Transcription
The language around food is fascinating because, you know, I mean, one of the things is that there are various things that will increase the price that people are willing to pay for food on a menu. One of them is provenance. If you put "Pembbrure potatoes" or "Jersey" this or whatever, anything that has a place of origin commands a premium. And weirdly, just, you know, seemingly meaningless words like "succulent carrots" rather than just carrots.
Also, uh, there's a whole, um, extraordinary science of menu design, um, which goes into detail like, you know, you don't put the pound sign, you spell the price out in words rather than doing it in digits. You, uh, get rid of, you get rid of the second two digits, so you just have round pound pricing. People experiment enormously with this, which is what conveys promise. But you're right in that, um, it you can't separate. Okay, I'll, I'll get into a tiny bit into the neuroscience of this. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to, um, which is that it looks as though most of what we perceive is a prediction, and that we use our senses to error-correct where the prediction deviates from the reality. And that's a more efficient data architecture for the brain than effectively me looking at the picture in front of me and processing every pixel.
If, if you're into digital photography, you'll be familiar with something called RAW mode. If you've got a fancy digital camera, you can shoot in RAW mode where there's basically, um, a few bits are used to describe each pixel in painstaking, intricate detail. Every single pixel is described. The reason you do that as a professional photographer is for editing, it's better. The way you achieve a JPEG or an MPEG is through a form of data compression where there is a likely value for each pixel based on the pixel that precedes it or adjoins it. Okay? And you only use data to describe the extent to which the pixel value differs from the expected value. And that's a much more economical use of data because if you've got a blue wall, you don't need the data going blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue for every pixel. Okay? You just go blue and then one single bit. Same again. Okay. Same again, same again. Same again, same again. Same again. Yeah. Okay.
So that, I, I've probably done a complete disservice to the genius people who, um, who do, um, effectively data compression in photography. That effectively is, you have an expected value for everything, and you use data to only, to the extent that the reality differs from the expectation. The book you need to read on this is by a guy called Andy Clark. It's called "The Experience Machine." He's an academic at the University of Sussex. He's a philosopher as well as being a kind of neuroscientist. Um, and Andy Clark's book, "The Experience Machine," effectively takes this model of human perception, which is the brain generates an expectation, and then the senses then convey the contrast between the reality and the expectation. If it's right, it's not a new theory. Clark admits this. It was advanced first by people, I think, like William James and Herman von Helmholtz in the 19th century. Um, Herman von Helmholtz and co didn't have the advantages of JPEGs and MPEGs to understand data architecture. They didn't have really the advantage of information theory to understand why the brain would work that way. But we've got limited bandwidth in the optic nerve. It makes more sense for the optic nerve to concentrate on surprising information than to concentrate on all information.
And if that's true, it explains essentially, I'd say the verdict of that is the science is in, and the marketers were right all along that things don't taste how they taste. They taste a strange combination of how they taste and how you expected them to taste. And there's a guy you must get on the show who's called Charles Spence of the University of Oxford, who's a kind of, um, how would you describe it? I suppose you call it psychophysics, or, or else you might call it phenomenology. But it's all about the science of how, not, not the science of how we measure the world as scientists, i.e., degrees centigrade, but how we experience reality as human beings. I, you'll know this if you've been to America. The weather forecast will say, you know, tomorrow, Scottsdale, it's going to be 97, feel, but it feels like 92. And American weather forecasts often have a "feels like" temperature, which is not the actual objective temperature of the air. It factors in things like whether there's a breeze and the level of humidity, both of which affect how we as humans experience heat. You know, high humidity, no breeze, is a really painfully hot day. If you add a breeze and reduce the humidity and leave the temperature the same, I've wandered around places like Phoenix, Arizona, when it's 100°, but because the humidity is really low, you basically wander around perfectly comfortable. The same temperature in Singapore, you're sweating like a sex offender, right? Okay.
You know, and so the, so Spence's work particularly around taste, he'll do things like wonderful experiments where you produce something that looks like a lemon, okay? Looks exactly like a bit of citrus fruit, but you flavor it with strawberry essence. And the only scientific way to describe the human reaction to this is it with people's heads. It, so in other words, you don't go, "Gosh, that looked like a lemon," but it's actually strawberry. That's, that's, that's how you'd expect if, if the Andy Clark theory isn't true. Instead, it almost creates a completely new taste, which is the taste of something that's strawberry-like when you expected it to be lemon. So the marketing of food. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, the, you know, the expectation you create when somebody goes in has a huge bearing on what they perceive. Just as, as they always used to say about lager, people don't drink the beer, they drink the advertising.
We've got to understand, of course, with food that there is the food that gets written about, which is the food that is remarkably good. Okay. Typically, most of the time when we eat, our deepest unconscious psychology isn't attempting to, uh, effectively use food as a form of status signaling or a form of, you know, extraordinary entertainment. It's actually, is this okay to eat? That's, that's our evolutionary instinct. It's, you know, basically the great thing about, they, I call this, this is called satisficing. Okay. Yes. And the reason McDonald's is so successful is not because it's the best restaurant in the world, um, uh, it's because it's, um, it's incredibly good at not being bad. So when you go there, you know what you get. It's going to be entirely expected. It's going to be very predictable. The bun has been toasted for 1 minute and 39 seconds. There are no surprises. It's exactly what like as it was last time. It's exactly what you expect it to be. And as a consequence, it's a very, very successful mind hack because you know, Nasim Taleb writes about this. He was baffled to see people eating at McDonald's at Milan railway station. You know, Milan, pretty good foodie city. And the point was the people weren't looking for great food. They were looking for food that definitely wasn't bad. You have to be absolutely fascistically consistent in what you deliver. Yeah.
But, but so then to your point, this one thing you notice when you try McDonald's or and, or Burger King in a different country is you have the similarities of home, but the differences. Yes. And I've always found that how you keep consistency, yet let, yet tailor, tailorize to localized markets, that conundrum fascinating. The McDonald's I got McDonald's delivery on WPY, which is their equivalent of Deliveroo. Yeah. I, I was like, I may as well have been ejaculating when I was eating it because it was so, it was exactly. I could have gone down to, um, the, the McDonald's in Liverpool Street. Do you know what I mean? It was exactly the same. I was like, and that is the promise I wanted. Do you know what I mean? Of course. Of course. And that, that, and of course, that's also true of hotel chains that we forget, you know, if you're a frequent hotel stayer, quite often what you want is absolute predictability. You want to walk in and you know, you know how the shower works. You, you know, you don't, you don't have that battle of kind of, uh, you know, confronting surprises or unexpected components, you know, to the experience.
And actually, you know, this, this concept of satisficing, which was coined by a guy called Herbert Simon, who's kind of polymathic, won the Nobel Prize for economics, um, interestingly, but his, um, a surprisingly interesting person to win the award, actually, but, um, he, um, uh, he, interestingly, made the point that in making decisions under uncertainty, his old sort of shtick was decision-making under uncertainty, the avoidance of a negative probably looms larger than the attainment of a positive, you know. Yes. Yeah. Um, and, uh, it is, um, it's a useful tool to understand human behavior because everybody in human, in describing their own behavior, always talks about, "I chose this 'cause it was the best." And actually, it probably isn't the best. Okay, you buy a Samsung television not because for the same money you might not be able to get a slight, you know, you probably could get a slightly better television, but there's a 10% 5% whatever it is risk with that other television that it might be a piece of. Yes. Espressos is sponsored by supply chain software gurus Unleashed. It talks your ecom and accounting software. It's helped islands cut admin time in half. Get granular clarity on your margins. Know where your stock is. Don't miss availability. Brands like Candy Kittens, Tiny Rebel, and Trip all use Unleashed, and so should you.