Horry
2008-02-25 02:26:47 UTC
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3422323.ece>
From The Sunday Times, February 24, 2008
How science could soon be manipulating our choice of food
Matt Rudd
I’m in the university town of Wageningen, about to have the least private
lunch of my life, and a Dutchman is playing tricks with my mind. “Would you
like coffee?” he says, all cryptically.
“No, water will be fine,” I reply, because I’m not going to be manipulated.
A bottle of water turns up with four beakers, all black but different
shapes. The Dutchman is smirking, barely able to contain his excitement as
he waits for my next move.
If I choose the tall one, it probably means I have issues with the size of
my penis. If I choose the short, stubby one, it probably means the same. I
choose the one closest to me. The Dutchman nods to himself.
“What does all that mean?” I ask. “Well, you were on edge because I was
smirking,” says the Dutchman, smirking at the fact that smirking was part
of his test.
“And you were uncomfortable because all the beakers are black, which is the
colour we associate with death. The different shapes should have no real
significance � they hold the same amount of water � but subconsciously, you
were making false assumptions about one holding more than the other. It was
interesting.”
At least it had nothing to do with my penis.
Welcome to the Restaurant of the Future, a multi-million-pound experiment
that could, and probably will, change the way we eat.
On the face of it, it is just another trendy office canteen, all marble
surfaces, floor-to-ceiling windows and mood lighting. But looks are
deceptive in Wageningen: it is in fact a laboratory masquerading as a
restaurant.
Dotted across the ceiling are 27 concealed video cameras watching your
every move. There’s a scale that weighs you secretly as you queue to pay.
Soon there will be face-reading technology and smart spoons that measure
the speed at which you are eating.
In a locked control room along the corridor, three of the 20 analysts,
psychologists and technicians involved in the project sit at banks of
screens, watching, watching, watching. If you don’t like your mayonnaise
and chips, they will notice and understand why before you do.
From the country that gave us Big Brother, this is Big Brother run by
Clever People with White Coats and Clipboards. It’s terrifying.
The Dutchman playing tricks with my mind is Rene Koster, director of the
project, who is about to begin the most extensive experiment on our
subconscious attitude to food. As he explains, you can’t just ask us why we
eat what we eat because we simply don’t know.
Up to 80% of what we do is entirely subconscious and not even particularly
rational. But if someone asks you why you made a decision, your brain gives
a rational but probably inaccurate answer, often out of sheer politeness.
For example: “Why have you just scoffed three Big Macs?”
“Because I was starving.” The real reason? Because my stomach didn’t notice
the nondescript flavour, because the weather was inclement, because the
carpet was green, because it was a Tuesday, because Tchaikovsky’s Symphony
No 3 was playing as it was the last time I had a Big Mac craving. In other
words, I really have no idea.
Koster and his team plan to work out the subliminal influences on food
choices. With that deduced, the implications for the real restaurants of
the future are enormous. They will be able to manipulate us � and we won’t
even know it.
I point out to Koster (who, incidentally, has chosen the long, thin water
beaker) that I find that scary. “All the things you are afraid of are
already happening,” he says. “Fast-food companies and supermarkets already
manipulate us, although our understanding of how is still very limited.
“What we do know is that we have big problems with the way we eat. Calories
are in abundance but we behave as if they are scarce, as we did when we
were hunter gatherers. We can’t tell when to stop. And we can’t simply be
told to stop. Diets don’t work � if you are told not to eat cake, you will
spend your whole time fixating on cake. If we work out what sort of
labelling, presentation, mood and so forth will make you more likely to
choose something other than cake, that will be far more effective.”
So mind control is the only way to make us make the right food choices,
which is pretty depressing.
“You would call it control. We would call it helping people. The health
implications of bad diets, the environmental implications of us throwing
away 40% of the food we buy, they’re immeasurable. We have a big problem
and if you can induce changes in subconscious behaviour, that is a good
thing.”
Used in the right way, the Restaurant of the Future could make fat people
thin. It could make children eat apples. It could make lorry drivers eat
salad, rather than sleep-inducing fry-ups. Used in the wrong way, it could
make us all eat three Big Macs.
It’s time for lunch. Koster and one of his head scientists, Rene de Wijk,
vanish into the control room to be all Big Brotherish, leaving me to
negotiate the canteen alone. It’s a Dutch canteen and, as you know, the
Dutch are quite strange.
There’s a milk bar even though this is a university, not a primary school.
I take some milk, then wonder if I’ve only done that because I want to
assimilate. Or maybe it’s because I relish the chance to be treated like a
baby again. I then begin to wonder if my mother loved me, consider paying a
prostitute to change my nappy on my way back through Amsterdam, then get a
grip and move on to the next food island.
Herring is an option but I know they’ll read a lot into that so I go for
the safer beef taco, some bread and a milky, swirly thing in a glass. I
wonder if this makes me a bad person.
When the programme begins fully next week, anyone using the canteen will be
told they are participating in a scientific study � but they will soon,
Koster maintains, forget they are being watched. At first I find that hard
to believe. As I sit alone at my table, I am incredibly conscious of the
cameras. But the real lab rats will be watched for months, even years: it
won’t take long for them to behave as if the cameras aren’t there at all.
Halfway through the strange dessert, the boffins return. I feel as if I’ve
given nothing away but de Wijk declares the past 20 minutes “very
interesting”. It takes two days to analyse fully the results of one meal,
but in a few minutes the scientists have deduced that I was nervous, which
might explain why I was atypically uninquisitive (I didn’t look around as
much as they had expected of a lone eater). They had expected that I’d go
for the taco because that was the high-calorie option. I had been up since
3am, I was tired, I needed comfort food.
The fact that I didn’t finish my salad didn’t surprise them. Salad is
charged by the bowl, so the temptation to take more than I needed was
irresistible. If the bowl had been 10% smaller, I wouldn’t have noticed and
I would still have had an elegant sufficiency of salad. It’s this sort of
manipulation that the restaurant will study in the coming months.
Most interestingly (for them, at any rate), I don’t eat my bread. Why would
I take bread and not even try it? That is illogical. Rene II explains that
anticipation is a very complex procedure. Trying to understand how I will
feel about the food I choose when I actually come to eat it depends on
hundreds of factors.
The team has already been asked to look at a Utrecht hospital’s catering
system (the restaurant is public-private funded and, for a fee, will test
out any new product or help to solve any food-related problem). The Utrecht
patients were being asked to choose their meals a whole week ahead. This
might have kept the costs down and limited visits by catering staff, but it
was a madness.
A patient having a colectomy on Tuesday is not going to know in advance
whether he will fancy the fish or the beef come Friday. If he isn’t getting
the food he wants, he is less positive, his recovery is hampered � and
medical costs spiral. The restaurant should help to quantify all this.
Enough about Utrecht bed-hoggers. How are we going to make children eat
more apples, for example? “We don’t know yet. But there is no real reason
why children shouldn’t eat apples, which are sweet and taste a bit like
lemonade. Perhaps children are put off by the packaging, the crunchiness,
the colour � or because they are being told to eat them by their parents.
It is very complex, psychologically. We hope to make all that clearer.”
I leave the two Renes and the Restaurant of the Future in a daze. The
questions they could answer are mind-boggling. What is the real reason why
women eat less in male company? Can green lighting make us herbivores? Does
an overattentive waiter make us choose cheese rather than ice-cream?
By the time I reach Schiphol airport I’m getting anxious about the future.
We’ll all be eating salad without knowing why. We’ll be stick-thin and
glowing. Wine will be served in thin, black glasses to trick us out of
binge-drinking. We will live for ever. The prospect is so depressing that I
find myself eating a Big Mac. I am eating one because I want to. At least
that’s what I think.
From The Sunday Times, February 24, 2008
How science could soon be manipulating our choice of food
Matt Rudd
I’m in the university town of Wageningen, about to have the least private
lunch of my life, and a Dutchman is playing tricks with my mind. “Would you
like coffee?” he says, all cryptically.
“No, water will be fine,” I reply, because I’m not going to be manipulated.
A bottle of water turns up with four beakers, all black but different
shapes. The Dutchman is smirking, barely able to contain his excitement as
he waits for my next move.
If I choose the tall one, it probably means I have issues with the size of
my penis. If I choose the short, stubby one, it probably means the same. I
choose the one closest to me. The Dutchman nods to himself.
“What does all that mean?” I ask. “Well, you were on edge because I was
smirking,” says the Dutchman, smirking at the fact that smirking was part
of his test.
“And you were uncomfortable because all the beakers are black, which is the
colour we associate with death. The different shapes should have no real
significance � they hold the same amount of water � but subconsciously, you
were making false assumptions about one holding more than the other. It was
interesting.”
At least it had nothing to do with my penis.
Welcome to the Restaurant of the Future, a multi-million-pound experiment
that could, and probably will, change the way we eat.
On the face of it, it is just another trendy office canteen, all marble
surfaces, floor-to-ceiling windows and mood lighting. But looks are
deceptive in Wageningen: it is in fact a laboratory masquerading as a
restaurant.
Dotted across the ceiling are 27 concealed video cameras watching your
every move. There’s a scale that weighs you secretly as you queue to pay.
Soon there will be face-reading technology and smart spoons that measure
the speed at which you are eating.
In a locked control room along the corridor, three of the 20 analysts,
psychologists and technicians involved in the project sit at banks of
screens, watching, watching, watching. If you don’t like your mayonnaise
and chips, they will notice and understand why before you do.
From the country that gave us Big Brother, this is Big Brother run by
Clever People with White Coats and Clipboards. It’s terrifying.
The Dutchman playing tricks with my mind is Rene Koster, director of the
project, who is about to begin the most extensive experiment on our
subconscious attitude to food. As he explains, you can’t just ask us why we
eat what we eat because we simply don’t know.
Up to 80% of what we do is entirely subconscious and not even particularly
rational. But if someone asks you why you made a decision, your brain gives
a rational but probably inaccurate answer, often out of sheer politeness.
For example: “Why have you just scoffed three Big Macs?”
“Because I was starving.” The real reason? Because my stomach didn’t notice
the nondescript flavour, because the weather was inclement, because the
carpet was green, because it was a Tuesday, because Tchaikovsky’s Symphony
No 3 was playing as it was the last time I had a Big Mac craving. In other
words, I really have no idea.
Koster and his team plan to work out the subliminal influences on food
choices. With that deduced, the implications for the real restaurants of
the future are enormous. They will be able to manipulate us � and we won’t
even know it.
I point out to Koster (who, incidentally, has chosen the long, thin water
beaker) that I find that scary. “All the things you are afraid of are
already happening,” he says. “Fast-food companies and supermarkets already
manipulate us, although our understanding of how is still very limited.
“What we do know is that we have big problems with the way we eat. Calories
are in abundance but we behave as if they are scarce, as we did when we
were hunter gatherers. We can’t tell when to stop. And we can’t simply be
told to stop. Diets don’t work � if you are told not to eat cake, you will
spend your whole time fixating on cake. If we work out what sort of
labelling, presentation, mood and so forth will make you more likely to
choose something other than cake, that will be far more effective.”
So mind control is the only way to make us make the right food choices,
which is pretty depressing.
“You would call it control. We would call it helping people. The health
implications of bad diets, the environmental implications of us throwing
away 40% of the food we buy, they’re immeasurable. We have a big problem
and if you can induce changes in subconscious behaviour, that is a good
thing.”
Used in the right way, the Restaurant of the Future could make fat people
thin. It could make children eat apples. It could make lorry drivers eat
salad, rather than sleep-inducing fry-ups. Used in the wrong way, it could
make us all eat three Big Macs.
It’s time for lunch. Koster and one of his head scientists, Rene de Wijk,
vanish into the control room to be all Big Brotherish, leaving me to
negotiate the canteen alone. It’s a Dutch canteen and, as you know, the
Dutch are quite strange.
There’s a milk bar even though this is a university, not a primary school.
I take some milk, then wonder if I’ve only done that because I want to
assimilate. Or maybe it’s because I relish the chance to be treated like a
baby again. I then begin to wonder if my mother loved me, consider paying a
prostitute to change my nappy on my way back through Amsterdam, then get a
grip and move on to the next food island.
Herring is an option but I know they’ll read a lot into that so I go for
the safer beef taco, some bread and a milky, swirly thing in a glass. I
wonder if this makes me a bad person.
When the programme begins fully next week, anyone using the canteen will be
told they are participating in a scientific study � but they will soon,
Koster maintains, forget they are being watched. At first I find that hard
to believe. As I sit alone at my table, I am incredibly conscious of the
cameras. But the real lab rats will be watched for months, even years: it
won’t take long for them to behave as if the cameras aren’t there at all.
Halfway through the strange dessert, the boffins return. I feel as if I’ve
given nothing away but de Wijk declares the past 20 minutes “very
interesting”. It takes two days to analyse fully the results of one meal,
but in a few minutes the scientists have deduced that I was nervous, which
might explain why I was atypically uninquisitive (I didn’t look around as
much as they had expected of a lone eater). They had expected that I’d go
for the taco because that was the high-calorie option. I had been up since
3am, I was tired, I needed comfort food.
The fact that I didn’t finish my salad didn’t surprise them. Salad is
charged by the bowl, so the temptation to take more than I needed was
irresistible. If the bowl had been 10% smaller, I wouldn’t have noticed and
I would still have had an elegant sufficiency of salad. It’s this sort of
manipulation that the restaurant will study in the coming months.
Most interestingly (for them, at any rate), I don’t eat my bread. Why would
I take bread and not even try it? That is illogical. Rene II explains that
anticipation is a very complex procedure. Trying to understand how I will
feel about the food I choose when I actually come to eat it depends on
hundreds of factors.
The team has already been asked to look at a Utrecht hospital’s catering
system (the restaurant is public-private funded and, for a fee, will test
out any new product or help to solve any food-related problem). The Utrecht
patients were being asked to choose their meals a whole week ahead. This
might have kept the costs down and limited visits by catering staff, but it
was a madness.
A patient having a colectomy on Tuesday is not going to know in advance
whether he will fancy the fish or the beef come Friday. If he isn’t getting
the food he wants, he is less positive, his recovery is hampered � and
medical costs spiral. The restaurant should help to quantify all this.
Enough about Utrecht bed-hoggers. How are we going to make children eat
more apples, for example? “We don’t know yet. But there is no real reason
why children shouldn’t eat apples, which are sweet and taste a bit like
lemonade. Perhaps children are put off by the packaging, the crunchiness,
the colour � or because they are being told to eat them by their parents.
It is very complex, psychologically. We hope to make all that clearer.”
I leave the two Renes and the Restaurant of the Future in a daze. The
questions they could answer are mind-boggling. What is the real reason why
women eat less in male company? Can green lighting make us herbivores? Does
an overattentive waiter make us choose cheese rather than ice-cream?
By the time I reach Schiphol airport I’m getting anxious about the future.
We’ll all be eating salad without knowing why. We’ll be stick-thin and
glowing. Wine will be served in thin, black glasses to trick us out of
binge-drinking. We will live for ever. The prospect is so depressing that I
find myself eating a Big Mac. I am eating one because I want to. At least
that’s what I think.