Airplane Noise May Actually Affect Our Perception Of Taste

Could the rumble of an airplane's engine affect how our in-flight meal tastes? New findings published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance suggests that it could influence the flavor of our food.

Researchers believe that it ultimately has to do with nerves connecting between the tongue and the brain.

"To me, this is interesting because people complain about airline food all the time," Robin Dando, the study co-author and an assistant professor of food science at Cornell University, via TODAY Health. "Flavor is produced by our brain. It's related to inputs from the environment; it's related to the smell and taste of our food. But it's also related to our other senses, too."

"This nerve happens to pass right across the middle ear, in contact with the eardrum," Dando added. "Nerves are very sensitive, so this led me to wonder whether the signal was in some way affected when under conditions of loud noise. A pretty interesting example of this is an airplane cabin, interesting as people always complain about the quality of the food on airlines."

The German airline Lufthansa noticed that passengers were consuming as much tomato juice as beer during a flight, which later commissioned a private study released last fall, showing how cabin pressure enhanced tomato juice pressure, as well.

"The multisensory nature of what we consider 'flavor' is undoubtedly underpinned by complex central and peripheral interactions," Dando said. "Our results characterize a novel sensory interaction, with intriguing implications for the effect of the environment in which we consume food."