Cutlery can affect the sense of taste

The size, weight, shape and color of cutlery can affect how people perceive the taste of foods eaten with them – experts of the University of Oxford states.

Recent evidence has shown that changing the plateware can affect the perceived taste and

flavour of food, but very little is known about visual and proprioceptive infl uences of cutlery

on the response of consumers to the food sampled from it. In the present study, we report

three experiments designed to investigate whether food tastes different when the visual and

tactile properties of the plastic cutlery from which it is sampled are altered. We independently varied the weight, size, colour, and shape of cutlery. We assessed the impact of changing the

sensory properties of the cutlery on participants’ ratings of the sweetness, saltiness, perceived

value, and overall liking of the food tasted from it. (MTI, after Flavour)