Why cant I stop watching food videos while I eat?
Im not sure exactly when I started reading recipe books at breakfast, but it was around the time I began getting ready for school on my own. Every morning, brain in a haze, the cornflakes would tinkle into the bowl, and then, before the milk, Id select something to read. It didnt matter which book. Id look at spines and covers. It could have been Elizabeth Davids South Wind Through the Kitchen, with French bread and olive oil in a stern still life. Or Antonio Carluccios An Invitation to Italian Cooking, Carluccio grinning as he waved a breadstick over a sunlit table of squid, green grapes and grilled peppers. Whatever I chose, the effect was always the same. My food was transfigured. It wasnt cornflakes anymore; that was just a canvas. It was a hot stromboli, with its ham galaxy swirling between creamy reams of dough. Or it was a fresh croissant, with its buttery pastry yellow within yellow. Green enchiladas from Mexico; rose water over Egyptian puddings; French chicken legs trussed with parsley bouquets. This all at breakfast! I'd never eaten most of these foods, never made any of these foods, but the writing changed my breakfast. The flavour was the same, but I was intoxicated. During the pandemic, Ive returned to this childhood comfort, but digitally. I watch food videos while I eat breakfast. Its the same effect, but stronger: today I watched Madhur Jaffrey cook a chicken curry while I ate Rice Krispies. Im not alone, either. This kind of vicarious eating isnt new. Its most popular form is in Asia  mukbang, loosely translated as eating broadcast describes the semi-sexual phenomenon of watching a person eat a shining plate of calorific, energy-dense food. Viewers may eat as well, or just watch. Secret Cinema events serve the meal you see on the screen to enhance both the film and the food itself: tasty burgers from Pulp Fiction; gabagool from The Sopranos. Youll see comments below opulent food videos that say things like watching this while eating Doritos. The science behind this transfiguration isnt a mystery. When our brain sees Gordon Ramsay fillet a steak into perfect slices and lace it with strands of olive oil, it fantasises: it calculates how energy-dense the steak is, and simulates eating it. Anticipation is everything, explains Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford. When you see food, blood begins to gush into your brain at a fantastic rate  the brain is the most bloodthirsty organ, he says  but when you start to eat the food, the brain deactivates; it is no longer interested in the same way. This effect isnt limited to images either: when you read or hear the word cinnamon, a brain scanner shows activation in brain areas associated with smell or vision. The actual flavour is not as important as we might imagine  its actually anticipated flavour, says Spence. And hence, when we eat while watching something on the screen, our brain is visually dominant. Its attention has been captured by those food images on screen, and were predicting how energy-dense they are, how rewarding they would be to eat, and some part of the brain is simulating eating those foods on the screen, while at the same time were eating something else.  We're hardwired to obsess over food. Research on still life paintings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shows that artists aimed to make the viewer salivate, says Spence, thinking about how they could make a lemon glisten yellow in just the right way, for instance. Its this primitive command of our attention that makes food videos so potent: its not just energy-dense, high fat, high-calorie foods the brain likes, but food that moves, like yolk porn, or cheese oozing from a burger. If you analyse the Super Bowl adverts, which are the most expensive adverts anywhere in the world, many of those are about food, and the majority of the food in those adverts moves, says Spence.