friends: let them smell some fruit or spice, or - even better - a flavoring. It must be done so that the subject cannot see and in no way guess what exactly he is evaluating. The vast majority of people cannot cope with this task on their own.

We are designed in such a way that when we see an orange, we can remember its smell, but it is very difficult for us to remember an orange after hearing its aroma. Only when the brain, sorting through the images available to it, comes across the image of an orange and compares the perceived olfactory signal, will it give its answer. And we will think: “It’s so simple, how did we not guess?”

We “anticipate” the smell, and therefore the taste, of the product by studying external factors. If you pour peach soda into a bottle with an orange on it, few people will notice the trick. It is enough to simply say that product A is tasty and B is tasteless, and most tasters will prefer A, even if they are the same thing.

Our perception is influenced by everything around us. First of all, appearance: it is no coincidence that restaurants try to present the dish beautifully on a plate. This is also the color, which is confirmed by experiments with wine tasters, who can rarely distinguish red wine from white wine tinted with paint. This is even a picture on the packaging - it is shown that children consider cereals from a box with cartoon characters to be tastier, even when they are the same cereal [1].

Even the price of the product affects the taste. Experiments have demonstrated that the same wine, served to tasters under the same conditions, receives different ratings depending on the cost of the drink [2]. More expensive wines, as expected, received higher ratings. It was confirmed that these assessments were accompanied by increased activity in the area of ​​the brain responsible for experiencing pleasure. The tasters were not just wishful thinking; their brains, in the process of processing the signal from the olfactory receptors, actually considered the expensive product more tasty. Despite the fact that the receptors received the same information, the results of its interpretation were different.

Professional tasters are aware of the unreliability of their own judgment. To obtain an objective picture, products for tasting are always rearranged in an anonymous form, at a strictly defined time. The tastings themselves are carried out in a room that excludes the influence of extraneous sound, light and other stimuli.

I often meet people who avoid store-bought food because it doesn't taste good. Some people make their own mayonnaise and dumplings. You can understand when it comes to health, although I would still argue which mayonnaise is more harmful. But people often explain their choice by the best taste.

We, food industry workers, usually focus on the results of blind independent tastings when working on a product. At closed tastings, taste preferences are not always distributed in favor of the homemade product. But he still wins when it comes to subjective ratings. After all, no one eats food under ideal laboratory conditions, and, as mentioned above, the perception of taste is a complex and ambiguous thing.

No matter how hard we try, we really can't beat home cooking. But it's not our fault. This is how we are made. For us, what we have prepared with our own hands for our family cannot be tasteless, diligently following recipes or, conversely, experimenting, filling the process itself with emotional content.

Even if it's the same product.

Sergey Belkov

1. Marketing Food to Kids with Cartoon Characters — http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/05/23/marketing-food-to-kids-with-cartoon-characters/

2. Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness — www.pnas.org/content/105/3/1050.long