Practical approach to synaesthesia in a sensorial food analysis course

MARÍA DEL PILAR BUERA; JOSÉ LUIS CAIVANO; CAROLINA SCHEBOR; VERÓNICA BUSCH; MARIO CUETO

Milan

Congreso; ISEKI_Food 2011. "BRIDGING TRAINING AND RESEARCH FOR INDUSTRY AND THE WIDER COMMUNITY" 2ND INTERNATIONAL ISEKI FOOD CONFERENCE; 2011

The complex process of human perception is affected by a number of factors simultaneously. They can be grouped as food factors, related to the food composition and structure, human factors, related to individual conditions and expectations, and factors related to the environment where the process occurs. Several evidences were reported on the effect of color on sweet taste. Green samples of sugar syrups were considered less sweet than the samples with other colors. On the other side, the addition of a red colorant to sucrose solutions enhanced sweetness perception. The phenomenon by which stimuli of different sensory modes are associated by means of some kind of perceptual similarity is generally defined as synaesthesia. This work deals with a practical approach to prove the sensorial associations between color and taste, which was performed in a graduate course of the Food Science career. Liquid, gel and solid samples were prepared with the four basic tastes. A group of 16 pre-graduate students participated of the experiment, who first identified the four tastes and recognized the four elementary chromatic colors. The students were asked to taste each sample separately, with closed eyes, then visualize the four basic colors and select the color most related to the current taste. In a second stage, they were asked to localize the color most associated to the perceived taste in a NCS color atlas with more than 1,000 samples. The results indicated that the most common associations in liquid or gel samples are sour-yellow; sweet-red, bitter- blue and salty-green. In solid samples the same tendency was observed, but with less marked differences between a particular taste-color. Color conditions food acceptance and it also provides previous information on the intensity of other food attributes. This work illustrates that the interaction between colors and tastes has a clearly defined tendency, which may have implications in different stages of product innovation, development, marketing, and packaging. It opens the possibility of using colorants to induce an increase in a given taste and thus partially replacing the use of additives.