Every so often, a day rolls around when I wish I had pursued studies in chemistry and biology (despite the definite knowledge that we would not have been an academic fit). More frequent are the days when I start to tinker out a path into the world of design. It’s on the days when those two overlap that I am so glad to come across posts like this one on Edible Geography that serves up a nice pairing of the two. 

“Astonishingly, despite the fact that, for a sizeable proportion of the world’s population, most interactions with food take place via the medium of metal cutlery, very little study has been made of how different materials augment, enhance, or dull the taste of the dishes they are conveying to our mouths.”

I am well aware that spending money on this type of research probably seems like a waste of time to people. So, to justify it economically, one has to consider how much money is put into developing flavours of not just processed foods, but even the selective breeding of crops, to create a desirable and competitive product.

 ”They also speculate that, with further research, metal-food interactions might be used to redesign the openings of drinks cans and the liners of tinned foods. Meanwhile, Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University and a fellow spoon researcher, has also recently shown that increasing spoon weight makes yogurt seem to taste thicker, sweeter, and more expensive, which suggests that, one day, super chunky, salt- and sweet-boosting copper cutlery might even be prescribed as part of a healthy diet.”

The author muses about cutlery design being affected by these kinds of findings, to add to what is already a vortex of food elitism. It makes me a bit weary to consider the insatiable consumerism thread that could make such a plan into a marketable reality, but hey, for now, it’s simply another way to dig in and understand our sensory engagement with the world.