Do You Eat Good Looks?

Another &#%*@ birthday just passed. I liked being 18 and think that I will enjoy being 19 again. At the party we had extra choclatey chocolate cake. It was one of those cakes that looked okay. It had stars, way too many candles, and sort of blocky look to it. If I had to guess how it would taste, I would have said good. I should say that I think all chocolate cake tastes at least okay and 99% taste good.

After enlisting several turbines and blowing out the many many candles, we got down to the eating of the cake. Wow! This cake was so moist. It had a good balance between sweetness and chocolate flavor. It was more milk chocolate tasting, which is fine with me. Overall this was an excellent tasting cake.

It got me thinking that this was a cake that tasted better than it looked. How many times have you had food that looked better than it tastedor the reverse? It happens. Some people are better or more focused on either the flavor or the presentation. The question for me is what is the interelation. I know from my professional and personal experience and from studies I have seen that food that looks better is perceived as tasting better (than the same food presented less attractively). I do wonder if there is a study showing how much this is true or not true. If you take a terrible tasting dish and present it in a beautiful high brow manner and tell people it is an exotic indulgence from some exotic foreign land, could it then be perceived as an acquired taste and eventually perceived as delicious? How much of taste is context or expectation based? To what degree can we acquire a taste and how much can our tastes change or be changed? I don't know the answers, but if you have seen any studies on this, please let me know. I will just get ready to turn 20 again in a year.