‘Cutlery provides us with the mental seasoning of a meal’. BAM. Make this the new catchphrase within the culinary world, and completely forget about the phrase, ‘You eat with your eyes’.

Leave this, once famously known expression, behind for good. Out of sight. Never to be acknowledged again!

Completely abandon it, and just for a second, try to look further than just what meets the eye, and immerse yourself into the unknown, and into what could be.

Have you ever thought about the potential ability that cutlery could have at either enhancing an entire dining experience or bringing it down into a ball of flames? Humans are intellectual beings, with minds rich in imagination. According to Behavioural Science, the average individual daydreams around 25-50 percent of the day. So, you sure are capable of it, aren’t you… 

Let’s immediately add another expression to the list whilst we’re at it. Being ‘born with a silver spoon in your mouth’ has been proven to be very advantageous. However, what if you were told that eating off a silver fork and knife also comes with its benefits?

A new study has proven that the use of heavier dining utensils makes food more enjoyable for diners. On top of this, heavier cutlery also makes diners more satisfied with the value, plating and presentation of their food. Plus, it makes it taste even better!  This was all demonstrated through an experiment conducted by Oxford University researchers, with 130 diners at a hotel restaurant in Edinburgh, Scotland. Each participant was given the same meal consisting of trout, mashed potatoes, spinach capers, and brown ship butter. What varied, however, was the cutlery with which they had to eat the meal. Half of the individuals received cutlery that weighed three times as much as the cheap cutlery given to the other group.

The results concluded that the heavy cutlery users liked their meals by about ten percent more, and were willing to pay an increase of fifteen percent for them. Lead researcher, Charles Michel, calls this phenomenon ‘sensation transference’. “It is likely that the positive or negative values that we attribute to the cutlery get implicitly ‘transferred’ to our judgments of the food. ”

By now you’ve learned that heavier cutlery creates a more mindful dining experience, but you might be asking yourself, why exactly? How does food taste better when using a certain type of cutlery? It should come as no surprise that our brains judge our food even before we eat it. This also entails the size of cutlery lying in front of us, the colour of the cutlery, and whether it is a spoon, a fork, a knife, or even some other utensil.

If, when you pick up cutlery, it has the heft and weight that you expect from it, it will positively impact the food’s taste, making it even more delicious. For example, when you use a small spoon, try and notice how the food you are eating tastes sweeter because your brain makes the association between small spoons, and their habitual pairing with desserts.

The contrast between the cutlery’s colour and the food’s colour also plays a role when it comes to taste! White yoghurt, when consumed with a white spoon, tastes sweeter than eating white yoghurt with a black spoon. The reason behind this phenomenon is that clashing, contrasting food and utensil colours impact how much people enjoy food. What occurred in this case, with the white yoghurt being eaten with a white spoon, is that the similarity between the colour of the utensil and the food made the pairing come across as seamless. Hence, allowing for a sweeter taste than when yoghurt was paired with a black spoon, where the colour contrast would subconsciously be interpreted as ‘aggressive’, and make the yoghurt taste less sweet.

Additionally, it has also been concluded that cheese presented on a knife tastes saltier than when it is served on a spoon, fork, or the choice everyone goes with when hosting a dinner party, a toothpick.

Our choice of cutlery truly has more power on our dining experiences than we have given it credit for. So, next time, rather than taking half an hour to plan what you will cook, let yourself be driven by the cutlery you feel like using that day, and see where it takes you. After all, cutlery is the mental seasoning of our meals which we never knew about. Happy cutlery picking!