Potato-chip-sound-modifier Ig Nobel Prize winner profiled

Charles Spence, 2008 Ig Nobel nutrition Prize winner (for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is) profiled in The Guardian:

…How to make bug-eating acceptable to westerners is one of the many gustatory challenges that he and his team are tackling. Through his studies into how the senses interact to form our perception of flavour, Spence is quietly influencing what we eat and drink, from the output of food-industry giants (he sits on the scientific advisory board of PepsiCo and much of his lab’s work is funded by Unilever), to the menus of leading restaurants (he has collaborated with Heston Blumenthal for 12 years).

Spence and his peers have, through a line of scientific inquiry that is informally referred to as gastrophysics, studied in minute detail how we experience food and drink. Who we eat with; how food is arranged and described; the colour, texture and weight of plates and cutlery; background noise – all these things affect taste. Now he and his colleague Betina Piqueras-Fiszman have collated this knowledge into a book, The Perfect Meal, packed with insights that are fascinating to anyone in possession of an appetite. For example, the person in a group who orders first in a restaurant enjoys their food more.…

The study that earned Spence and co-author Massimiliano Zampini their Ig Nobel Prize: “The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips,” Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence, Journal of Sensory Studies, vol. 19, October 2004,  pp. 347-63.