To evaluate the effect of belief on taste, scientists conducted taste tests in three locations (a university campus, a public park, and a natural foods store). They asked people to rate the flavour of five apple slices: two from the same organic apple (one labelled organic, one not); two from the same local apple (one labelled local, one not), and an unlabelled conventional apple.
People who believed that organic food tastes better generally gave the slices labelled as organic higher ratings than slices from the same apple labelled as non-organic. The same trend held with the people who felt local food tasted better.
While belief affected taste, so did the production methods. Even though people thought the organic apple labelled as non-organic didn’t taste as good as the slice (from the same apple) labelled as organic, overall the organic apple splices topped the list of preferences regardless of how they were labelled.
Are beliefs stronger than taste? A field experiment on organic and local apples. John C. Bernard and Yinan Liu. Food Quality and Preference. Volume 61, October 2017, Pages 55-62.
- Janet Wallace