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Your taste is learned, so it can be relearned
Gianna Powel's argument is not that you enjoy food too much. It is that your enjoyment was aimed somewhere, and it can be aimed back.
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01 The problem, outside
The craving was designed before you felt it
Powel opens with a claim you can check for yourself: the food that is hardest to put down was built to be that way, by people who were paid to build it that way.
Drawing on Witherly's work, she names six attributes that big food companies tune. Taste hedonics (sugar, salt, fat and umami). Dynamic contrast (several textures in one bite). Evoked qualities (a flavour that reminds you of somewhere). The food pleasure equation (macronutrients plus sensation). Caloric density. And emulsion theory, where fat carries the flavour through everything else. Get all six right and the product lands on what the industry calls the bliss point.
Salt is held between 1.0 and 1.5 percent. Taste alone accounts for only about a tenth of what you like. The rest is texture, colour, sound, memory and packaging. None of that is a failure of character on your side of the counter. It is product design, and it worked.
A picture emerges of an army of chemists, physicists, and even neuroscientists, all working to make sure you want a second cookie.Kelly Crowe, 2013
02 The problem, inside
The pleasure lands below where it started
Dopamine is the brain's motivation signal. Powel's point is not that dopamine is the villain. It is that the lift is borrowed, and the brain collects.
She uses invented numbers to make the shape clear. Say your usual level is 5. A piece of chocolate takes you to 7.5. When it comes down it does not stop at 5, it undershoots to roughly 2.5. You now feel worse than before you started, and the most obvious way to feel better is more chocolate. The brain will return to 5 on its own, given a little time.
Repeat it often enough and the peak flattens. She is direct about where that leaves a person: still eating, no longer getting much back for it. That loop is worth understanding, because everything the book suggests afterwards is aimed straight at it.
03 The turn
Taste is a habit, and habits move faster than you think
The encouraging finding in this book is how quickly a preference resets. Powel cites neuroscientist Andrew Huberman: a couple of days away from the most intensely engineered foods is enough for plain food to start tasting good again.
Her practical answer is not smaller meals. It is better cooking. She gives a whole list of things that make home food taste like something you actually want: soy sauce, cheddar or parmesan, garlic, butter, shallots, a little brown sugar or honey, Worcestershire sauce, good bacon, egg yolks, and fresh herbs rather than dried. On the bacon she writes, "You see, we are not cutting out all the good stuff."
That list is the whole argument in miniature. Every lever the factory pulls is sitting in an ordinary kitchen. She asks for ten days of cooking at home, and she asks for it gently: if you grab something else along the way, do not make it a verdict on yourself.
All it takes is a short period of time, even just days, two days or so of not consuming any highly palatable foods, and suddenly broccoli with just a little bit of seasoning tastes delicious to you.Andrew Huberman, 2021
Take a dish you already make and add one thing from her list: garlic, a knob of butter, fresh parsley instead of dried. Then notice whether you wanted the second forkful more than usual.
04 Shift one · belief
Bias reversal: "unhealthy means tasty" is a belief, not a fact
Raghunathan and colleagues ran four experiments and found something consistent. The less healthy people judge a food to be, the better they expect it to taste, the more they report enjoying it while eating, and the more likely they are to choose it.
The expectation is doing a lot of the tasting. Powel's evidence that it is learned rather than built in comes from a comparison. Werle and colleagues found that eaters in the United States largely hold the association that unhealthy equals delicious. Eaters in France hold the reverse: the healthy option is assumed to be the flavourful one, and the heavily processed option is the one assumed to be thin on taste.
If the same plate of food can carry opposite expectations in two countries, the expectation is not coming from the food. That is what Powel means by bias reversal. Change what you expect before the first bite, and you have changed part of the meal.
Next time you order, notice the exact moment you decide which option is the good one. That decision usually arrives before you have read a single word about the food.
05 Shift two · language
Mental labeling: the name on the dish changes who takes it
Stanford researchers tracked the dining halls of five schools across three months. The same vegetable dish went out on the same day each week. The only thing that changed was what it was called.
One week the name was taste-focused, built out of flavours and cooking methods. One week it was health-focused. One week it was just the plain word. Students took the taste-labelled version 29% more often than the health-labelled one, and 14% more often than the plain one. At one of the schools they also ate 39% more of what ended up on the plate.
Read that ordering again: health language did worst, and the plain word beat it. So Powel says write your own labels. When you put cooked food away in containers, name it as appealingly as you can, because that name is what you will read at the moment you are deciding.
The taste-focused label of "caramelized balsamic and herb vegetable medley" was changed to the health-focused label of "light n' fit vegetables" or just the basic label of "vegetables."Stanford Medicine, 2019
Next time you put leftovers in the fridge, write the flavours on the lid instead of the contents. "Garlic and lemon chicken" rather than "chicken."
06 Shift three · attention
Memory rehearsal: you choose again what you remember enjoying
Robinson and colleagues asked people to list what they had enjoyed about a meal straight after eating it. Those people could still recall the enjoyable parts much later, and they chose similar meals when the choice came round again.
The catch is that most of us eat without laying anything down to remember. Powel's fix is to pay attention during the meal, not only afterwards: the crisp lettuce, the juicy tomato, the creamy avocado, the cool cucumber. She connects this to mindful eating, which she teaches through the raisin test. Hold one raisin as though you had never seen one. Look at it, feel its weight, smell it, then eat it slowly enough to notice every stage.
There is a second benefit she notes. Eating with attention is also how you notice you have had enough, instead of reading the plate to find out.
How enjoyable we remember food to have been is more likely to be a significant predictor of food choice.Robinson et al., 2012
Eat one meal this week with nothing else running, and afterwards say three things you liked about it out loud. The saying out loud is the whole technique.
07 What is actually in the way
The obstacle is usually the habit, not the circumstance
Powel tells the story of Sasha, who explained for years that her long commute was why she never cooked. Then she started working from home. The commute went, and nothing else moved. The condition had never been the obstacle.
To find the real pattern she suggests ten days of a food diary that records more than the food: the time, the place, what else you were doing, who you were with, and what mood you were in. Patterns show up across those five columns that never show up in the food alone. Once you can see the trigger you can change what follows it, keeping the ritual and swapping the contents.
She is just as clear that willpower is the wrong tool for your surroundings. Quoting Peter Sage, she writes that your environment will beat your willpower every time. So invite the people you eat with to join in rather than trying to hold out against them, and let each of them find what suits their own body.
Try not to judge yourself during this challenge. This is not a time to take a hard look at what you are eating and feel ashamed about snacking a dozen times a day.Gianna Powel
08 The whole book
Move the enjoyment, and the eating follows
Powel never asks you to enjoy food less. She argues the opposite. Enjoyment is the lever the food industry found first, and it is the same lever available to you.
Bias reversal
The idea that healthy means bland is cultural, not chemical. Two countries hold opposite versions of it, which is how you know it can be changed.
Mental labeling
Name food by its flavours and people reach for it. Name it by its virtue and they walk past. Write the appetising label yourself.
Memory rehearsal
Say what you liked while you eat it and just after. A meal you remember enjoying is a meal you will choose again.
The promise is right there in the title. Eating well is not the part of life you give up in order to keep living. It is one of the ways living stays good.
Adapted from How to Eat While Enjoying and Living
Gianna Powel · © 2022 DVFZ Training Consultancy Services · 27 cited sources in the source edition