Quick question: Does your mouth fill to the brim with saliva when a big bucket of fried chicke n is plopped down in front of you? How about potato chips? Pork rinds? Follow up query: Do your eyes roll back into your skull with pleasure every time a crunching sound is emitted from your mouth? I mean, not entirely normal, but normal enough. Humankind's obsession with crispy food goes way back, and we actually have our early ancestors to thank for our love of pretzels, pork rinds, and crispy bacon.
To get to the bottom of this pseudo-mystery, I talked to John S. Allen, research scientist at the University of Southern California an author, who was happy to discuss our love of crispy food.
Allen shows us that the answer lies—like so many of our idiosyncrasies—in the hands of our ancestors. It all started with hunting and gathering. That crunch can also influence how much food we consume. Thanks to this hard-wired feedback, the snack industry has made it a priority to emphasize the sounds of their foods in both development and marketing. There, they discovered the ideal breaking point for a chip was four pounds per square inch PSI , just a fraction of what we might need to tear into a steak to PSI.
The quality and consistency of the potatoes themselves is also key, according to Herbert Stone, Ph. For most consumers, the promise of sonic flavor will draw their attention. According to Connecticut audiologist Natan Bauman, M. Other sources peg it as closer to 63 dB when you're chewing on a chip with your mouth open, or 55 dB with your lips closed.
When you hear your own chewing, the sound is being conducted both via the air and your own bones, giving it a distinctively unique sound. Like talking, hearing yourself chewing on a recording might be troubling. For someone suffering from misophonia , or the literal hatred of specific sounds, it's not their own chomping that's the problem.
It's everyone else's. When we chew, Bauman says, the auditory cortical and limbic system areas of our brain are lighting up, getting information about freshness and texture. Instead, they're affected by others typing, clicking pens, or, more often, chewing. That's true for everyone, but in misophonics, it lands with a thud. Chewing, lip smacking, and even breathing become intolerable for sufferers, who often feel agitated and nervous, with corresponding increases in heart rate.
Some fly into a rage. That is all. Bauman says misophonia can be treated using cognitive therapy. An earpiece can provide white noise to reduce trigger sounds while sufferers try to retrain their brain to tolerate the noises. But even the sight of a bag of chips can be enough to send them scrambling.
People with misophonia might also want to exercise caution when traveling. Eating is a multi-sensory experience. One of the key senses is proprioception also called kinaesthesia ; our body's ability to sense movement and location.
Proprioceptive sensations are interesting because we are largely unaware of them. The jaw is teeming with proprioceptors, which give the brain a lot of sensory information when we eat. This rich experience can be both stimulating and grounding. For children with sensory processing difficulties, the proprioceptive system can be exercised with crunchy foods that provide a lot of sensory input.
Crunching means making noise inside the mouth, which may also be part of the evolutionary appeal of crunchy foods. As I write, I am eating from a bag of chipotle-flavored tortilla chips. My skull rattles as I move the crisp shards around my molars. The flavor never weakens. Then the bag is mysteriously empty.
I am greedy, but this would not happen with a bag of spinach. I notice how the flavor keeps singing. We want more.
This feedback loop stops you becoming habituated to the texture. At the root of our enjoyment with crispy, crunchy, or chewy textures is the simple fact that chewing itself is pleasurable. Chewing increases blood flow to the brain. More blood means more oxygen and energy, which makes the brain perform better.
A large Swedish study in found that elderly people who could chew hard foods had lower risk of cognitive impairment. It is a cruel trick of nature that our ability to appreciate texture may not decline along with our physical ability to eat.
In , a group of Japanese researchers investigated whether the perceived sensations of nursing care foods could be changed by providing auditory feedback. Thirty adults took part in the experiment.
For half the participants, researchers used an electromyogram EMG —an instrument that records the electrical activity of muscles—to detect activity in the masseter the prominent muscle of the jaw and played crunchy chewing sounds while they ate. Considering this effect, a tool for helping people on soft diets enjoy their food more could be a kind addition to elderly care.
Tarka , or tadka, involves frying whole spices in oil to release their fragrance and maximize their crunchiness. Although food with one-note texture can quickly become boring, our preferences may be cultural.
Some cuisines put particular textures at center-stage.
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