You eat with your eyes

In Sydney and Melbourne, there’s a restaurant that blindfolds its guests for the duration of their meal. The restaurant is called Dining in the Dark, and that’s exactly what you get. The restaurant wants you to “explore the full potential of your taste buds… While blindfolded, you’ll enjoy delectable surprise dishes and feast on a curated 3-course meal without using your sight, thereby enhancing your other senses.”

But how does it work, if it works at all?

Our senses play a major role in how we experience the world around us. We often talk about how taste and smell are connected, but the way that food appears to us on a plate can affect our perception of how it tastes, too.

Here, we unwrap the link between our taste buds and our eyesight.

Understanding crossmodal correspondence 

Our senses don’t work in isolation. When you see a plate of food, smell it, touch it, and taste it, you’re sending several messages to your brain at once about the food you’re eating. Your brain processes these different inputs simultaneously to make sense of your experience.

This process, where one sense influences another, is called crossmodal correspondence.  

Crossmodal correspondence matters, and many people—food scientists, psychologists, nutritionists, chefs—want to understand it better.

For example, several studies have shown that the aesthetic features of a plate, like its colour and shape, play important roles in our perception of how a meal tastes. 

That’s why a beautifully plated dish in a restaurant doesn’t just look good. Chefs will often use colour contrast, symmetry, and artistic presentation to elevate the dining experience, leveraging our visual biases to make meals more enjoyable and memorable.

What do colours taste like?

Most of the research that’s been done into crossmodal correspondence as it relates to vision and taste has focused on colour. The results are this: when we see colours in food, we expect them to taste a certain way. 

According to several studies, we’re most likely to associate red and pink with sweet foods, yellow and green with sour ones, white and blue as being salty, and browny/black and purple with bitterness.

Some studies have even shown that just telling someone the colour of their food (in these studies, participants were blindfolded) can influence their perception of how the food tastes.  In other words: expecting a certain colour of food to taste a certain way can—rightly or wrongly—influence your perception of how it tastes.

In Melbourne this year, a collaboration between Brazilian artist João Loureiro artist and Piccolina Gelateria played with customers’ taste perceptions by serving only grey ice-cream. Called ‘Greyscale’, the experiment involved serving six flavours of grey gelato in different, unmarked flavours. The only way for a customer to tell which flavour they were eating was to taste it and guess.

Speaking to Good Food, Sandra Foti of Piccolina Gelateria, said “Seeing people’s faces as they’re trying to understand what the flavour is, is actually so fun… It completely plays tricks on your mind.”

Using colours to appeal to taste

This isn’t exactly a new practice. Since at least the nineteenth century, products have used colour associations to try to influence our perception of how food tastes. One well-known example from the United States dates to the late 1800s, when the manufacturers of margarine (which is naturally white and lard-like in appearance) started adding yellow food dye to the product to make it more appealing. The butter lobby was so threatened by the move that they successfully petitioned against it; by law, margarine was no longer allowed to be dyed yellow. In Vermont, New Hampshire, and South Dakota, margarine had to be dyed pink. How would that taste?

Food science at home

Understanding the link between vision and taste can have useful applications at home too, especially when it comes to healthier eating habits. 

A growing body of research is exploring food-shaping, particularly for older people or people who have difficulty swallowing, in order to make food more palatable and boost nutrition. 

Parents of picky eaters might also find that presenting food in fun, colourful and creative ways can encourage kids to give new foods a go.

Read more: How to help kids try new foods and flavours