We invest food with so much meaning, and rightly so: it changes our mood, it strengthens our relationships when we eat together and food choices express who we are.
But food has a dark side. We worry about eating unhealthy, about weight gain and how we can control our intake. Eating is not just pleasure; it is also about the struggle with ourselves.
In the last few decades we’ve learnt an enormous amount about the psychology of food. Here are 20 of my favorite findings.
1-America’s terrible relationship with food.
Americans have a very dysfunctional relationship with food.
Compared with the French, Belgians and Japanese, Americans get less pleasure from food and are most obsessed with whether it is ‘healthy’ or not (Rozin et al., 1999).
In contrast, the French have fewer hang-ups and enjoy their food the most. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that they are also half as likely to be obese as Americans.
Americans, then, get the worst of all worlds: they are more dissatisfied with what they eat, are more concerned about whether it is healthy, try to make more dietary changes and are twice as likely to be obese as the French.
Something has clearly gone badly wrong with America’s relationship with food.
2-You don’t know when you’re really full
We tend to think that the amount of food we eat is a result of how hungry we are. It’s a factor, but not the only one. We are also affected by the size of the plates, serving spoons, packets and so on.
This has been most memorably demonstrated in a study where participants ate out of a soup bowl that was filled up secretly from under the table (Wansink et al., 2005). Others were served more soup in the usual way. Those eating out of the magically refilling bowl had almost twice as much soup but felt no less hungry and no more full.
The moral of this strange tale is that our stomachs provide only crude messages about how much we’ve eaten. Instead we rely on our vision and the eye is easily fooled.
Here’s my healthy eating tip: force yourself to buy smaller packets of everything. Oh, and get rid of your automatically refilling soup-bowls: they’re really doing you no good at all.
3. Fat = bad?
This is a great example of the law of unintended consequences.
Many people have come to believe that high-fat food is bad. Public health campaigns, books and articles in the 80s promoted this idea.
Here are the problems. Not all fats are bad; in fact some are very good, necessary parts of our diet. As a result people avoid small snacks with high-fat content in favour of large snacks with low-fat content. In reality the low-fat snack may have way more calories simply because it’s much bigger.
Because people think that fat=bad, some foods get unfairly categorised as bad for us, while other low-fat foods are supposed to be good. This leads to the situation were people regularly under-estimate the amount of calories in low-fat, ‘good’ foods and over-estimate the calories in high-fat ‘bad’ foods (Carels et al., 2006). The difference in that study worked out to about 35%.
The same is true in restaurants where dishes billed as ‘healthy’ are estimated by diners to contain up to 35% less calories than they really do.
4. Fat waitress = fat customer
Here’s a case in point for how context affects what you might choose from the menu in a restaurant. McFerran et al. (2010)looked at how the effect of your server’s body-weight might affect what you choose.
They found that people who were dieting ate more food when encouraged to choose unhealthy snacks by an obese waitress than when the waitress was thin. You might have predicted exactly the reverse result—surely an obese server will put you off your food. Apparently not. Instead it may unconsciously give people who are dieting ‘permission’ to overeat. In other words: if she can overeat, so can I.!!!
Incidentally exactly the opposite effect was seen for those who weren’t dieting. They ended up eating more when the waitress was thin. This may be simply because attractive (thin) people tend to be more persuasive.
5. I’m eating an idea and it’s a tasty one!
What weird foods have you eaten? Fried bat or tarantulas, an ox foot or tuna eyes?
Perhaps you’ve been involved in this type of conversation. People start listing all sorts of exotic foods they once tasted—each trying to outdo the last. What’s that about? According to one theory we don’t just eat food, we eat ideas.
‘Conceptual consumption‘ is our desire to tick boxes on our experiential CVs.
People know, for example, that bacon ice-cream will taste unusual, but there is a clear pay-off in conceptual consumption. It’s not just bragging rights, they also like the very idea of each of these things and they want to ‘possess’ the experience.
It’s also about self-image. People want to see themselves, and be seen by others, as interesting people who choose a variety of different experiences for themselves. (Hence the fried-bat-chat.) :)
