George Bernard Shaw once said – “There is no sincerer love than the love of food.”
We further say that food nourishes the body and is fodder for the soul. Food is So much more than simply putting a few ingredients together. It is a multi-sensory experience that involves all five senses – taste, smell, sight, sound, and touch. The smell of the food, its texture, color and appearance, and sound when we chew all contribute to our reception n of food. Based on a combination of the senses, we gauge if the food is delicious, good, unpleasant, or downright disgusting. Our minds have many tasks when ingesting food, from identifying and assessing the quality to relatively passive processes such as the increased production of saliva or gastric juices that aid digestion. Let’s take a look at how each of these factors affects our experience and interact with each other:
Taste
While most assume that food is all about taste, it works with other senses. There are five basic tastes: bitter, sweet, sour, salty and “fleshy” (umami), each of which has a role in food selection. If we had to race with the five senses for food, the taste would probably emerge as the winner, albeit with a minor margin.
Sight
We all know just how vital a presentation is. A beautifully arranged food is more likely to be well-received than one presented hotch-potch. Everyone can claim to have had one meal that stands out or was one of the worst dining-out experiences they’ve ever had due to the presentation. We get a whole new angle when we add colors to the mix. We are conditioned to know what something will taste like by its color. Generally, brown is associated with rotten fruit and vegetables, and red has sweeter properties (wholesome berries), yellow and orange will be sour, etc.
Sound
How would you like it if your paper or puri didn’t go crunch? Would you still think it was made fresh? Similar to sight, we recognize sounds with food biologically, which is essential when judging its freshness and avoiding spoiled foods. We love foods that generate sound. We particularly love crispy foods, one reason being their ability to stimulate hearing. In our heads, noisy foods signal freshness. Take a wet bag of chips. The taste may be the same, but if they are soggy, we’ll assume they’re wrong.
Touch
Textures simulate touch, which can be felt with your fingers, tongue, teeth, and palate. It’s the quality that helps us differentiate between the slimy feeling of jelly and chewing gum’s chewiness. Many people are as sensitive to textures as they are to smells, making it imperative to keep this ‘sense’ in mind while creating the food.
Smell
You know how when you have a cold and your nose is blocked, you cannot taste your food? The smell is essential when trying to gain the entire sensory experience. We associate smells with memories, which directly impacts how we perceive food. The perception through various senses plays an important role, in turn, triggers other processes in our body that are necessary for the metabolism of nutrients. Apart from the five senses, certain external factors also play an essential role in our perception of food. Not only the color of the food, but the setting, the table decorations, the surroundings, the lighting, and the background music can all influence the perception of our food. Only when we gain a more profound knowledge of the five senses’ perception of food and the external factors can we have a multisensory dining experience.
At Hawking St., we hope to provide you with a multisensory experience with added nostalgia. We aim to recreate the best foods from the food streets of India and the beautiful memories they bring with them.
