Does Food Taste Better When Cooked By Someone Else?

Sometimes, by the time I am finished preparing dinner, I have no appetite for it. I’ve been tasting it the whole time and I’m just over it once it’s finished. I’ve seen it suggested that food tastes better when cooked by someone else, as when we make it ourselves, we anticipate the flavor and therefore are less excited to eat it. However, my personal experience doesn’t tell me a lot, and neither do internet factoids. So, what’s the evidence? Does food taste better when prepared and cooked by someone else?

One of the most popular internet references to food tasting better is that there is evidence that sandwiches taste better when made by someone else. This is often attributed to ‘researchers’ at Carnegie Mellon University. The explanation?

When you make your own sandwich, you anticipate its taste as you’re working on it. And when you think of a particular food for a while, you become less hungry for it later.

This quote comes from psychologist Daniel Kahneman, a well-known writer in the psychology realm, responsible for such books as Thinking: Fast and Slow and recipient of a Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences.

After this statement, Kahneman goes on to say:

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, for example, found that imagining eating M&Ms makes you eat fewer of them. It’s a kind of specific satiation, just as most people find room for dessert when they couldn’t have another bite of their steak. The sandwich that another person prepares is not ”preconsumed” in the same way.

Various websites, after reading this quote in the New York Times, produced content that made it seem as if the Carnegie Mellon research regarded sandwich making and that it proved that sandwiches made by someone else were more enjoyed than sandwiches made by oneself.

The only part of the Kahneman’s statement that directly references the research is the part about imagining eating M&M’s. He then mentions the desert stomach, or sensory-specific satiety (the Dessert Effect).

Do Sandwiches Taste Better When Made By Someone Else?

The Carnegie Mellon research mentioned is a study published in Science in 2010, called Thought For Food: Imagined Consumption Reduces Actual Consumption.

In five experiments, the researchers found that people who repeatedly imagined eating a certain food, like peanut M&Ms or cheese, over and over, subsequently ate less of that food than people who imagined eating it fewer times or didn’t imagine it at all.

The study had nothing to do with who is cooking or preparing the food. Instead, it was a study of mental imagery and perception. However, it may stand to reason that while you are cooking or preparing a meal, or just making a sandwich, you are imagining eating it and even pre-imagining the taste of each component, etc.

Why Do We Always Have Room For Dessert?

Therefore, when you finally sit down to eat the meal, you will eat less of it than other people consuming the meal with you, such as your family or friends.

This, however, does not mean we can confidently state that a sandwich or other food will taste better when someone else prepares it. Furthermore, Kahenman’s statement, made ‘out of school,’ as it were, leaves a lot to be desired.

If you’ve been thinking about ordering a certain sandwich all day, for example, wouldn’t that have the same effect? Haven’t you ‘pre-consumed’ the sandwich in a similar way to what Kahenmann suggests?

In fact, the research mentioned only deals with consumption, not taste perceptions and flavor, specifically. We need actual experiments dealing with whether people eat less or more of food they, themselves, prepared.

The research that exists on this question presents a complex but contradictory result: People do indeed like food better when they prepare it themselves.

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One study, by Dohle, et al. assessed the role of self-participation in ratings of healthy versus unhealthy food. Self-preparation was found to increase the liking of healthy food while not affecting the perception of unhealthy food.

Another study found that children eat more food when they prepare it themselves.

In fact, in experiment after experiment, the result is the same. When people cook food themselves, food enjoyment increases, and people eat more. This is important in terms of eating healthy food. If you don’t usually like healthier options, preparing it yourself may change your perception quite a lot! In my experience, my son was always more enthusiastic about eating unusual and healthful foods when he helped prepare them.

Paradoxically, guilt, such as what occurs when we eat foods we perceive as unhealthy, can flip these results. When guilt is present, having someone else prepare the food increases taste evaluations. So, when someone else makes a food that you perceive as unhealthy, it tastes better to you than when you make it. But, when this guilt is not present, such as when you are eating food you perceive as healthy, according to this study, there is no difference in food evaluations when the consumer or someone else prepares the food.

Yet another experiment calls these results into question as participants rated a high-calorie milkshake they prepared themselves as tasting better than one prepared by the experimenter. What’s more, those who prepared the milkshakes themselves consumed more.

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In Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating, author Charles Spence described another experiment performed by Norweigian researchers. Participants prepared a meal from a kit, Indian Tikki Masala, in a kitchen laboratory. Participants were then told they were either eating the meal they prepared themselves or one prepared by someone else. Those who cooked the meal kits themselves rated the food as tasting better than those who thought they were eating a meal made by someone else. In reality, all the participants were eating the exact same food.

While this is still an emerging picture, generally speaking, the evidence to date suggests that people enjoy food more when they make it themselves, and they subsequently consume more of it.