Favorite Food Hoax?
Dear Mr. Corduroy,
This is a strange question. I recently read somewhere that depending on the hand you use to eat with, food tastes differently. If you are right handed, and normally eat with your right hand, then by switching and using your left hand to eat with, it will open different taste pathways by using the other hemisphere of your brain. After testing this, I have come to the conclusion that it is a hoax. I was wondering what was the most ridiculous hoax you had heard of concerning food/eating.
Ambidextrous Andy
Dear Andy:
I’ve got to admit, I’ve never heard anything like that before. The concept seems somewhat preposterous, especially since hands are quite often used interchangeably when eating. Think about when you’re cutting a steak: you probably hold the fork in your left hand and the knife in your right hand. Once you’ve cut a chunk off, you may or may not lay the knife down, switch the hand you’re using for the fork, and then eat the piece of steak. Then again, you might not, especially if you’re European, where the general consensus on table manners is that there’s no sense in playing patty-cake with your fork, thus they maintain the fork in their left hand and the knife in their right, just as the utensils are laid out for them before the meal (they’re so pragmatic!).
I tried to find some sort of source for the rumor about hand usage affecting taste but could find no mention of it despite searching Google, MSN, and Ask.com. Perhaps the rumor is so outlandish it hasn’t taken hold in enough people’s imaginations to require debunking online? Seems a plausible hypothesis to me.
As far as the most outlandish hoax I’ve ever heard of: McDonald’s trying to paint themselves as a source of healthful meals by offering multiple salads on the menu. I hadn’t even been aware of the variety of salad options on their menu (I don’t eat there but I do see their billboards) until I checked out their website for nutritional content. The restaurant offers several salads, each with a choice of grilled chicken, crispy (fried) chicken, or no chicken. Were I to be ordering a salad from them, I would probably lean toward the “grilled chicken breast,” which I view as preferable to deep fried chicken, while still providing me with a somewhat hardy meal option. the nutritional content seems to confirm my choice: the grilled breast adds only 2g of fat, 0.5g saturated fat whereas the crispy chicken adds 9g of fat, 2g saturated. Even so, though, what you’re getting turns out to bear only a mild resemblance to a chicken, as evidenced by the ingredients listed for the “grilled chicken breast”:
Grilled Chicken Breast Filet
Boneless, skinless chicken breast filets with rib meat, colored with paprika and caramel color added. Contains: Up to 20% of a solution of water, seasoning [salt, sugar, modified corn starch, maltodextrin, spices, dextrose, autolyzed yeast, hydrolyzed (corn gluten, soy, wheat gluten) proteins, garlic powder, paprika, chicken fat, chicken broth, natural flavors (animal and vegetable source), caramel color, polysorbate 80, xanthan gum, onion powder, extractives of paprika], modified food starch, sodium phosphates. Grilled with liquid margarine. Contains wheat and soybean ingredients.
Good Lord! Who knew they could pack so much artificiality into something like a grilled chicken breast? The crispy chicken turns out to be even less like an actual bird:
Crispy Chicken Breast Filet
Boneless, skinless chicken breast filets with rib meat. Contains: Up to 29.3% of a solution of water, seasoning (salt, modified food starch, spices, carrageenan, spice extractives), sodium phosphates. Battered and breaded with: Wheat flour, water, modified corn starch, bleached wheat flour, salt, spice, wheat gluten, egg white solids, dextrose, yeast, leavening (sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium bicarbonate, monocalcium phosphate). Breading set in vegetable oil. Cooked in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, (may contain partially hydrogenated soybean oil and/or partially hydrogenated corn oil and/or partially hydrogenated canola oil and/or cottonseed oil and/or sunflower oil and/or corn oil). Contains wheat and egg ingredients.
Reading the list of ingredients confirms in my mind why I don’t eat at McDonald’s (or any other fast food restaurant, if I can avoid it). Want to see something really scary? Go to the nutritional page and check out the information for some of their more popular sandwiches. Disgusting!
September 12th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
Once again, reading Parade every Sunday has paid off! I, too, read
the bit that Ambidextrous Andy did about taste changing depending on what hand you’re eating with — in Marilyn vos Savant’s column this past Sunday in Parade magazine. Here is the quote straight from the source:
I’ve heard that food tastes a little different when eaten with the hand opposite the one usually used. My friends and I tried this, and it’s true. Why?
—Reggie Mechulan, Miami, Fla.
[Per Marilyn]: Taste receptors are arrayed symmetrically, with certain areas sensitive to sweet and salty flavors while others are tuned to sour and bitter flavors. When you use your favored hand to place food inside your mouth—especially with a utensil such as a fork or spoon—you do it the same way again and again. But if you use your other hand, the food arrives from an unfamiliar angle and traverses a somewhat different path of taste buds. The change is unimportant but noticeable.
September 13th, 2006 at 5:41 am
Thanks for pointing out the ingredient list for the chicken at McD. I’ll use this with my students when they do their fast food analysis project. I’ll probably point it out to them after they watch Supersize Me.
As for scary fast food nutrition–check out a Double Whopper with Cheese at BK. It has a third cup of fat and paired with small fries would give me almost a full day’s worth of calories. I think they have either triple or quadruple burgers now.
September 14th, 2006 at 8:51 am
After reading Marilyn vos Savant’s reasoning behind the supposed difference in food taste, I decided to reevaluate the prospect, with special attention to the way the food traveled over my tongue. When inserting the food with my right hand, the food had a tendency to stay near the right side of my mouth; when inserting with the left, it tended to stay near the left side of my mouth—so, in a sense, she is correct. Tastes that originate on the tongue (sweet, sour, salty, bitter) may have very slightly different tastes, if you pay very close attention. The difference is, though, as Marilyn says in her response, unimportant–really to the point of being negligible.