Charles Spence: The Perfect Meal The launch of the new book by the Oxford
professor who is changing the way we understand the enjoyment of
food
Charles Spence (pictured above) is a dude.
Red trousers, big open cuffs, pacing oratory.
He’s a professor of experimental psychology at the University of
Oxford, where he heads up the Crossmodal Research Laboratory, and
he’s just written a book titled The Perfect Meal. Recently he
convened a
lunch to launch the book at the Bengal Brasserie in South
Kensington, so I went along.
Proceedings began with a sampling of whisky vapour, and a chance to
take part in an experiment: can you tell the difference between the
sound of pouring of Champagne, Prosecco and mineral water? (The
results are still coming in, but it looks like the answer might be
yes.) Over lunch, which was really good, Spence gave a presentation
talking about the subject of the perfect meal, and beginning with a
fabulous quote from MFK Fisher.
Once at least in the lifetime of every human, whether he be brute or
trembling daffodil, comes a moment of complete gastronomic
satisfaction. It is, I am sure, as much a matter of spirit as of
body. Everything is right, nothing jars. There is a kind of harmony,
with every sensation and emotion melted into one chord of
well-being.
MFK Fisher, The Pale Yellow Glove, 1937
‘This is the perfect meal,’ says Spence. ‘We have all had one—we
know what she is talking about— and it is probably different for
each one of us. The question is, can the science and neuroscience
help get us a little closer to that perfect meal?’
This is the subject of Spence’s new book, which brings a scientific
perspective to flavour. He regrets the fact that this topic has been
little studied. ‘My colleagues aren’t interested in food: it’s dirty
and messy, people get full up and they spill it, and they’d much
rather test people on computers with flashing images.’ Spence cites
William James, writing in 1892: ‘Of the food lover’s prized
possession – taste, smell, thirst, hunger – little of psychological
interest is known.’
How did people think of the perfect meal of the future in the past?
French chemist Marcellin Berthelot introduced the concept of the
‘meal in a pill’ back in 1894, anticipating the triumph of synthetic
chemistry over agriculture and farming. Feminist writers such as
Anna Dodd also latched onto the idea of food in pill form taking
women away from the shackles of their domestic chores. In her 1887
satirical novel Republic of the Future, she states, ‘when the
last pie was made into the first pellet, women’s true liberation
began.’ (Although Dodd was probably tongue-in-cheek here.) ‘For me
this this is not the perfect meal,’ says Spence. ‘It can’t be – it
is unsensory. It might fill a certain need, but it doesn’t stimulate
our senses in the way that we want food and drink to do.’
When the world’s top chefs are writing about the perfect meal, they
think of their creative process in terms of senses. Ferran Adria
claims that cooking is the most multisensory art: ‘I try to
stimulate all the senses’. Closer to home, Heston Blumenthal has
claimed that eating is the only thing that we do that involves all
the senses: taste, smell, touch, pain, vision and hearing. They are
all involved in experiencing and enjoying the flavour of the food on
the plate.
‘None of us realize how much influence the senses have on the way we
process the information from the plate into our brain, and construct
the flavours that we like or dislike, enjoy, crave or remember,’
says Spence, who has collaborated with Blumenthal. ‘He has been a
key figure in going to science labs every few months to find out
what scientists have discovered about the mind on flavour, and then
try to interpret this to create something wonderful on a plate that
is memorable and stimulating, because it is built on the brain
science and can more effectively stimulate the senses.’
But the perfect meal isn’t just about the senses. ‘It is also about
memories and emotions,’ says Spence. ‘Increasingly the perfect meal
is about the theatricalization: the imagination and storytelling are
all brought to bear to turn the food into something memorable.’
Spence claims to be a poor cook, but his contribution
here is the
science. ‘Every day in the lab at Oxford we are thinking about how
what we see might change what we taste, how what we feel might
change what we smell, and how changing smell might change what we
taste. All the senses are connected in ways that we don’t
understand. They interact more than we realize in ways that the
science is only just beginning to elucidate.’
But while he thinks that science has a role to play in order to
stimulate diners more successfully, he is worried about taking
science too far. He’s not a big fan of neuroscientists sticking
people in fMRI machines. ‘If you were to volunteer to take part in
an experiment you would be put on a tray, your head would be clamped
still, you’d be given headphones to black out the 120 db of
background noise, a tube would be inserted into your mouth and you
would be slowly inserted into the coffin. periodically you would be
given a squirt of 4 ml of liquid.’ Yes, various brain areas light up
in these experiments, but they are hardly natural settings.
‘I think this is taking things too far: no one has had their perfect
meal lying in one of those machines with a periodic puree being
pumped into your mouth,’ says Spence. ‘It tells you something and it
is important, but I don’t think it tells you about the perfect meal
and how to get closer to it.’
He thinks a fruitful area for study is to gain insights from the
chefs who often intuitively have picked up on the various elements
of what makes a great meal experience and then to try to study these
aspects. He gives the example of a restaurant where you have to book
two months in advance. This is raising expectations. Then a month
before the meal you get a note in the post, scented with a fragrance
which you then experience as you enter the restaurant. Then, as you
leave, you are given a bag of sweets, which you take home, extending
the meal experience.
What about cutlery? The Fat Duck, for example, is known for its
incredibly heavy cutlery – is this part of the perfect meal? Does
the weight in your hand make things taste better? Spence mentions
and experiment that looked at this, with 160 diners in the Sheraton
Grand in Edinburgh. Half use the regular heavy cutlery, the other
half use lighter cutlery, and those using the heavier are willing to
pay £1.50–£2 a plate more for the same food.
He gives the example of Denis Martin in the Valais, whose restaurant
has 2 Michelin stars. It’s based in the middle of a knitting museum.
Martin can see when people walk through the door that they aren’t
going to enjoy his modern Swiss cuisine fully: they are uptight,
suited Swiss businessmen dining on an expenses account. How does he
solve this? People are told to arrive at 7 pm and there’s nothing on
the tablecloth except for a toy Swiss cow. Nothing happens until
someone picks the cow up and it moos, and before long the restaurant
is filled with the sounds of laughter and mooing cows. This breaks
the atmosphere: a psychological palate cleanser, preparing people
for the meal to come.
Then there’s ‘digital seasoning’. This began with Heston
Blumenthal’s Sound of the Sea dish (recipe
here - I
won’t be trying it at home), where diners are given a conch with an
ipod shuffle in it, and listen on headphones to a marine soundtrack
that works to enhance the flavour of the dish. A residence at the
House of Wolf in Islington took this idea more midmarket, with theme
music playing with each dish across the whole restaurant. And this
was taken further mass market by British Airways: customers on long
haul can dial in on headset to music that matches the taste of their
food.
Spence notes that some high profile new restaurants have been
multisensory. There’s Ultraviolet in Shanghai, a 10 seater
restaurant based in a secret location (you get taken there). It’s a
high-tech experiential dining room, with each course enhanced by a
taste-tailored atmosphere. For example, it serves fish and chips
with sounds of the sea, projections of the Union flag on the table,
and a device squirting out marine smells: it’s a true multisensory
experience.
There’s Sublimotion in Ibiza, which at £1200 a head is thought to be
the world’s most expensive restaurant. ‘At this sort of price it
cannot just be about the food and taste and flavours,’ says Spence.
‘It has to be about the whole experience.’ And Sublimotion certainly
delivers an experience.
One of the strongest influence on flavour is visual. ‘We are led by
our eyes,’ says Spence. He refers to a dish (again, from Heston)
that’s a scoop of pink/red food that looks like strawberry ice
cream. It’s actually a crab bisque and Heston thought it tasted
wonderful, but people found it over-seasoned and too salty. The eyes
say ‘sweet’ and the palate says ‘savoury’, and the result is that
given this expectation, it ends up tasting too salty. ‘The first
experience of this dish has to be right and involve the right name,’
says Spence. ‘If you call this dish fugue 386 it’s enough to suspend
expectations and you come at it with a fresh palate and it will
taste seasoned just right – the chef has to get into the mind of the
diner and to lead their expectations.’
How food looks matters now more than ever, in the age of smartphones
and sharing pictures of our dishes on social media. Back in the
1960s French chefs didn’t care how things looked: food was about the
taste, and it was served on the plate as it might be at home. Then
came nouvelle cuisine and things began to change. ‘In the 21st
Century the perfect meal should look just so,’ says Spence.
The way a plate looks is a key element in our enjoyment, but does it
make a difference with taste? Yes is the answer. This has been
studied. Many chefs these days do asymmetric plating , but in
studies people are willing to pay less and enjoy the food less than
if the food is plated in a more symmetrical manner.
Places like El Bulli and the Fat Duck are very exclusive, and few
can afford to eat out like this on a regular basis. Most won’t
experience this sort of dining at all. So what is the relevance?
Spence thinks that what is going on in the best restaurants is like
Formula One of the kitchen. Just as the technology of the leading
race teams filters down to domestic cars, insights from the
experimental kitchens will be applied to benefit us all, and will
show up before too long on the high street .
The colour of the plate matters. In one experiment, Ferran Adria
took one of his desserts and served it to half on a white plate and
half on a black one. It tasted 10% sweeter and 15% more flavourful
on the white plate. And in a hospital setting, patients ready for
procedure are often given a red tray. But ‘red’ says ‘don’t eat me’:
put anything on a red plate or red tray, and people will eat less.
To finish with, Spence mentioned that insects may be the food of the
future, as current dining practices are unsustainable. But most of
us find the idea of eating insects appalling. The challenge for
Spence and his colleagues is to apply all this knowledge on the
psychology of food to get us all ready to find the food of our
future delicious rather than unpalatable.
