Study: Food Tastes Better in a Bowl
Poké bowls, smoothie bowls, Buddha bowls, burrito bowls: name something and it comes in a little bowl. Why? Because it tastes better. And here’s why.
In the past, we ate little more than cornflakes and soup from a bowl, but these days everything goes in a bowl. Only suddenly, you don’t call it a bowl anymore, but a bowl. You can get annoyed by that (like Emma), but what I mainly wonder is: why have we suddenly started eating everything from a bowl?
The Dutch trinity of potatoes-vegetables-meat is always neatly separated on a plate, with the gravy on the side because goodness me, what if you mixed something. That’s what stamppot is for, after all. Which, incidentally, is also invariably served on a plate.
Poor people’s food
Food historian Helen Zoe Veit explains in online magazine Quartz how this came about. Long story short: in the twentieth century, eating from a bowl became associated with food for poor people (stews, beans and mush you could throw leftovers into) and non-assimilated immigrants and their—for us, at least—still unfamiliar cuisines. Meanwhile, eating multiple courses and using different tableware for different food groups was seen as a sign of wealth.
The spirit of the times
Times change, and by now eating from a bowl is hipper than hip. And definitely not just because of the #instafactor. Bowls full of vegetables, grains, roasted pumpkin and pieces of tofu or chicken fit perfectly with today’s vegan and health trend. And let’s be honest: in a bowl, it looks appetizing; scattered loose on a plate, it looks hopelessly lost.
What’s more: it simply sounds delicious. Take a burrito bowl. In reality, it’s nothing more than the contents of a burrito dumped onto a bowl of rice. But if you called it a tortilla-less burrito, it would sound a lot less appealing. A burrito bowl sounds lavish, extravagant, substantial.
Tastier
This brings us to a very important reason why food tastes better in a bowl. “Even before you start eating, your brain forms a set of expectations about how it will taste. Light, music, tableware: all of it has an influence,” psychologist Charles Spence explains in Quartz.
“You pick up a bowl, feel how heavy it is and smell it up close. This creates the expectation that you’re about to consume a more filling, healthier, more flavorful meal than when that same pile of food is sitting on a plate,” says Spence.
A better world
The professor even dares to take it a step further: according to him, eating from a bowl can make the world feel a little nicer. “Research shows that when you hold something warm in your hand, the world looks a little better. So if you hold a warm bowl, the same effect could occur.”
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