Tag: food
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Our Fascination with Cookbooks
Cookbooks are designed to help us attain the “ideal sugar-salt-saturated-fat state” in our cooking while hiding that fact between the sautéing of onions and the reduction of the sauce. That wonderful proposition comes from Adam Gopnik’s look at our long-standing fascination with cookbooks, and how they are used in our homes. The first thing a cadet…
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Barriers, Not Calories, Influence Eating Habits
Informing consumers of the calorific value of their food options doesn’t change their ordering/eating habits (previously), but removing barriers and making the healthier options easy to order does. That’s the conclusion from Kevin Volpp’s lecture, ‘Using Behavioral Economics to Improve Health Behaviors’. Recent studies […] have indicated that providing nutritional information at restaurants and recommending…
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The Psychology of Restaurant Menus
Type, colour, currency symbols and vivid adjectives: all items to pay attention to when designing menus–but not for aesthetic reasons. Subtle changes to menus can influence our restaurant decision-making, as is made obvious by Sarah Kershaw’s excellent article on the psychology of restaurant menus. (If you’ve read the articles in my previous post on this topic there…
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Calorie Counts Don’t Affect Food Decisions
After New York City passed a law requiring many chain restaurants to post the calorific value of all food they sold on their menus (in the same size and font as the price), researchers started looking at how the posting of calorie counts affect consumer decision making and food consumption. The study’s findings, as summarised…
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Food Advertising Causes Unconscious Snacking
Food advertising does much more than influence our brand preferences; it also ‘primes’ automatic eating behaviours, contributing to overall and longer-term weight gain. This is the conclusion of a recent study into whether food advertising (of both the healthy and non-healthy kind) can trigger unconscious snacking by leading our thoughts toward hunger and food. Children…
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In Defence of Fixed Service Charges (or: Why Only Tip for Service?)
Tipping: that most contentious of issues that–depending on your location–can be illegal, required, or the most heinous of etiquette crimes. It’s a complicated business (as the Wikipedia entry indicates by the size of the Tipping by region section), and an odd and occasionally uncomfortable tradition. As a self-proclaimed ‘socially awkward Briton’ David Mitchell laments the…
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Healthy Food Boosts School Results
In 2004 UK TV chef Jamie Oliver ran an experiment at a school in Greenwich, London for an upcoming show of his, Jamie’s School Dinners. By various means Oliver attempted to improve the eating habits of the school’s students and, by-and-large, succeeded. Tracking his progress–and that of the children–were two Oxford economists, Michele Belot and Jonathan James.…
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More Psychology of Wine
Most psychology studies focusing on my good friend, wine, rely on applying the scientific method to the tasting of different wines, and this is done in one, relatively simple way: blind tasting. Finance blogger at Reuters, Felix Salmon, isn’t a fan of blind tasting, and after reading his eminently-quotable piece on the subject I tend to…
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Sports Drinks and Dehydration
More for the parents of athletic children, this article from The New York Times‘ Well blog still contains some useful all-round advice on hydration during exercise. In the comments the author also links to this urine colour test for dehydration. When [exercising children] were offered grape-flavored water, they voluntarily drank 44.5 percent more than when…