The taste of ritual

Life can get hectic these days, can’t it? As well as a career there is a never-ending stream of entertainment at your fingertips. It is easy for every minute to be filled, and if you are a parent then your darling children of course fill any time-gap that may appear. In a world that is such a sponge for your time it is no wonder that ritual is being lost. This is a shame on many levels but a new study has found a surprising consequence of the disappearance of ritual: your food may be tasting worse for it.

In the new studies, researchers from the University if Minnesota in the US used foods ranging through chocolate, lemonade and carrots. In the first experiment subjects were given a chocolate bar with these instructions on how to eat it: “Without unwrapping the chocolate bar, break it in half. Unwrap half the bar and eat it. Then unwrap the other half and eat it.” Another group were told to relax for a few minutes and then eat the chocolate bar in whatever way they wanted to. Surveys afterwards found that those who had gone through the enforced ritual rated the chocolate more highly, savoured it more and were willing to pay more for the chocolate.

In a second experiment, subjects watched other subjects making lemonade. The people making the lemonade followed a strict set of instructions. It was found that the people who made the lemonade rated the lemonade as tasting better than those who simply watched the ritual taking place.

Another experiment showed that the longer the delay between the ritual preparation and the consumption of the food, the higher the rating of the taste of the food, even when the foods were as simple as carrots. Other experiments also found that random hand gestures did not impact taste of food compared with the ritual preparation of the food itself.

It seems then, according to the researchers, that the harder you have to work to get to your food, the better it tastes. They now want to see if you can perhaps transfer this ritualised phenomenon to other fields and perhaps get patients to perform a ritual before surgery and see if it can modify their post-surgery pain and how rapidly they heal.

In the context of food though the message is clear. We have reported in this column how people on a Greek island commonly live into their 90s and this longevity has been linked to their consumption of coffee. The thing is that their coffee drinking is highly ritualised and involved exactly the delays and time-cost that these researchers tried to emulate in their studies. Instead of rushing through your food consumption as something you have to get out of the way, try to make some time for ritual around your eating and drinking. Your food will taste better and be better for you too.