We eat with our eyes – this we know.
Think of airplane food, or of a soggy takeaway that’s accidentally been bashed around on the way home.
No matter how hungry you are or how much you thought you’d enjoy it, it just doesn’t taste good because it doesn’t look appealing.
Well, according to Heston Blumenthal, that same principal applies to our brains.
Even imagining something while eating can have a transformative effect on how whatever is in your mouth tastes, he reckons.
To prove his point, the celebrity chef recently told a journalist who was interviewing him to take a sip of wine while picturing someone she “loved dearly.”
He then asked her to take another sip and picture someone she really disliked.
“The difference is marked,” Kerrie O’Brien wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald.
“In the second there’s a bitter taste not apparent in the first.”
Heston explained that it shows how closely our brains and emotion are linked to taste.
“I only discovered this about a month ago,” he said. “It might be the single greatest discovery that I’ve made.”
You could read a lot into that but what we’re hearing is that we can make the wine we buy right before pay day taste incredible if we just think of Ryan Gosling.
Certainly something we’ll be trying…
