Food is one of the few elements we interact with, which involves all of the five senses. Despite this, we are everyday taking more distance from them. Our lives are characterized by time shortage, so we can’t afford to waste it, not even for paying attention and enjoying the food we eat. That means we don’t smell, we don’t touch, we don’t look closely at what we are eating, and for these reasons, we are losing the ability to use the senses, swallowing edible products, without even tasting them.

Tongue Workout is an experiment that wants to draw attention to that topic.

Blocking the sight with a scarf on the eyes, the subject (an Italian, middle aged woman) was invited to eat as slowly as possible, the food I offered to her. She didn’t know it was a bite of spaghetti with tomato sauce, the most common dish in Italian houses. Even if she claimed that the blockage of the sight allowed her to focus more on the taste, she wasn’t able to recognise the dish. “I can taste a strong flavour of meat” – she claimed, but no meat was used in the preparation of the spaghetti.

In that case I am pretty sure that memories in association to the flavour influenced her perception; however, the fact she didn’t recognize a dish she probably ate thousand times during her life, supports my hypothesis that we should stop, focus more on food and taste it, instead of swallow it as faster as we can!