My mother is a great cook, and an adventurous one. Throughout my childhood, she made flan and soufflé and once, memorably, a dish called “pungent fish balls.” But she was also busy and often didn’t have time to cook from scratch, and I wonder sometimes about my longing for small memories of her culinary non-grandeur. Mac and cheese from a box, for instance, or “cheese toast” for lunch: wheat bread in the toaster oven with cheddar cheese and paprika. I can find all the necessary ingredients for this particular snack within 50 feet of my apartment, but I have never once made it for myself. I never really want cheese toast, it turns out. Cheese and bread tastes like cheese and bread. So why is it that I’ll still eat it in a heartbeat if my mom makes it?
To investigate, I talked to Dr. Alan Hirsch, founder and neurological director of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago, about the ways mom’s cooking shapes our memories of childhood and our preferences as adults.
Why is our mothers’ cooking so special to us?
It’s a matter of olfactory evoked nostalgia. We looked at 989 people from 45 states and 39 countries, and we found the number-one odor that made people nostalgic for their childhood was baked goods; the smell of mom’s baking.
But what if your mom never baked?
The memories we have are not true memories. When we have a memory, it’s really a compilation. In our culture, we perceive the maternal influence as being the comforter, the one who bakes apple pie, and we come to associate that with our mother, even if it’s through false or perceived memories. My best guess would be that we do it because that’s the memory that we want to have.
So our memories of our childhood could have nothing to do with the things we actually experienced as children?
That’s right. It could be things that we learned to associate with childhood. There is often a very wide variation between what you recall and what actually happened. We think of memories as being a stable thing, but memory fluctuates, depending upon our immediate past experience, our emotional affect at the time, and our expectation. Even if our mothers weren’t cooking, we somehow as a culture have developed that association, and it affects the way we remember childhood. Your memories change along with your experience.
Ok, so getting back to your study, why do baked goods in particular remind us of childhood?
I think it’s because you associate baked goods with a more positive eating experience than you do with, say, Brussels sprouts. I think most kids at one time or another ate Brussels sprouts, but they don’t say that they make them recall their childhood. Baked goods were given as a reward, at dessert. Or when you were coming home, and you were particularly hungry, you got cookies or baked goods for a snack, so that’s why people have this nostalgia for them. Nostalgia is really a sanitized memory of the past. We remember the good and forget the bad.
And what’s the relationship between nostalgia and smell?
The quickest way to a change of mood or behavior, quicker than any of the other sensory modalities, is smell. When you smell something you immediately decide whether you like it or you don’t like it, and then you figure out what it is, whether it’s rose or lilac–which is totally different than all the other sensory spheres. When you see a picture of a cow or a horse, you identify it, and then you decide if you like it or not. With smells it’s the exact opposite. It’s a pure affective or emotional sense.
Anatomically, it’s hardwired. The part of the brain that processes smells is actually right there where the emotions are, and that’s because odors were important for the survival of the species — to be able to detect if there were any particular pheromones present, or if a lion was about to attack you. It was important for an infant’s survival to be able to smell the mother. All these things were evolutionarily important, so it makes sense why smell would continue to be so emotional.
To what degree does the food we eat as children define our preferences as adults?
What we’ve found is that the foods that you like in ages 0-7 tend to be foods that you like throughout adulthood. The part of the brain that’s oriented towards food preferences seems to develop then; it’s almost imprinted. Now, the reality is, there can be negative experiences that change this — you develop an aversion, you get sick from something and then you avoid eating it again. But that’s the exception rather than the rule.
And how do we learn to like what we like?
Part of it has to do with past experience. If your mother eats Chinese food when she’s pregnant, you’re more likely to like Chinese food later on. If your mother eats carrots when she’s nursing you, you’re more likely to like carrots. There’s this phenomenon of “neophobia,” when you’re fearful of new foods. The more you’re exposed to a food, the more you like it, and if you’re exposed at a very early age, you like it that much more.
So part of it is this exposure, and part of it has to do with your genetics. We all taste differently. Some people can’t taste the bitter taste that’s found in green leafy vegetables, and they tend to like vegetables more. All of these things will impact your preferences. And superimposed on that are cultural expectations– seeing commercials for “Trix are for kids”– that make you more oriented towards one food over another.
We’ve also looked at geographic distributions of olfactory evoked nostalgia. While baked goods are number one, people from the East coast describe the smell of flowers as making them nostalgic for childhood. In the South it was the smell of fresh air, and in the Midwest it was the smell of farm animals. On the West coast it was the smell of meat cooking or meat barbequing. It also depends on when you were born. For people born from 1900 to 1930, natural smells made them nostalgic for their childhood—trees, horses, hay, pine, that sort of thing. People born from 1930 to 1980 were more likely to describe artificial smells that make them nostalgic for childhood—Playdoh, Pez, Sweet Tarts, Vapo rub, jet fuel.
But we’re able to like things that we didn’t like in early childhood, right?
We are culturally inclined to do so. For instance, coffee– kids don’t like coffee, because it is very bitter. But it’s part of the maturing experience in our society to drink coffee, so you can learn to drink this bitter drink that normally people would be averse towards. There are certain things you can acquire. Like alcohol, people don’t normally like the taste of beer, because it’s bitter, but you can learn to acquire that taste.
As it turns out, those jitters you feel after eating a McDonald’s hamburger may not just be the contents of your meal eating away at your insides — it’s your brain getting stressed out. As the Daily Mail reported today, a study by researchers at the University of Toronto (which will be published in the journal Psychological Science) has found that exposure to fast-food symbols — including the logos of McDonald’s, KFC, Subway and Taco Bell — make people both less likely to save money and more likely to feel like they’re running out of time.
The study was conducted by exposing students to nearly imperceptible flashes of images (for 12 to 80 milliseconds) that included, in some cases, fast-food logos. The students were then asked to read text and choose between two different kinds of skin-care treatments — a three-in-one or a separate cleanser. As it turns out, the subliminal exposure to fast-food marketing caused the students to read “significantly faster” and made them more likely to choose the more time-saving product.
The researchers concluded “fast food, originally designed to save time, can have the unexpected consequence of inducing haste and impatience” and “preference for time-saving products when there are potentially other important aspects upon which to choose a product.” So, basically, driving past a McDonald’s on the highway has the potential to not only make you drive faster, it will make you more likely to buy two-for-one Pantene Pro-V Shampoo and Conditioner the next time you go to Duane Reade. One, it seems, is considerably less ominous than the other.
Although the study’s sample is remarkably small (57 students), and there are probably a number of factors that would result in the preference for combined skin-care products (like past experience), its results aren’t exactly surprising. Anybody who’s spent time in a fast-food business, watching meals get churned out at a hyper-fast rate, has probably felt a twinge of impatience once they leave. And for an example of how time spent surrounded by hyper-convenience can alter people’s expectations in ridiculous ways, just spend time talking to a New Yorker about, well, anything.
This past Saturday morning, the buttery sound of Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s words stopped me in mid-breakfast. On her radio show “The Splendid Table,” she spoke of menus being “invitations to pleasure,” and there was something in that, with the sun streaming through my friend’s window, that sounded wonderful and right. But her guest was William Poundstone, author of “Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value and How to Take Advantage of It,” and he talked about how restaurants use menus to manipulate you into spending more money than you intend.
“Menus,” he said, “are supposed to be the classic example of free choice, but menu designers have found that there’re many ways of getting you to order what the restaurant wants you to order” — the most profitable dishes, presumably.
The techniques he laid out are fascinating: a box drawn around certain items, for instance, always draws the eyes — and attention — there. This might mean these dishes best highlight the kitchen’s skills, or, more likely, they make the restaurant the most money: The ingredient cost is low, or maybe they take the least staff time to prepare.
But, more subtly, the box might not simply be encouraging you to order whatever’s in it. “There are places where there’s a $150 hamburger,” Poundstone said. “The first thing everyone does is shake their head. But then you go down the menu, suddenly the $50 steak doesn’t seem so outrageous.” Our sense of value is always relative, and a technique like this, which gets you over your sticker shock early, can skew that sense just enough for you to find yourself saying, “I’ll have the steak medium rare, please.”
Similarly, when a menu offers a choice between portion sizes, the more expensive large will make the small seem like a better deal. Poundstone suggests that the smaller size is often the more profitable one, but I’m not sure. You have to account for staff time — it takes just as long to cook a half-plate of pasta as it does a full one, for instance — and, of course, exactly how much more food the cooks are putting in the large order. But still, the savviest restaurateurs know that having a larger, more expensive version of a dish makes the small one seem like a good deal, and they’ll make sure, small or large, it’s a high-profit item to begin with.
As he spoke, I recalled the lessons I learned on menu layout in culinary school, most of which revolved around the Prime Objective: make people forget about money. Round to the nearest dollar and skip the cents, avoiding more numerals that can draw attention to the cost. Don’t align the prices at the right side of the page, causing people to run their eyes down the column and compare numbers without even reading the menu items. (And lines that lead the eyes from the item to the price are a mortal sin in the eyes of Mammon.) Knowing that the eyes hit the upper right side of a menu first upon opening it, savvy designers will put the items they want to push in that area, so they catch your attention first. They’ll bury the ones they don’t want to feature — the ones that don’t make money, or the ones that just sell themselves without any help — below those. If it’s a two-page menu, you will go back and read the entire left page, take another look at the top right, and by the time you get to the middle and bottom of the right page, your attention is probably fading. So that’s where they bury the items that they don’t mark up that much or dishes like the steak, because the guy that’s going to order the steak is probably going to order the steak regardless of where it is. And all this strategy is before we even get to menu wording, which is another art in itself.
At the end of the interview, Kasper gave a chuckle and said, “Ah, nothing like being a victim at the restaurant.” It was a gentle joke (can anything said in her hot cocoa voice sound harsher than a mild chiding?), but we, the Masters of our Destiny, always bristle at the idea of being manipulated, and I wondered about the fairness of her insinuation.
The first rejoinder of course is that restaurants are not dinner parties; they’re businesses trying to make money. But looking over my vast collection of menus, ones slipped under my door by delivery boys, I see none of these design techniques, but plenty of extra decimal places and right-justified numbers. And I realized that it’s a certain type of restaurant that has resources to expend on menu psychology.
The fact is that these sorts of restaurants are selling you more than a full belly. They are selling you an experience, an entertainment, a fantasy of your life as expressed in a meal. And what meal tastes better when you’re busy calculating how much each bite is costing you? Of course, people have their budgets to follow, and ones with tight budgets are likely going to be extra vigilant of how much they’re spending regardless of subtle design tricks. But once they’ve committed their money, shouldn’t they also get the most out it by enjoying the night without worry?
There is an important distinction between saying that these menus are hiding their prices and saying that they are helping you to focus on the food when making your choices. The former is cynical. The latter gets you excited for what’s going to come, looking forward to the evening unfolding before you. There’s something every smart restaurateur knows: Make your business feel like a dinner party, and people will come back. And pay again.
What tastes better than cardboard? Sweet cardboard! After being told by customers that their food tasted like paper products, Domino’s announced, in a painfully earnest mea culpa ad campaign, that it was revitalizing its pizza, featuring a new, sweeter sauce. A company on the ropes, losing money for six straight quarters, was confident banking its future on sauce that tastes more like candy than it already did.
But just a week before Domino’s announced its “Pizza Turnaround,” General Mills took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to announce that it would, at some uncertain point, lower the sugar content in its cereal to “single digit” levels. The two campaigns illustrate our complicated relationship with sugar.
There is a big psychological difference between “sweetness” and “sugar.” Sweetness is good. It tastes good, and it feels good, going all the way back to our reptilian brains. But our nutritional superego constantly battles our sweet-toothed id: Sugar is bad, it’s tooth decay and empty calories. We call in a seemingly endless string of substitutes, from rat-killing chemicals to low-glycemic-index nectars, to exorcise the demon of sugar from the deliciousness of sweet things.
Regardless of everything we have learned, however, our food just keeps getting sweeter and more sugary. According to a report from the Times of London, many of the foods we buy are markedly sweeter than they were 30 years ago — cereal, bread, soup and even fruit.
Susan Brown, an apple specialist with the Cornell University Agricultural Research Station, denies that the fruit she is working on has more sugar, but acknowledges that “high-quality” fruit is defined, in large part, by a high level of “perceived sweetness.” (Which she achieves by creating a balance of sugar and acids, which otherwise tend to mask sweetness.)
Sweetness has always been a sign of caloric energy, so it makes sense that we evolved to want it. But why do our tastes seem to be tilting ever more in its direction, even with calories so readily available to us? To find out, we talked to Brian Wansink, head of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, and author of the book “Mindless Eating,” an investigation of what we eat and why. Salon talked to Wansink about corn syrup, conspiracy theories and what happens when trendy vilification is the hallmark of our attitude toward nutrition.
Domino’s sauce is just one of many savory-sweet foods on the market now. It’s common to see flavors like “caramelized onion” and “sweet chili.” Does the savory-sweet combo make foods more appealing?
Definitely. What goes on is something called “sensory-specific satiety.” It means that if you eat lots and lots of handfuls of popcorn, eventually you’re going to get tired of eating popcorn. And if you eat M&M after M&M, eventually you get tired of eating M&Ms. But if you dump a handful of M&Ms into the popcorn, you can eat a ton. Combining the sweet and savory stimulates people into wanting to keep eating because their taste buds don’t burn out.
But even though it tastes good, we know that sugar is bad for us. Why isn’t our increased nutritional awareness bringing down the sugar levels in food?
Well, one reason was our vilification of fat. We did an environmental scan of over 370 of the most popular snack food products and what we found was, when they went to low-fat, the average calorie level only dropped by 11 percent because they replaced fat with sugar. That’s just ridiculous! If you were to ask most people how many fewer calories are in something that’s labeled low-fat, the majority of people will say between 40-50 percent. Studies show that people end up eating more of something if they think it’s low-fat, and even if it is low-fat, they end up eating more total calories as a result.
And what about all the super-sweet protein bars out there, which are marketed as a healthy food? Isn’t that fundamentally wrong?
The thing is, there was a kind of witch-hunting phase where we demonized sugar back in the late ’80s. But if you look at it, there’s a really nice case to be made for sugar. Let’s use chocolate milk as an example. If you’re trying to get kids to drink milk, and you add just a little more chocolate and a little more sugar, and add 30 more calories to it, you know, I don’t really think that’s bad compared to them ordering Goofy Grape punch with the same number of calories and really nothing in it.
I think the same thing with Powerbars. If adding the sugar makes the high concentration of protein a little more stomach-able, I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing. People eat more protein, it sticks with them longer, they have fewer subsequent cravings for food, and if the cost is a few spoonfuls of sugar, I’m not so sure that’s such a bad cost.
But the more sugar we eat, the more we need in order to taste it. Are we raising kids who have a super-high tolerance for sugar?
It’s called adaptation levels, whether it’s the amount of sugar we put on anything or the amount of salt, or Tabasco. People get acclimated to a certain level of stimulation, and below that, stuff just tastes boring. So that becomes the new benchmark they need to sort of respond to whenever they season their food.
The Times of London article claims that food scientists are breeding fruits and vegetables to be sweeter, so even our baseline understanding of what’s “naturally” sweet is changing. Is that true?
You know, it’s cool because it has the sniff of conspiracy to it, it’s like “Ooh I think I found something!” but the stuff is so mixed it’s hard to be really sure. I know data that says yes and data that says no.
Speaking of conspiracy theories, there are a lot of people, including Michael Pollan, who blame our increased tolerance for sweetness on high-fructose corn syrup and the power of corn lobbies over the food industry. Do you believe them?
I don’t know that it’s the problem with sweetness. There’s a reason why corn syrup is a substitute — because it’s cheaper. When people go, “Oh, we need to go all organic!” I think, gee whiz, who’s gonna starve? It’s not going to be you, Mr. Rich Yuppie. It’s gonna be somebody else. I’m frightened to think what the unintended consequence would be of going back to cane sugar as a sweetener for everything.
I have read studies that show that people eat more sweets when they’re stressed. We’re in a recession. People are worried about money, and Domino’s is known for being inexpensive. Does our general stress level contribute to the appeal of sweeter pizza?
We’re doing a really cool study where we’re looking at the sales of healthy and unhealthy foods across Cornell University based on exam time versus non-exam time, and the effect is less than you think. The junk food definitely goes up during exams, but what we find, surprisingly, is that in the weeks after exams there’s a reversion that ends up almost wiping out the effects.
The studies of “mood & food” stuff tend to be very episodic. It ends up being like, “OK, what we’re going to do is we’re going to run in and tell half the people in this room that their grandmother just died, and then we’re gonna see how much they eat.” This doesn’t look at whether there is any compensation or any sort of bounce-back effect that takes place afterwards. And the studies that do look at this stuff longitudinally show that there ends up being this kind of recompensation that occurs, except in the most bizarrely artificial situations, which tend to be the ones reported.
Do you think Domino’s will succeed with its new pizza?
What is a typical person who orders Domino’s? It’s not your nutritionist, it’s not your activist. It’s your typical American, and your typical American goes, “Man! Sweeter sauce! This is good stuff!” We recently had an emergency, a surprise guest, and I’ve got a Domino’s box within 10 feet of my recycling right now.
Was it good?
Oh yeah.
A McDonald's flag flies with the American flag at the world's oldest-operating McDonald's, located in Downey, CA. 
