Have you ever had a tomato juice during a flight? If you have, you should like it because tomato juice actually tastes better on flights!
Generally speaking, tomato juice is not that popular compared to other juices. However, in flights, tomato juice is one of the most popular drinks. The Lufthansa Airline which is a German airline serves almost the same amount of tomato juice as beer to passengers. How could tomato juice be selected as a popular drink at 35000 feet above ground?
Source: Flickr Commons
Researchers have recently found that there is a relationship between sound and taste. Prof. Dr. Charles Spence at Oxford University explained that, “noise suppresses people’s ability to taste sweetness and saltiness, but it actually enhances people’s ability to taste umami.” Therefore, it is true that the airplane’s engine noise influences the way people taste food and beverages. Furthermore, his study also proved the better taste of tomato juice in flights as tomato contains the umami flavor.
Source: Flickr Commons
Umami is one of the five tastes which was identified in 1908 by Kikunae Ikeda, a professor of the Tokyo Imperial University. It is difficult to describe how umami tastes since it is sensed when glutamate binds to specific receptors on your tongue. Various types of food such as seaweed, pork, soy sauce, cheese, and mushrooms have umami taste.
Research from the faculty of food and nutrition in Cornell University stated that people prefer umami taste in the environment with high-decibel noise. The researchers conducted an experiment on a flight. Eleven men and thirty seven women aged from 18 to 55 were asked to taste liquid with each basic five tastes (sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami), first time with headphones and second time without headphones. The result showed that people with headphones claimed the four flavors except umami were strong. On the other hand, people without the headphones stated that they could taste the umami flavor to be much stronger than the people with headphones did.
Therefore, studies mentioned above on the effects of sound on taste prove the reason why tomato juice actually tastes better on a flight.
Here’s an interesting video of short experiment about the effect of sound on taste:
YouTube video courtesy of: Brit Lab
– Lisa Inhye Kim
