The Perfect Meal: The Multisensory Science of Food and Dining

Abstract

The central idea behind this book is deceptively simple: that our perception of flavour is multisensory. Consequently, to serve up great tasting food is not simply a matter of tickling the taste buds but of engaging a whole range of sensory experiences. Drawing on recent innovative research carried out by Spence’s team at the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University, the authors argue that we must go beyond four or five individual taste sensations (which respond to particular sensory nodes on the tongue) to focus on the interaction of multisensory experiences as it is here that flavour emerges. They show how a host of sensory elements ranging from the colour of the plate to the frequency of concurrent sounds all affect the ways we perceive flavour.