Posted on January 13 2018
While many of us like to believe that we are not easily deceived, our sense of taste is often fooled by our sense of sight. This is because humans have certain expectations of how food should look. When a food’s color is off or is different than what we expect, our brain tells us that it tastes different too. Long supported by scientific studies, we use visual cues from color to identify and judge the quality and taste of what we eat.
Eat With Your Eyes
Your taste buds play an important role in determining the four basic groups of taste, which are sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. When your taste buds come in contact with food, they send signals to your brain to interpret flavor. Because we look at our food before eating, however, our eyes send signals to our brain well before our taste buds get the chance. This can predetermine how we will perceive the taste and flavor of what we’re about to eat.
Color is often the first element noticed in the appearance of a food product. Humans begin to associate certain colors with various types of foods from birth, and equate these colors to certain tastes and flavors throughout life. For example, we may expect yellow pudding to have a banana or lemon flavor and red jelly beans to have a cherry or cinnamon flavor. In fresh foods, such as fruits and vegetables, we rely on the color to determine their level of ripeness and or freshness. If the color of a food product does not match our expectations, we may perceive its taste and flavor differently – a psychological effect some food companies use to their advantage.
Showing Ones True Colors?
To give the impression of a certain taste, flavor, or quality, food coloring or dyes are added to processed, packaged, and even fresh foods. Adding a red colorant to the skin of an apple, for example, may influence consumers into believing the apple is sweeter in taste. In a study published in the Journal of Food Science, researchers found that people confused flavors when a drink did not have the appropriate color. A cherry-flavored drink manipulated to be orange in color was thought to taste like an orange drink, and a cherry drink manipulated to be green in color was thought to taste like lime.
Color additives are also used to offset the effects of color loss during the manufacturing process because of exposure to light, changes in temperature, moisture, and storage conditions. At other times, additives are used to enhance the food’s natural color or to provide color to foods that are normally colorless. This can be seen in the seafood industry, where farm-raised salmon, typically an unappealing gray color, is dyed pink to give the impression that the fish is of high quality and very fresh.
The role color plays in our perception of taste has long been researched by food companies to better understand consumer behavior and how that impacts the perception of their products. Without these visual cues, our taste buds might get confused and not recognize the lemon flavor in pudding or cherry flavor in jelly beans that we’ve grown to expect. While food colorants have been highly debated over the past few years due to questionable health effects, food companies know that consumers determine the quality and taste of a food product long before their taste buds have had a chance to process it.
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