What we taste is profoundly influenced by what we see.. now that is a bold statement which may be true according to the latest scientist research. Charles Spence in his own words says that similarly to taste, our perception of aroma and flavor are also affected by both the hue (i.e., red, yellow, green, etc.) and the intensity, or saturation, of the color of the food and drink we consume. Let’s say if we change the color of wine, and people’s expectations, their tasting experience can be radically altered. Research found that sometimes even wine experts can be fooled into thinking that they can smell the red wine aromas when given a glass of what is actually white wine that has just been colored artificially to give it a dark red appearance.
Let’s say you were a guest at a restaurant, and you were being given four spoons of espherified colorful taste placed randomly right in front of you—one red, one white, one green and one browny-black. You and the others were informed that the chef recommends starting with the salty, then the bitter spoon, next the sour, and ending on a sweet note—leaving you and the other diners a little perturbed as to which order exactly you should taste the spoons in.
The idea is that the diners arrange their own spoons from left to right in front of them in the order: salty, bitter, sour and sweet. Having arranged their own spoons, the diners normally start to look around and compare notes with each other. In the restaurant, or online, we get somewhere around 75% of people ordering the spoons in the way that the chef (and the gastrophysicist) intended. It is the basis that tastes are very definitely associated with specific colors.
Charles Spence tells that color can be used to modify people’s perception of a taste that is already present in the mouth.Such example is to make food or drink taste sweeter by adding a pinkish- reddish color hue. The effect is not that significant but still there some effects were made by the color present.
Although the effect of color on taste were true but there’s still limitations on how color can be tasted, such as you cannot create a taste out of nowhere, simply by showing the appropriate color. Think about color as more of MSG’s, it is useless in taste without the main ingredient, but when you introduce it to the existing food or drinks, the effect will work.
Our responses to color in food and drink aren’t fixed but change over time. For instance, a few decades ago, marketers and cultural commentators were telling anyone who’d listen that blue foods would never sell. Roll the clocks forward a few decades, though, and we now have cool blue Gatorade, Slush Puppy and the London Gin Company all successfully promoting blue drinks. A Spanish company even launched a blue wine in 2016.* Given the rarity of this color in nature, it is normally introduced solely as a marketing ploy to capture the attention of consumers by standing out on the store shelf.
The impact of color depends on the food. In the context of meat and fish, blue causes a distinctively aversive response. So in conclusion, yes we do and we human definitely ABLE TO TASTE THE COLOR but with some degree of limitations and not directly.
External Source: Gastrophysics by Charles Spence
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