Feeling the world, through your dessert
Feeling the world, through your dessert
Imagine a future where you go to visit your chocolate psychologist. He listens to you and creates, based on your feelings, the right chocolate for the right mood.
Maybe this is not the distance future, as mood food, food that can help us change our mood or bring us to the right mood is becoming more and more popular.
Why? In our stressful 24/7 online lives, we need food to feel good, empower us so that we are able to better cope with the world. Food has even become part of our identity, shows what we value, what we like and we get likes out of it.
So how do we, as chefs, affect the way food influences our mood? By working on its shape, texture, taste, color and even sound.
This is not science fiction. One of the best known studies on how shapes influence our mind is known the “Buba and Kiki effect”. This effect was first observed by German-American psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1929 which links sounds to shapes. It has been extrapolate to food.
Look at this plate:
Which side is Buba and which side is Kiki? Most people will say Buba is the left side and Kiki is right side. Buba is milk chocolate and Kiki is dark chocolate.The sound of the foods name, its shape, the plate it’s served on… all affect the taste of what we eat. So our sense our cross connected and forms links between shapes, color, tastes and sound.
Don’t forget to think about color, taste, shape and texture and even the name of your creation when creating your next dessert.