By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
You probably thought picking something to eat was all about taste — something that you did with your tongue.
But Associate Professor Glen McNeil, MS, RD/LD of Fort Hays State University, set out Monday night to demonstrate food choice has much more involved. It relates to all your senses, emotions and external factors, such as education, religion and culture.
At the first Science Café at Thirsty’s Venue, McNeil started to look at food selection by looking at taste. That can be broken down into salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami. Umami is flavor we experience from broths and cooked meets.
“So what we do is we take these five components and combine them now with texture, temperature and odor and that produces flavor,” he said.
Although some taste receptors are more concentrated on certain parts of the tongue than others, there are food receptors for all five tastes all over the tongue.
Humans have an acquired taste for the five tastes. He used the example of salt.
“The more you use, the longer you use it, the more it takes to taste the salt,” he said. “If you add salt to your plate before you ever taste it, why? You don’t even know if it needs salt or not. It’s habit.”
If you add enough salt to something until you taste it, you have added too much, he said. Salt is a flavor enhancer.
McNeil challenged the audience to try to stop salting their food and eating foods high in salt for three days and then go back to adding the same amount of salt they had in the past.
He said they will see a marked difference in how salty things taste.
McNeil gave a couple of examples of foods that start sweet and then go to bitter, such as a tomato. Artificial sweeteners, especially the early ones like Saccharin, started out intensely sweet and then made a bitter aftertaste on the back of the tongue and throat.
McNeil then had his audience explore food through sight. He asked each person in the room to take a jelly bean out of a paper bag and try to determine what it would taste like based on its appearance. They then tasted the jelly beans. Some people had guessed their flavors correctly, others had not and still others could not put a name to the flavor of their jelly beans.
He then held up a bright yellow banana. Some people said the banana was ripe. Others said it was green.
Ripe bananas are actually mostly brown, soft and are more sweet — too sweet for most people, he said. Green bananas are more starchy.
“What we see is not always what food is meant to be,” he said.
Color can be important in affecting our food choices and perceptions of foods.
“We eat with our eyes,” McNeil said. “We make choices and selections with our eyes. We begin to associate colors with foods from shortly after birth.”
Food processors use coloring to affect our food choices. Strawberry milk has no strawberries in it. It has artificial coloring to make it pink and a mix of chemicals to make sweet.
We associate certain colors with certain favors. Some relate red with spicy like a red peppers.
People associate blue sports drinks with a sweeter taste, despite the fact they are flavored no differently and have no more sweetener than the other colors.
Perception also has effected portion size. A bottle of pop used to be eight ounces. Now a standard bottled beverage is 20 ounces. Bagels used to be three inches. Now they are they can barely fit in your hand. Hamburger patties used to be 10 per one pound of beef. Now the standard is a quarter pound.
“Serving sizes have grown as we have gotten into looking at them, looking at how much they fill a plate, looking at what we see,” McNeil said.
McNeil also brought audience participation into his program with a hearing test. His wife, behind a screen, popped popcorn, opened a pop, snapped celery, opened a bag of chips and bit into an apple.
“Sounds drive us to make selections in foods,” he said. “Sounds are used to judge quality in foods and what we see.”
To demonstrate how we use touch in food selection, McNeil prepared paper bags and asked audience members to identify the contents only by touching them. The items were marshmallows.
“Touch tells a lot of things, and there are two ways we touch,” he said. “We can touch with our fingers. We can also touch with our tongues. There are different ways to sense.”
Finally to illustrate smell, McNeil prepared bags full of peanuts.
Although you primarily take in aromas through your nose, you can also take in odors through your mouth.
Food manufactures take advantage of our sense of smell to entice us to eat certain products. They look for chemical signatures that produce the strongest response in consumers.
“Every smell has a chemical formula they can replicate,” McNeil said.
People are also conditioned to eat certain foods culturally, noting the Catholic custom of eating fish on Fridays.
Some people in Kansas eat mountain oysters, which are cattle testicles.
McNeil and his family lived in eastern Kentucky for a couple of years. One of his students had to miss class because she needed to go home and help her family castrate hogs. The family usually fed the testicles to their dogs.
McNeil asked the young women to bring him some of the testicles. He and his wife fried them and ate them.
“They thought I was nuts,” he said. “When she graduated the only thing her dad wanted to do was meet me. He came up and said, ‘Mr. McNeil, I just had to meet a guy who would eat testicles.’ We do that all the time at home. You eat head cheese. That is not overly appealing to us and chitlins and tripe, which is not bad, but it is different.”
Money, fads, nutrition knowledge, level of education, peer influence, time, temperature, and likes and dislikes all affect our food choices.
“The further you go in the educational system, whether it is formal or informal, the more educated we become, the broader your palate becomes — the more likely you are to try new and different foods and experiment with foods. It gets us out and we meet other people and we hear things and some people travel,” McNeil said.
Local environments also dictate the availability of certain foods. On the coasts, produce and seafood are more abundant. In Kansas, beef and pork is more available.
In the winter, we usually eat more soups and chilis.
“We eat warm foods,” he said. “We also have a tendency to eat more because it is cold out and here comes our genetic heritage. We need a little more fuel.”
Hunger is the physical sign your body gives you that you need food. Appetite is the psychological signal our body gives us about food, and that also affects food choices.
Marketers play on these emotions.
Perkins restaurant was struggling, so it created a commercial in which it panned across a table full of pancakes and pie with a simple theme song touting its name in the background. Sales soared. 7 Up used a radio commercial that depicted the sound of ice clinking in a glass, the pop pouring and then someone drinking the beverage. It was very successful.
You can see a video of the full presentation at www.fhsu.edu/smei.
The next Science Café titled “Thought Experiments Leading to the Theory of Relativity” by Dr. CD Clark III, associate professor of physics at FHSU, will be at 7 p.m. Oct. 29 at Thirsty’s Venue, 2704 Vine St.