TEXT E A Polish proverb claims
that fish, to taste right, should three times—in water, in butter and in wine.
The early efforts of the basic scientists in the food industry were directed at
improving the preparation, preservation, and distribution of safe and nutritious
food. Our memories of certain foodstuffs eaten during the World War Ⅱ suggest
that, although these might have been safe and nutritious, they certainly did not
taste right nor were, they particularly appetizing in appearance or smell. This
neglect of the sensory appeal of foods is happily becoming a thing of the past.
Bow, in the book "Principles of Sensory Evaluation of Food," the authors hope
that it will be useful to food technologists in industry and also to others
engaged in research into problem of sensory evaluation of foods. An attempt has
clearly been made to collect every possible piece of information, which might be
useful, more than one thousand five hundred references being quoted. As a
result, the book seems at first sight to be an exhaustive and critically useful
review of the literature. This it certainly is, but this is by no means is its
only achievement, for there are many suggestions for further lines of research,
and the discursive passages are crisply provocative of new ideas and new ways of
looking at established findings. Of particular interest is the
weight given to the psychological aspects of perception, both objectively and
subjectively. The relation between stimuli and perception is well covered, and
includes a valuable discussion of the uses and disadvantages of the Weber
fraction of differences. It is interesting to find that in spite of many
attempts to separate and define the modalities of taste, nothing better has been
achieved than the familiar classification into sweet, sour salty and bitter. Nor
is there as yet any clear-cut evidence of the physiological nature of the taste
stimulus. With regard to smell, systems of classification are of little value
because of the extraordinary sensitivity of the nose and because the response to
the stimulus is so subjective. The authors suggest that a classification based
on the size, shape and electronic status of the molecule involved merits further
investigation, as does the theoretical proposition that weak physical binding of
the stimulant molecule to he receptor site is a necessary part of the mechanism
of stimulation. Apart from taste and smell, there are many other
components of perception of the sensations from food in the mouth. The basic
modalities of pain, cold, warmth and touch, together with vibration sense,
discrimination and localization may all play a part, as, of course, does
auditory reception of bone-conducted vibratory stimuli from the teeth when
eating crisp or crunchy foods. In this connection the authors rightly point out
that this type of stimulus requires much more investigation, suggesting that a
start might be made by using subjects afflicted with various forms of deafness.
It is well-known that extraneous noise may alter discrimination, and the
attention of the authors is directed to the work of Prof. H. J. Eysenck on the
"stimulus hunger" of extroverts and the "stimulus avoidance" of
introverts. The reviewer’s appraisal of "Principles of Sensory Evaluation of Food" is one of ______.