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Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating.  Charles Spence.  Viking.  NY. 2017.

Hard Cover.  Sewn.  308 p.  Bibliography by Chapter. Index. Typeset in Bembo Book MT Std.  1.2 lbs.

Discovered at Eureka Springs Carnegie Library; purchased at Alibris.com

Dear Mr. Spence,

Your book is written in such a style that I can quite imagine enjoying all the sensations of sharing a meal while conversing with you about its many subjects.  For the readers of this Review Letter to you, I use the word sensations on purpose.  For you, eating is more than just chewing food.  Eating is multisensory and crossmodal; it involves all of our senses and the various modes of our brain.

Your pioneering studies and enthusiasm for this new science are invigorating and inspirational.  This book is a full-course meal for anyone interested in food, from those who work in the food service industry to those who love to entertain at home.  I am personally grateful for your influence on my own total dining experience, especially because I usually eat alone, a topic you address in your chapter on “Social Dining.”

You explore several questions relating to the total dining experience.  How do we perceive eating, with each of our senses but even more so in our minds?  What do we think about and remember about eating any specific meal?  How do we judge, in general, certain foods?

I must confess that while I have often appreciated various aspects of my dining atmosphere, I hadn’t thought about any of it much in terms of science.  It is eye-opening that all my senses affect my perception of both my enjoyment of food and my taste of it.  Reading your science behind this total experience of eating expands both my palate and my palette.

I like your fun attitude about food, how things don’t have to be one way or another and how all people have diverse levels of tolerance or stimulation with each different sense.  It’s hard to believe that people could perceive a dish as more sweet, more filling, more salty—or less—depending on the shapes or colors of serving platters, or what sounds are heard, or what one’s skin is feeling.

But let’s back up a minute and look at the title of your book more closely, Gastrophysics: a merging of two words.  Gastronomy highlights the fine dining from which you find inspiration for your studies.  Psychophysics “references the scientific study of perception.”  Gastrophysics is the science of the perception of eating.

As an example, the covid pandemic has made the general public aware of the role smell has in our taste of food.  Gastrophysics had already backed up that fact with science.

Now let me also reveal up front my bias regarding gastrophysics: I’m into food. 

You deal with me and my snooty foodie attitude quite adeptly: you say how some commentators on your work state that “good food should speak for itself.”  “To them, a great meal is all about the local sourcing, the seasonality of the ingredients, the detail and technique in the preparation, and the beautiful cooking.  Don’t mess with the food; keep it simple, keep it slow, even.” 

Well, that’s been me more times than I care to admit, as I ate my locally-sourced food purchased at the farmers market.  This is probably why I like Michael Pollan so much; many of his books explore the nature of food production and preparation, more so than its presentation.

Then you point out the obvious: such food—slow food—is most often served in attractive settings with attractive cutlery and tableware, and with an attractive soundscape.  The multisensory IS important.  Serve that same food in a noisy airplane cabin or busy hospital canteen and how will it come across: good, better, or less tasty?  This is gastrophysics, the study of the question: how does ‘the everything else’ influence the experience of eating food?

As I read through the first few chapters in which you analyze each of the five major senses and their role in the experience of eating, I became ever more enamored with your explorations of how we perceive food.  I came to realize that truly you are scrutinizing consciousness itself. 

Leonardo da Vinci investigated the role of optics to learn about painting; Alexander von Humboldt used scientific instruments to learn about nature; quantum physicists debate the act of measurement in their theories; you are investigating the role of our senses in eating.  All these efforts are looking at the deeper question: how do we know what we know?

We don’t assess food objectively but through our own peculiar sensations, expectations, memories, and values. Through our crossmodal brain.

The following quote you cite in full relates to my question at the end of this review, but I also find it worthy to cite vis-á-vis this topic of consciousness:

“As chef Andoni Luis Aduriz put it …  ‘What it comes down to is: you don’t have to like something for you to enjoy it or, in other words, pleasure is not only found in the mouth.  Predisposition, the ability to concentrate—the impulsive mechanisms of the brain—can completely modify the perception of something that, at first sight, would not even be considered food for humans.  In the end, it isn’t only about eating; it’s also about discovering.  We take advantage of the fact that we are always on the borderline between our conservative selves—the part that makes us creatures of habit, finding shelter and security in repetition—and our curious, and daring, selves, which seek pleasure in the unknown, in the vertigo we feel when we try something for the first time, in risk and the unpredictability.’”

Perception.  You study the act of perceiving with all five senses through experiments in fine dining establishments, on airplanes, in hospital cafeterias, for multi-national corporations that make frozen meals, and other venues.  You ground this heady ethereal exploration into consciousness through our most basic need—to eat—in our many dining settings.

You matter-of-factly state how your work is a “new approach to measuring and understanding those factors that influence the responses of real people to real food and drink products, ideally under as naturalistic conditions as possible.”

Many of your experiments are done in high-end cuisine settings because the chefs are so creative and quick to try something new.  The insights gained from studying diners in such settings can then be further tested and applied in the much-slower moving food and beverage industry, which then translates to meals in the grocery store, hospitals, airlines, and eventually into my own solitary dining at home.

And so, insights working with chefs can lead you to assert with a reasonable measure of assurance that how a plate is shaped or what sounds—besides music—are heard can influence a diner’s perception of the food they are eating, beyond the food itself.

Your chapter “The Meal Remembered” is a further foray into consciousness; but I have to answer your question of the first paragraph—how much you can remember about your favorite meal—with one name: M. F. K. Fisher.  I myself may not remember the details of most of the meals I’ve eaten, but I love reading her essays for her remarkable ability to recall and share settings of her ‘meals remembered,’ who she was with, the layout of the kitchen it was prepared in, the waiters and waitresses, and the food itself … all so well-described I feel I was there with her eating the same meal! 

Some of us do indeed have an uncanny ability to remember our meals; but I, like most of your presumed readers, will benefit from contemplating your points in this chapter.  They mainly coalesce around the concept of awareness: being fully present while in the act of eating.  Being conscious.

Yet, how can we really be present to all five senses at every minute of a meal?  Thus our brains play tricks on us even while we are eating, which then influence our subsequent memories.  But the effort is worth it; being more fully present makes the memory stronger and longer.

Then there’s your chapter on “Social Dining.”  At the end you talk about “The telematic dinner party.”  Well, since the book’s publication, thanks to the pandemic, many of us have necessarily used online audio and web conferencing tools.

Being newly single, I joined a dating site that as part of its program promotes a ‘video date.’  The site even encourages us to set up such a date to watch a movie or eat a meal together!  I won’t be doing that anytime soon, and for the same scientific reasoning you give for why a telematic dinner party would be a challenge:

“Dining together involves the tight synchronization of the diners’ behavior, so that trying to replicate the precisely coordinated choreography at a distance, where a lag can sometimes delay the signal coming from the other end, is likely to disrupt the more communal aspects of the meal.”  Amen to that!  I’d rather eat alone.

I appreciate how you end the book with ten tips for eating healthier.  What a wonderful summary of all you enthused about over the course of the book, including suggested shapes of our dining ware.

And now my question for you:

As a grocery store employee, I’ve been particularly sensitive to the pandemic’s influence on food production, distribution, and availability. Because your book was published before the pandemic, I am glad to see your university website assures that you have been able to continue your research through all these changes.  But no doubt the tone of your book would be considerably different had it been written during or after the pandemic. 

Similarly, climate change has become an even more important topic since your book’s publication with increasing weather extreme events across the globe.  Again, we’re seeing a growing importance to food production, distribution, and availability.

I came across an article on Agroecology (Scientific American, November, 2021, pp 34-45), in which there is a photo of children eating with the caption, “Nutritious foods such as pigeon peas and beans are typically not children’s favorites, but teaching them to cook helps shape their tastes.”

This photo reminded me of my own efforts to help start a non-profit (Apple Seeds) that is dedicated to helping children eat healthier here locally.  Proper nutrition is a world-wide problem indeed.

So my question is how can your research in gastrophysics assist malnourished and food-insecure people to eat healthier when they are presented with non-traditional foods in non-traditional settings prepared by non-traditional cooks?

Relatedly, in light of the changing climate and therefore changes in food availability, it seems all people across the globe will be faced with those same situations of being presented with non-traditional foods prepared in non-traditional settings—or, as Chef Aduriz put it, food that “at first sight, would not even be considered food for humans.”

So somewhat selfishly, how can your research assist me in learning to enjoy eating insects, algae-grown food, or fungi-based meat alternatives, which may become increasingly necessary in the coming decades?

Thank you.

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