In his book Gastrophysics, Oxford University psychologist Professor Charles Spence explains how the way we serve food can completely change how it tastes – and how satisfied with it we may therefore be. Here are 5 tips from the book that could help you shrink your portions.
- Take the lid off your coffee cup: Smell plays a role in how intense things taste. When you drink a coffee from a takeaway cup with its lid on you don’t get the odour and so lose some of the flavour with it – the same thing happens if you drink something direct from the bottle. Take the lid off your coffee cup and pour other drinks into a glass and you might not need so much.
- Serve sweet food on round plates. We think things taste sweeter if they are associated with round shapes – and again, this can see us more satisfied by less food. This might mean simply serving dessert on a round dish, or try serving ice cream in a scoop or use a melon baller to serve fruit rather that cutting it into chunks.
- Serve hot chocolate in an orange cup: It tastes chocolateier and so you might not feel as if you need as much.
- Buy a red plate: ‘People eat significantly less when served food on a red plate than when offered the same food from plateware of another colour,’ says Professor Spence. In fact, people ate twice as many pretzels from a white plate than a red one in one study.
- Buy a bowl: All those instagrammers are onto something – food tastes better from a bowl. ‘It allows, maybe even encourages the diner to take a hearty sniff – something people would be less likely to do from a plate,’ says Professor Spence. The heavier the bowl the better – you’ll think you’re getting lots more food if it feels hefty to lift.
