Do eating utensils affect the flavor of food?

Your taste is actually influenced by the utensils you use to eat it.

Psychologists at Oxford University asked participants to eat yogurt from spoons of different weights and colors and then rate the taste of each sample.

The researchers found that yoghurt was friable from light, tasting plastic spoons more dense and more expensive than yoghurt eaten from plastic spoons. This may be because our perception of taste is altered by unexpected experiences, such as a plastic spoon being unusually heavy, the researchers say.

The color of the cutlery was also important. White yoghurt taken from a white spoon had a higher degree of sweetness and quality than yoghurt. But when the white spoon was replaced with a black spoon, these results were reversed.

Even the shape of cutlery can affect a person's sense of taste. Cheese was rated more salty when served on a knife than when slathered from a spoon, fork, or toothpick.

“How we process food is a multisensory experience that includes the taste, the feeling of food in our mouths, our smell, and the sensations of our eyes. Even before we put food in our mouths, our brains have made a judgment about it, which affects our general experience. “

They say their research could be used to help change people's eating habits, such as portion size or the amount of salt added to meals, by providing cutlery in certain colors and shapes.