At the time, organ meat wasn’t popular in America. A middle-class woman in 1940 would sooner starve than despoil her table with tongue or tripe. So when the scientists recruited into the Committee on Food Habits met for the first time in 1941, they set themselves a goal of systematically identifying the cultural barriers that discouraged Americans from eating organ meat. In all, more than two hundred studies were eventually published, and at their core, they all contained a similar finding: To change people’s diets, the exotic must be made familiar. And to do that, you must camouflage it in
...more
The study that this section draws upon was written by Brian Wansink, an academic who is famous for doing experiments that show things like dish size influence how much we eat. In one of his most famous experiments, he create a soup bowl that - unbeknownst to diners - would secret refill itself as people ate, via a tube connected to the bottom of the bowl. People would eat and eat and eat as long as the bowl appeared to be full. Eating from a large plate, by the same token, causes people to consumer more food than using a small plate. Wansink’s research is really fascinating.
MMM and 3 other people liked this
