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Trying your fill while still cooking, casually nibbling a little off someone else’s plate, and late in the evening grabbing a small but very tasty piece of food from the refrigerator – in Russian all this is called the word “bite”. Is there a psychological explanation for this habit?
A spoonful of jam or condensed milk, a slice of cheese or ham – and a sip of juice or milk, straight from the bottle. And that’s it, quickly, quickly close the refrigerator door and tiptoe out of the kitchen. As if nothing had happened, as if everything was in order. It’s not about you? Then probably about one of your friends or relatives. The habit of biting is characteristic of a great many people. It has nothing to do with the feeling of hunger, but rather with the pleasure of eating. But why do all these people prefer to receive it in this way, and not at the table?
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- The power of imagination against overeating
The Guardian journalist Amy Fleming decided to ask this question, honestly confessing to the mortal sin of biting. Yes, she loves to grab a slice of pizza from the refrigerator in the middle of the night. Yes, it happens that a jar of peanut butter in her house runs out, never making it to sandwiches: Amy just eats it, taking it – spoon by spoon – in the evenings. And yes, Amy loves to taste what she cooks – perhaps more than eating cooked food. So what? After all, we live in the XNUMXst century, can’t science explain all this?
As it turns out, not yet. In any case, Amy Fleming has not been able to find a single exhaustive study on this topic. However, the psychologists to whom she turned for explanations nevertheless expressed several interesting considerations. For example, Jonathan Schooler of the University of California shared a hunch that our secret addictions give us much more pleasure than openly expressed preferences. True, he refers at the same time to studies on romantic relationships, and not at all on food, but still, there is perhaps some truth in this. A piece of ham, eaten in the kitchen secretly from the whole family, really turns out to be much tastier than a piece of ham on a plate put on the dining table.
Read more:
- Why We Eat… When We’re Not Hungry
Another thought by Jonathan Schooler is that biting is quickly turning into a ritual. And the role of rituals in psychology is difficult to overestimate. And in the psychology of food consumption as well. Schooler, for example, refers to an experiment* in which participants were asked to simply eat a bar of chocolate. But some of the subjects were asked to break the tile in half, then free the left half from the foil, eat it – and then repeat the same process with the right half. And the other part was free to eat the chocolate in any way possible. And what do you think? Those who broke and unwrapped the chocolate bar in a certain order found it to be tastier. Of course, the chocolate was exactly the same. It is quite possible that the ritual of eating food not at the table, but at the midnight refrigerator or with a knife and fork at the stove leads to the same results.
Another interviewee Amy Fleming, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan Kent Berridge (Kent Berridge) suggested that “eating out of context” can exacerbate the sensitivity of taste buds. And in fact: at the table we eat at least three times a day, and the receptors just get used to this process and do not pay tribute to the food in the right way. But one single piece, swallowed while standing, is able to restore liveliness and sharpness of sensations to us.
In part, this idea is confirmed by a study conducted by a group of British scientists back in the early 80s of the last century **. They found that our satisfaction with food decreases in proportion to the amount of food we eat. And it’s not just about eating. It’s just that each next fork or spoon of the same dish brings us less pleasure than the previous one. This knowledge is actively used by restaurateurs, reducing the volume of each portion and thus stimulating us to order a lot of dishes: we would have eaten a single conventional borscht much faster than equally conventional salad, borscht, shish kebab and dessert. But, following the same logic, the first spoon turns out to be the most delicious. Or a fork. Or a piece of ham from the refrigerator grabbed by the fingers. Thank you Amy Fleming, we got it. And we think it’s time to eat.
The full text of Amy Fleming’s article is available at: theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2014/sep/30/grazing-underrated-way-to-eat
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