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Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

Tom Vanderbilt

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781471100048
• eBook ISBN: 9781471100079
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Self Improvement

'A luminously intelligent exploration of the paradoxes of pleasure'– Guardian Everyone knows his or her favourite colour, the foods we most enjoy, and which season of The Sopranos deserves the most stars on Netflix. But what does it really mean when we like something? How do we decide what's good? Is it something biological? What is the role of our personal experiences in shaping our tastes? And how do businesses make use of this information? Comprehensively researched and singularly insightful, You May Also Like delves deep into psychology, marketing and neuroscience to answer these complex and fascinating questions. From the tangled underpinnings of our food choices, to the discrete dynamics of the pop charts and our playlists, to our non-stop procession of 'thumbs' and 'likes' and 'stars, ' to our insecurity before unfamiliar works of art, the book explores how we form our preferences - and how they shape us. It explains how difficult it is, even for experts, to pinpoint exactly what makes something good or enjoyable, and how the success of companies like Netflix, Spotify and Yelp! depends on the complicated task of predicting what we will enjoy. Like Traffic, this book takes us on a fascinating and consistently surprising intellectual journey that helps us better understand how we perceive and appreciate the world around us.

CHAPTER 1

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE?

THINKING ABOUT OUR TASTE FOR FOOD

IT ALL SOUNDS SO GOOD;

OR, WHY THERE IS SO LITTLE WE SHOULD NOT LIKE

Nowhere do we encounter the question of what we like so broadly, so forcefully, so instinctively as in a restaurant meal. Sitting down to eat is not just a ritual of nourishment but a kind of story. Venturing through the “course of a meal,” we encounter a narrative, with its prologues, its climaxes, its slow resolutions. But a meal is also a concentrated exercise in choice and pleasure, longing and regret, the satisfaction of wants and the creation of desires.

And so we begin our journey with the journey of a meal. It is a blustery winter day on the windy western reaches of Manhattan, but inside Del Posto, the Italian restaurant run by Mario Batali and Joe and Lidia Bastianich, the wood-paneled room is warmly lit, a pianist is deep into “Send in the Clowns,” and the red wine is being poured by a waiter with a Continental accent and well-honed charm.

What’s not to like?

Very little, really. One does not generally arrive at the white-clothed table of a restaurant accorded four stars by The New York Times, only to find a raft of unpalatable swill. The very fact that the food has made it onto the menu—the menu of a long-established culinary tradition—reflects that it is generally liked. We are not our evolutionary ancestors, forced to graze on the culinary savanna, scrounging for sustenance amid a host of unfamiliar plants and elusive prey, waiting for our bodies to tell us whether we like (or will survive) what we have chosen.

Nevertheless, the old tickle at the back of the brain—eat this, not that!—has hardly left us. We are born knowing two things: Sweet is good (caloric energy), bitter is bad (potential toxin). We also come into the world with a curious blend of full-spectrum liking and disliking. We are, on the one hand, omnivores. There is little we could not eat. As Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has helpfully pointed out, we share this “generalist” status “with such other worthy species as rats and cockroaches.” And yet, like rats, we are intensely “neophobic,” afraid of trying new foods. Being dual omnivores/neophobes has its evolutionary advantages: The latter trait kept us from ingesting the wrong things; the former made sure we had plenty of access to the right things. But neophobia can go too far. In some experiments, rats, once mildly poisoned by new foods, became so afraid of subsequent new foods that they starved to death.

We actually seem predisposed to be more acutely aware of what we do not like than of what we like. We are particularly alert to even minor changes in what we do like, as if we had an internal alarm for when things go wrong. When I am served, by mistake, diet soda, which I do not like and thus do not drink, my response borders on the visceral: Danger! This alarm is most well tuned for the bitter, and we rate “aversive” tastes as being more intense than pleasurable ones. The worm found in the last bite of an otherwise delicious apple will pretty much wipe out the pleasure accumulated from eating the rest of it. Although this may be an occasional drag on our ability to enjoy life, being primed to spot the bad helps us have a life to enjoy.

And so, a few days out of the womb, we are already expressing preferences, picking sugary water over the plain variety, making faces at (some) bitter foods. This is pure survival, eating to live. We start getting really choosy at around age two, when we have figured out (a) we might be sticking around for a while and (b) we have the luxury of choice. The need for raw sustenance explains why for infants nothing can really be too sweet: It is the primordial liking. Even our desire for salt, which is so vital to the human endeavor that it informs town names like Salzburg and those English burghs with “wich” (brine pits were known as “wich houses”) as their suffix, takes a few months to kick in.

Liking for sweetness is liking for life itself. As Gary Beauchamp, at the time the director of Philadelphia’s Monell Chemical Senses Center—the country’s preeminent taste and smell lab—had put it to me in his office one day, “I would say that all human pleasure derives from sugar. It’s the prototypical thing—a single compound stimulating a very specific set of receptors.” He told me this after first casually proffering a sample from a can of salted army ants (the ingredient label read, “Ants, salt”). Other kinds of substances—like salted ants—may have a more wayward trip upstream, he intimates, but with sugar “that pathway goes directly to the parts of the brain that are involved in emotion and pleasure.” Even anencephalic babies, born missing parts of the brain that are central to consciousness, respond positively (through what’s called a “gustofacial response”) to sweetness. No one living really dislikes sweetness; they may only like it less than others do.

But few of our gustatory preferences are innate; that lump of sugar, a touch of salt, perhaps the feel of fat as it glides across our tongue, even those are not beyond change. Nor is much of what we do not like. Some people may be more biologically sensitive to certain substances, but often that is not taste per se. Cilantro, for some, brings out a “soapy” taste, but it has been argued that has to do with genetic variation in olfactory receptors. Meanwhile, only half the population, as it fries up pork chops or grills sausage, seems able to detect “boar taint.” This is an unpleasant scent, to humans at least, often described as “off,” evoking “urine,” or, simply, being “pig like.” Boar taint comes from androstenes, a steroid-driven musk that steams off male boars during mating to boost their desirability. The ability of humans to smell it is genetic, though people can be trained to detect it (for professional, not hobby, purposes).

But there is not a clear line between one’s biological sensitivity to substances and one’s food likes and dislikes. Beauchamp theorizes this may be some population-wide adaptive mechanism. One group liked a certain plant, and another group liked another; if one plant turned out to lack sufficient nutrition, it would not mean the end of the species. Just because you find a substance more bitter than someone else, however, does not mean you are going to like it any less. As one researcher puts it, “It is striking how little genetics predisposes humans to like or dislike food flavors.”

And yet go to a restaurant, even a well-reviewed exemplar of a beloved cuisine, like Del Posto, and there will be things on the menu that you seem to prefer to others (this may even change from one day to another). The very array of choices that you are presented with—from the opening salvo of “Would you like fizzy or still water?”—speaks to this litany of tastes. But what actually goes on in the mind to make these decisions between seemingly inconsequential choices, of whether one prefers carbonation in one’s water? An extra frisson of excitement to hydration? Or the desire for a more languorously silken mouthfeel? How passionate are you in your choice, or is it rather arbitrary? Let us imagine you opt for still. This earns you another choice: “Would you like tap or bottled?” Reasons though you may have for choosing one or the other, it almost certainly has nothing to do with sensory discernment: Studies show that most of us cannot distinguish the stuff.

As adamant as we are in our likes—“I love ragù Bolognese,” one might say—we are even more adamant in our dislikes. “I can’t stand eggplant,” my wife has said, more than once. If pressed, though, we would find it hard to locate the precise origin of these preferences. Is there some ancient evolutionary fear at work here? Eggplant, after all, is part of the nightshade family, and its leaves, in high enough doses, can be toxic. Then again, tomatoes and potatoes are in the same Solanum genus, and my wife happily eats those.

She is certainly not alone in finding eggplant off-putting. Its mention in the culinary press often comes cloaked in cheerily conditional phrases like “love it or hate it” and “even if you dislike it,” while one survey of Japanese schoolchildren found it to be the “most disliked” vegetable. It is probably a texture thing; done wrong, eggplant can feel a bit slimy, a trait we do not always prize. Indeed, texture, or mouthfeel, should not be underestimated: Not only can we literally “taste” texture, but as the food scientist Alina Surmacka Szczesniak has written, “People like to be in full control of the food placed in their mouth. Stringy, gummy, or slimy food or those with unexpected lumps or hard particles are rejected for fear of gagging or choking.”

But our feelings about food are not often so clearly causal. Poison leaves aside, there is no biological aversion to eggplant itself or to most other foods. As the psychologist Paul Rozin—famously dubbed the King of Disgust for his work into aversions—once told me, over a meal in Philadelphia of sweet-and-sour shrimp, “Our explanations for why we like and dislike things are pretty lame. We have to invent accounts.”

And yet where else but with food is liking and disliking so elemental? Our choices in food are directly related to our immediate or long-term well-being. Not to mention we are actually putting something in our mouths. “Since putting external things into the body can be thought of as a highly personal and risky act,” Rozin has written, “the special emotion associated with ingestion is understandable.” And then there is the simple fact that we eat so often. The Cornell University researcher Brian Wansink has estimated we make two hundred food decisions a day. We decide what to eat more than we decide what to wear or what to read or where to go on vacation—and what is a holiday but a whole new set of eating choices?

Not that eating is always driven by some unadulterated quest for pleasure. As Danielle Reed, a researcher at Monell, had suggested to me, there is more than one kind of food liking. There is liking in which you give someone food in a lab and ask her how much she likes it. This is relatively simple, more so than asking why she likes it. There is liking on the level of a person going into a store, and does she choose this or that? This is a bit more complicated. “And then there’s what people habitually eat,” Reed said. “As you can imagine, that’s not a direct reflection of how much you like it.” She gestured to some food carts across the street, visible through her office window. “I had God-knows-what something nasty for lunch. It’s not what I like; it’s just what happened to be convenient.” It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between actual liking and simply choosing among the least disliked alternatives. An “interesting question,” she suggested, and one that I will return to later in the book, is, how much do people differ in how much they respond to their own liking? For some, liking may be the key driver; others may lean more on other criteria.

Something besides sheer frequency makes liking so crucial in food: the idea that we bring all of our senses—and a whole lot more—to what we eat. Synesthetes aside, we do not like the sound of paintings or the smell of music. When you like something you eat, however, you are typically liking not only the way it tastes but also the way it smells, the way it feels, the way it looks (we like the same food less when we eat it in the dark). We even like the way it sounds. Research has shown that amping up just the high-frequency “crispiness” sounds of potato chips makes them seem crispier—and presumably more liked.

It can often be a bit hard to tell what is actually driving our liking: People have, for example, reported deeper-colored fruit juice—up to a point—as tasting better than lighter, but similarly flavored, varieties. On the other hand, toying with one of the “sensory inputs” can radically change things. When trained panelists cannot see the milk they are drinking, they suddenly find it hard to determine its fat content (as they lose the vital visual cue of “whiteness”). Flipping the switch on a special light in the course of one meal—so that a steak was suddenly bathed in a bluish tint—was enough, according to one marketing study, to virtually induce nausea.

We call our liking for all kinds of things—music, fashion, art—our “taste.” It is interesting (and not accidental) that this word for our more general predilections coincides with our sense of taste. Carolyn Korsmeyer, a professor of philosophy at the University of Buffalo, notes that traditionally the notion of “bodily pleasure” did not discriminate between these two sorts of taste. The way we enjoyed art and music was not so dissimilar from the way we enjoyed food.

That began to change, at least to philosophers, in the eighteenth century. Gustatory taste (that “low,” “physical” pleasure, which actually entails ingesting something) did not fit neatly into the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s influential notion of “disinterested pleasure”—of coolly analyzing “free beauty” at a physical and intellectual remove—in terms of judging aesthetic quality. As Korsmeyer writes in Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy, “In virtually all analyses of the senses in Western philosophy the distance between object and perceiver has been seen as a cognitive, moral, and aesthetic advantage.” We look at paintings or watch movies without being in them, or them in us. But how could you ever divorce liking food from its host of “bodily sensations”? Ever since, taste, in terms of what we eat, has been judged as primal and instinctive, as well as hopelessly private and relative. “The all-important problem of Taste,” writes Korsmeyer, “was not conceived to pertain to sensory taste.”

It was bearing this heavy philosophical and scientific load that I sat down to lunch at Del Posto, joined by Debra Zellner, a professor of psychology at Montclair State University, who for several decades has studied the intersection of food and “positive affect,” as they say in the field. A onetime student of Paul Rozin’s—a disciple of disgust, if you will—in her work on liking, she has watched rats as they lapped at dripping tubes, and, more salubriously, she has conducted experiments with the Culinary Institute of America on how “plating” can influence how much food we eat.

With rats, the equation is fairly simple: If they eat it, they like it. The more they eat, the more they like (and vice versa). Rat eating behavior does not change according to who is watching or to feelings of guilt or virtuousness. Humans are trickier. Asking people what they like often does not reveal the full truth of what they eat, but neither does measuring what they eat always match up with what they like. In Zellner’s plating study, the same restaurant meal, on different nights, was presented first rather conventionally and then with a bit more flair. People who got the latter treatment actually reported liking the food more. When plates were weighed, however, there was no difference between the “conventional” and “flair” groups in the amount of food consumed.

Zellner, who has spent decades thinking about liking, is herself a case study for the vagaries of it. As we sat down, she informed me that she is allergic to dairy. Does this mean she instinctively does not like it? Not at all. To acquire a “conditioned taste aversion,” a visceral dislike of a food, one must generally vomit after consuming it. The reason for this is an ongoing mystery. As Paul Rozin wondered, “What is the adaptive value of endowing nausea with a qualitatively different (hedonic) change as opposed to other events, including gut pain?” Perhaps the simple intensity of dislike, the conscious removal of the food from the stomach itself, sears itself into memory.

The importance of the nauseous response may even go beyond food: Rozin notes that the “aversive gape”—that scrunching and slight opening of the mouth upon ingesting something gross—has the “function to promote egress of substances from the mouth.” This particular face (and we use more facial muscles when we eat food we do not like) is what we also use to signal all kinds of disgust, from bad smells to unpleasant images to moral transgressions. Disgust began, he suggested, with disliked food: the mouth as gatekeeper, the gape as message. Instances of disgusting behavior, which leave a “bad taste in the mouth,” may in some ancient or metaphoric sense be akin to an actual bad taste in the mouth that needs to be expelled.

Precisely because Zellner is allergic, she has never eaten enough of a dairy product to get severe nausea. So she dwells in a purgatory of pleasure—pitched somewhere between desire and revulsion. She admitted to not caring for the mouthfeel of many dairy products. “Maybe because I know that it means I have just consumed something that might make me feel bad. I don’t know.” To complicate matters, she occasionally “cheats” with cheese, eating tiny shards of especially alluring varieties.

The waiter appeared. “Is this your first time at Del Posto?” It is an innocent question but one that itself is important, as we shall see. As we study the menu, one of the principal liking questions looms. “What determines what you’re selecting?” Zellner asked, as I wavered between the “Heritage Pork Trio” with “Ribollita alla Casella and Black Cabbage Stew” and the “Wild Striped Bass” with “Soft Sunchokes, Wilted Romaine & Warm Occelli Butter.” “What I’m choosing, is that liking?” she continues. “It’s not liking the taste, because I don’t have it in my mouth.” If I had been to this restaurant before and had a particular dish, I might remember liking it. One might argue that liking is entirely based on memory: The single biggest predictor for whether you will like a food is whether you have had it before (more on that in a while).

But let us say it is new to me. Perhaps I like the idea of it, because it reminds me of similar choices in the past. “Choices depend on tastes,” as one economist wrote, “as tastes depend on past choices.” Perhaps it is the way the entrée is described. Language is a seasoning that can make food seem even more palatable. Words like “warm” and “soft” and “heritage” are not idle; they are appetizers for the brain. In his book The Omnivorous Mind, the neuroscientist John S. Allen notes that simply hearing an onomatopoetic word like “crispy”—which the chef Mario Batali calls “innately appealing”—is “likely to evoke the sense of eating that type of food.” The more tempting the language, the more strongly one rehearses the act of consumption. The economist Tyler Cowen argues one should resist such blandishments and order the thing that sounds least appetizing on a menu. “An item won’t be on the menu unless there’s a good reason for its presence,” he writes. “If it sounds bad, it probably tastes especially good.”

But it is hard to find anything that does not appetize on this menu. “It all sounds so good,” says Zellner (a curious phrase because we are reading the menu to ourselves). At this point, all we can be sure of what we like is this: We like to choose. The mere fact of having a menu of items from which to choose, research has shown, lifts all our liking for all items on that menu. And while the anticipation of our choice excites us, our anticipation of being able to make a choice, as brain imaging work has shown, seems to result in more neural activity than simply looking forward to getting something without making a choice.

If language helps us “pre-eat” the food, something similar goes on as we merely consider the choice. “Prefeeling” is how the psychologists Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert have described it. In their view, we “try out” different future scenarios, taking our hedonic response in the moment as a gauge of how we are going to feel about our choice in the future. Not surprisingly, thinking about rewards seems to prompt similar brain activity to actually experiencing rewards. Even thinking about the future calls upon memory, however. Amnesiacs often have trouble “prospecting,” or looking ahead, because, as Wilson and Gilbert describe it, “memories are the building blocks of simulations.” You will not really know if you are going to like something you have never had until you have had it.

Which raises the quest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• ALSO BY TOM VANDERBILT
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION: WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE COLOR (AND WHY DO YOU EVEN HAVE ONE)?
• CHAPTER 1: WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE? THINKING ABOUT OUR TASTE FOR FOOD
• CHAPTER 2: THE FAULT IS NOT IN OUR STARS, BUT IN OURSELVES. LIKING IN A NETWORKED AGE
• CHAPTER 3: HOW PREDICTABLE IS OUR TASTE? WHAT YOUR PLAYLIST SAYS ABOUT YOU (AND WHAT YOU SAY ABOUT YOUR PLAYLIST)
• CHAPTER 4: HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT WE LIKE? THE ECSTASIES AND ANXIETIES OF ART
• CHAPTER 5: WHY (AND HOW) TASTES CHANGE
• CHAPTER 6: BEER, CATS, AND DIRT. HOW DO EXPERTS DECIDE WHAT’S GOOD?
• CONCLUSION: TASTING NOTES. HOW TO LIKE
• NOTES
• INDEX
• A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• A NOTE ON THE TYPE