Key to Good Cooking: Trickery

Aug. 15, 2007 — -- So, you're not a great chef, but you want to impress someone with your culinary skills. Trick them into thinking the cheap wine you've just poured is really a fine wine from California, and they'll sing praises of your meal.

Conversely, serve the same wine, but make them think it came from North Dakota, and chances are you won't have to feed them again for a long, long time.

That's the latest finding from researchers at Cornell University, who have spent several years now, up to their gullets in trickery, trying to find out just how easy it is to make someone think a meal, or just about anything else, is better than it really is just by introducing one or two psychological cues.

A purported "fine wine," in this case, invoked "cognitive shortcuts" that led diners to believe the meal was fit for a king, according to Brian Wansink, professor of marketing at Cornell, and leader of the research team.

"It's really crazy, but it kind of makes sense," said Wansink, author of "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think." "If we think something is going to taste good, we look for the qualities that can confirm that expectation. If we think it's going to taste terrible, we look for things that will confirm that it's bad."

For his latest excursion into culinary witchcraft, Wansink returned to a restaurant he helped found when he was at the University of Illinois. The Spice Box restaurant in Urbana was designed to serve as a research platform, allowing Wansink and others to test out their theories about how our expectations influence our behavior and judgment.

Every Thursday, the restaurant serves a meal for $20 to $25, and diners know they are expected to fill out a card after the meal, offering their comments and evaluation. Everybody gets the same meal.

The diners are pretty sophisticated, partly because of the proximity of the university, but Wansink wanted to find out if he could introduce a single cue and sway their judgment, either to think the meal was quite good, or quite bad.