Have you ever spent hours preparing a lovely meal and when you come to tuck in, you just don’t fancy eating it?
Loads of people find food less appetizing when they’ve cooked it themselves – and there’s actually a scientific reason why.
Why you hate your own cooking
We spoke to food scientist Dr. Bryan Quoc Le, who explained that eating your own cooked food isn’t as appealing as eating someone else’s cooked dishes due to the “delicate interaction between food aroma and our sense of smell”.
“Much of what we perceive in terms of taste and flavor happens at the interface of the gustatory system found on our tongue and mouth, and our olfactory system in our nasal passages,” he explained.
In other words, it all comes down to the way our sense of taste is closely linked with our sense of smell. Flavor molecules vaporize during chewing, pass through the back of our throats and rise into our nasal passages from the other direction.
We then perceive those molecules the same way as smelling something, but our brains are now integrating the sensation with the perception of taste.
During the process of cooking, many of these flavor molecules vaporize, but due to the higher temperatures used, the concentrations of these aromas are much higher than what would be experienced during eating.
“So our olfactory system becomes quickly saturated with these odors while we’re cooking,” the food scientist continued.
“When it comes to eating the same meal, which has already fully saturated the receptors in our nasal passages, we have a harder time perceiving these same flavors. The food becomes more relatively bland, in a sense, as our overstimulated receptors are unable to register these odor compounds.”
He compared it to the dish suddenly appearing gray rather than colorful due to the over-saturation of color in your eyes. This problem doesn’t occur if you’re eating someone else’s cooking, because you are not the person in the kitchen smelling every cooked aroma at its source.
How our sense of taste works
Taste buds are cells on your tongue that allow you to perceive the five main tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami, Cleveland Clinic explains. When we eat, the chemical substances responsible for the food’s taste come into contact with the taste buds and pass the information on to the brain.
However, what we refer to as “taste” actually consists of a group of different sensations, including the smell, texture and temperature of the food.
“The perception of the color, texture, and even chewing sounds of the food contributes additional details to our brain on the pleasure we experience from our food,” Dr. Quoc said.
Even though your taste buds are little bumps all over your tongue, the flavor of a food can only be determined when taste is combined with smell. That’s why it’s usually harder to taste things when your sense of smell is impaired, for example due to a stuffy nose.
Dr. Bryan Quoc Le is a food scientist who earned his PhD in Food Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is also a food industry consultant, and author of the book 150 Food Science Questions Answered.
