When guests come to dinner, a question may arise: "Do people chew delicious food faster than they chew distasteful food?" The answer seems to be yes, according to an experiment performed by the team of France Bellisle, Bernard Guy-Grand and J Le Magnen at Hôtel-Dieu Hospital in Paris.
(Dr Bellisle made waves in 2001 when she reported, as part of a larger study, that women who eat lunch while listening to a recorded detective story take in more food than women who don't. For more about that, go to a library and read the paper she co- authored with Anne-Marie Dalix.)
Bellisle, Guy-Grand and Le Magnen published their mastication report in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. The technical details are worth, as they say, chewing over: "Cocktail size (3 square centimetres) open sandwiches were served in one of five different flavours. An oscillographic recording of chewing and swallowing showed that chewing activity varied with the palatability and variety of foods. Chewing time was shorter and fewer chews were observed as palatability increased.
"Swallowing did not change as a function of stimulus flavour. Pause duration between two successive food pieces became shorter as palatability increased. The effects of sensory factors were most evident at the beginning of meals and decreased until the end of meals." Let me partially digest that passage, and then regurgitate it in plain language. The scientists make three points:
First, that people chew delicious food more quickly than they chew horrible food.
Second, that people race to put delicious food in their mouths, but with horrible food they hesitate.
And third, that people enjoy a meal more when they are hungry than when they are full.
These are good things to know - and we now know it scientifically. But that is not all we know.
An edogram is a graph with two wavy lines: one line zigs every time a person chews, the other line zags every time the person swallows. In doing their study, the three scientists learned that ordinary people can become highly accustomed to wearing the ungainly equipment used in making the edogram. Here is a condensed passage from the official report:
"During test meals, the strain gauge was placed on the subject's cheek. A small balloon, filled with water, was maintained on the subject's throat by an adjustable elastic collar. The subjects did not report any discomfort from the apparatus. One subject even fell asleep briefly during a meal, with her head resting on the table."
For hosts and hostesses who obsess about their housekeeping rather than their cooking, this is good news. If you have tasty enough food - or in a pinch, if you simply have enough food - your guests will be able to ignore any distractions. Unless you read them a detective story while they are eating.
· Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research www.improbable.com and organiser of the Ig Nobel Prize