Name: Professor Charles Spence: "The Perfect Meal" | Talks at Google
Uploaded: 2016-07-09T23:44:07.000Z
Duration: 55 min 8 s
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I'm very pleased to welcome Charles Spence to Talks

Charles Spence is a professor of experimental psychology

at Oxford University, and a gastrophysicist,

So it's a pleasure to be with you here this lunch time,

and tell you a little bit about the research we

do in Oxford, but also with food companies and chefs

It's sort of this interface of psychology, neuroscience,

some of the insights that are emerging from the latest

kind of research at this kind of interface,

are starting to work their way out to home dining,

to hopefully allow us all to eat a little more

And it's all kind of premised on this idea of the perfect meal,

Just feel the weight in your hands and you'll know,

And the opening quote from the book, from MFK Fisher,

is one that kind of inspires a lot of our thinking.

"That once at least, in the life of every human,

whether he be brute or trembling daffodil,

comes a moment of complete gastronomic satisfaction.

It is, I am sure, as much a matter of spirit as of body.

There's a kind of harmony with every sensation

and emotion melted into one chord of well-being."

If we all think back in our past over the last few years,

we've all had that kind of perfect meal experience.

can't study it, because it's kind of different for each

Maybe for some of you, it's going for your gastro tourism

to some fancy Michelin starred restaurant

For others, it might be nothing more complex

than a picnic on a summer's day in the English countryside.

but I think that we can sort of study that perfect meal, what

makes it great, try and extract some generalizations

can be used in everyday life to kind of nudge our meal

to be more stimulating, more engaging, more

memorable, and perhaps more healthy as well.

I'm certainly not the first to think about the perfect meal.

It is a topic that goes back at least a century.

You find some the first sort of mentions from 1894

from French chemist, Berthelot, talking about the perfect meal

and what it would be like sometime around about today.

And for all of the chemists, for the feminist writers,

and also for the sort of serious scientists,

So he was imagining in 1894, thereabouts, what

and wasting an hour of your day with a multi-course meal

Surely in the future, we'll have a pill, we'll pop it.

Just take this quote from-- where has he gone?

"Looking Forward: A Dream of the United States

of the Americas in 1999," written in 1899 by Arthur Bird.

often dined on a pill, a small pellet which contained

They had little inclination to stretch their legs

while masticating on an eight course dinner.

The busy man of 1999 took a soup pill or a concentrated meat

He dispatched these while working at his desk."

So he could be more efficient as a result.

That's what they thought was going to happen in 1999,

Because I think food is so much more than just

behind our experience of food, the way we eat

And that is the theme for the book, "The Perfect Meal."

Myself, I worked together with Betina Piqueras-Fiszman,

my co-author, working in a psychology department

at Oxford, trying to understand the factors that

make one meal experience better than another

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Professor Charles Spence: "The Perfect Meal" | Talks at Google

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