The sensory experience of eating is an important determinant of how tasty a person thinks a particular type of food or a piece of meat is. However, it’s not always just the taste that matters. Factors, such as the food’s sight, smell, taste, and texture come first. And most importantly the information one has about it.
Our beliefs about how certain foods are produced and processed can shape our eating experience, according to a new study led by Lisa Feldman Barrett, University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. For the study, identical meat samples with different descriptions were given to participants to taste. They found that the meat samples paired with descriptions of animals raised on factory farms looked, smelled, and tasted less pleasant to study participants than the meat samples paired with descriptions of animals raised on humane farms. Participants’ beliefs also influenced their perceived flavour of the meat and the amount of meat they consumed, suggesting that beliefs can actually influence eating behaviour.
Similarly, wine, for instance, tastes better if we think it’s expensive—even if the fine vintage we’ve been told we’re drinking is really a cheap knock-off from a corner store. “We show that what you feel very directly influences not only how you interpret what you see but also very literally what you see,” said Barrett, “we call this ‘affective realism’—the tendency of your feelings to influence the actual content of your perceptual experience.”
This theory works on a concept called grounded cognition, which defines beliefs as instances of conceptual knowledge that include affective and sensory neural representations. As noted in the paper, “beliefs that meat came from animals that suffered would be represented, in part, in regions of the brain that are associated with the embodied simulation of animals’ experience.”
For years clever marketing has been utilising these theories to influence people to buy health foods with extravagant descriptions and promoting organic foods for a higher cost. People are willing to pay more than the original price for an item they believe came from a hygienic manufacturer over a regular seller. “Beliefs are really powerful. Words are really powerful,” Barrett said. “They influence what you do, often in surprising ways.”
Anisha Naidu