Study: Foods’ sounds impacts their flavor

OXFORD, England — Everybody loves bacon. Well, mostly everybody. Little Caesars definitely does. And while most people would say the taste and smell of bacon is what makes it so enjoyable, a paper published in the journal Flavour says it has more to do with the food’s texture.

The paper was authored by food sensory expert Charles Spence, an experimental psychologist at Oxford University. To him, the crunch, crisp, or fizz emitted by food and drink plays an important role in our multisensory perception of flavor. Despite some of his colleagues being convinced sounds have no impact on a food’s flavor, Spence analyzed prior related research in order to see for himself.

In one study Spence came across, he found consumers mentioned “crisp” more than the three other descriptors provided to evaluate 79 foods, while researchers from the University of Leeds found crunchy bacon (and the sound of crunchy bacon) was crucial to what participant’s considered the perfect BLT. Spence concluded the sound of food matters more than its look or smell because it indicates the food’s quality.

Crisp vegetables, for example, indicate how fresh they are,

“Most researchers, when they think about flavor, fail to give due consideration to the sound that a food makes when they bite into and chew it.” Spence told Time. “However… what we hear while eating plays an important role in our perception of the textural properties of food, not to mention our overall enjoyment of the multisensory experience of food and drink.”

Spence added that throughout his research, he found the sounds generated by biting into or chewing food provides rich, simple sources of information about its textural properties. Not only that, but ambient sound can affect flavor perception, too.