Gourmet Live Blog

Psychologists study it, and food lovers know innately: Eating is a multisensory experience. Long before we reach the table or kitchen, where food can be tasted, visual and olfactory cues have established our expectations and sharpened our desires. But as a team of Carnegie Mellon researchers recently found, these things also affect resulting consumption—but in a counterintuitive way.

In a recent psychological study, published in the journal Science on December 10, 2010, Carey Morewedge, Young Eun Huh and Joachim Vosgerau reported that mental imagery alone, depending on how it is directed, can serve to reduce consumption rather than increase it. This is not a correlation that would be obvious, given the proliferation of food imagery in the form of food publications (including the one you’re reading now), cooking shows, food-related advertising and the simultaneous proliferation of inches in the average American waistline. But under the right circumstances, simply looking at images of food—engaging the visual senses and the all-important imagination, without actually tasting anything—can make you want to eat less. Continue reading →