Vision and Taste in Food Flavor Perception

When we get out of bed, we prepare for the long-awaited event: the first meal of the day! Cultures around the world differentiate between them. Brazilians themselves already have diversified routines: some eat the sacred bread with butter and coffee with milk, others indulge in cassava, yam, and seasoned dried meat. There might even be sausage with gravy and American-style scrambled eggs, along with cheeses and other cold cuts, and, to top it off, a fruit salad with mango, banana, apple, kiwi, strawberry, and papaya!

Were you able to visualize this beautiful and colorful breakfast just by describing it, even without the entire table setting? What if it were an image?

This fact leads to interesting sensory, semiotic, and marketing analyses that reflect on how visual stimuli can be involved in human desire, since the colors, shapes, shine of dishes, crockery, packaging, and even the types of labels can determine the preference for certain foods and, more importantly, can reflect their flavor (SPENCE, 2015; VERMEIR, 2020).

So influential that an example was provided by a Hungarian study conducted by Szakály et al. (2020). The researchers analyzed the influence of labels on the evaluation of the flavor of Trappist cheese, as well as the attributes related to the product. Consumers who enjoyed cheese were recruited and selected and divided into two groups, using a questionnaire: those more concerned with health and those more concerned with flavor. After recruitment, the study began, and the same cheese was offered to the evaluators, but with four different labels: “conventional”; “low salt”; “low fat”; and “low salt and fat.” The results were very interesting. Cheeses with labels other than conventional cheese created the impression of being less tasty, despite being healthier. The experiment also observed that the descriptors used for conventional cheese were related to tradition, nostalgia, and positive images, while the others revealed somewhat skeptical or even negative descriptors. However, even in these cases, consumers associated labels other than “conventional” with a sense of healthiness.

Many other examples could be cited here to recognize that, in the anthropological context already observed by Claude Lévi-Struss (1908-2009), food not only represents a form of nutrition, but also has symbolic meanings and is the starting point for studies of the structuring of societies and their customs (COFF, 2013).

It is also suggested that research with these objectives can help food and ingredient producers observe the profile of the target consumer, in addition to decision-making in government actions related to health, always remembering that there is a heart inside every human being and that the sense of sight can make it beat faster when faced with memories and feelings related to the pleasure of eating.