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20th December 2016
12:10am GMT
A team of scientists from Oxford University have proven what most of us suspected to be true: food tastes better when it's eaten with heavier cutlery.
The study, which involved 130 diners at an Edinburgh restaurant, showed customers were willing to pay 15% more for their food when they used high-quality knives and forks – the type usually reserved for banquets.
All participants were served identical meals of trout, mashed potatoes, spinach and capers and brown shrimp butter. The only difference was that half ate using the banquet-grade cutlery, while the other half ate using a cheaper type that weighed three times less.
"It is likely that the positive or negative values that we attribute to the cutlery gets implicitly 'transferred' to our judgments of the food -- a phenomenon that is often called 'sensation transference'."
Charles Michel, speaking to Wired.co.uk
So there you go – that explains why you root and rummage through the cutlery drawer before dinner until you find the once fancy fork you own.
The research was originally published in the Flavour journal, and you can read the full study here.
