Willemijn van Dolen | The sight of good food disrupts social contact
Picture this: you’re chatting with your friend on the terrace and food comes along. Gone is a good conversation, writes Willemijn van Dolen. This phenomenon was recently studied scientifically and it indeed turns out: the sight of good food makes a nice experience less enjoyable.
How beautiful autumn can be with all those coloured leaves and then we had those sunny days too. Full terraces everywhere and I ended up among them. Lovely, having a drink, looking around and having a good conversation.
Now I don’t always manage the latter so well anymore as soon as tasty things are served at the tables around me. More precisely, I find it hard to concentrate on the conversation as soon as the bitterballs appear at the neighbours’ tables. When I mentioned this once, it turned out I was not the only one; many people get distracted by the snacks, cakes and desserts at the neighbouring tables, resulting in: no more good conversation; you only listen with half an ear.
Recent scientific research provides a good explanation for this. The researchers found that the mere sight of delicious food makes the experience you are having at that moment less enjoyable. So listening to a podcast while your eye catches your just-baked cake, watching a movie with popcorn next to you on the sofa, or going to college with your favourite sandwich on the table in front of you...it makes the experience of the podcast, movie and college less enjoyable.
Why is that? What happens when you see delicious food is that you automatically start imagining what it would taste like. This makes you less engaged with what you are doing at that moment. And that makes it less fun. The researchers’ tip: make sure people eat the tasty food right away and not during the event. Ice cream or hot drinks are very suitable because they need to be consumed quickly.
The effect occurs only with tasty food. With ‘functional’ eating, i.e. eating because you have to, the experience is not affected. Furthermore, the core activity must be experienced as enjoyable; with unpleasant experiences, the effect does not occur either. The latter could work to companies’ advantage because it turns out that less pleasant experiences are actually perceived as more enjoyable if they are accompanied by the presence of good food. I imagine something like lying at the dentist overlooking a delicious cake. Finally, the researchers find that even just pictures of tasty food are distracting without the food being present. This sheds another light on the impact of billboards and advertisements you see at football matches and concerts.
The point the researchers want to make is that it pays to do things with attention; research shows that if you can become completely absorbed in something, it can make you happy. The sight of good food then distracts. I understand. Next time I’ll tell the people next to me on the terrace not to order bitterballen, so I can concentrate on my company and our conversation. By the way, saying that seems like a very uncomfortable experience to me. Which I can actually make more enjoyable by looking at good food, though. Are you still following? Let’s have a bitterball first.
