The Body: A Guide for Occupants

by Bill Bryson

easy way to experience the limitations of your taste buds is to close your eyes, pinch shut your nostrils, and eat a flavored jelly bean collected blindly from a bowl. You will instantly apprehend its sweetness, but you almost certainly won’t be able to identify its flavor. But open your eyes and nostrils and its fruity specificity becomes immediately and redolently apparent. Even sound materially influences how delicious we find food. People who are played a range of crunching sounds through headphones while sampling potato chips from various bowls will always rate the crunchier, noisier chips as fresher and tastier, even though all the chips are the same. Many tests have been done to demonstrate how easily we are fooled with respect to flavor. In a blind taste test at the University of Bordeaux, students in the faculty of enology were given two glasses of wine, one red and one white. The wines were actually identical except that one had been made a rich red with an odorless and flavorless additive. The students without exception