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“contrast,” on the other hand, you end up being disappointed, more than if your expectations had not been lifted to such a lofty plateau.
    With food, we tend toward assimilation. “The first taste is always with the eyes,” as the saying goes, but even before that the food has been sampled by the mind. The problem at Natick is that expectations are often so poor. In one study, Cardello’s team took Green Giant corn and put it in an MRE package, and vice versa. “People will like the corn significantly more when they think it’s Green Giant,” he says. Perhaps even more than an inherent liking for Green Giant, “that negative stereotype of military products drives the liking down.”
    Assimilation speaks to another virtual law of liking: The more a person’s experience with a product matches his expectation, the more he will like it, and vice versa. This happens all the time with food, in ways that have little to do with our actual sensory reactions to a product.Tell people a coffee is bitter, and they will think it is more bitterthan if you had not told them.The opposite can happen as well, with our brains, neuroscientists have suggested, actually “suppressing” our response to the bitter when we are not told to expect it.Tell subjects that an orange juice has vodka in it, and they will like it more than the one that does not—even when
neither
juice actually has alcohol (I need hardly mention these were college students).
    Simply give people some kind of information about what they can expect from a food they have never eaten—in one Natick trial, Arctic cloudberries—and they will like it more. If it is “weird space food,” call it weird space food!People will still like it more (the research was done on astronauts). A Natick study had soldiers eat in the dark, a not unlikely occurrence for soldiers. They liked things more when they were told what they were eating.
    When our expectations are violated, interesting things happen.In one well-known study, people were given a salmon-flavored ice cream that was labeled simply as “ice cream” or “frozen savory mousse.” People liked it more as mousse than ice cream. Their dislike for the ice cream was so intense, in fact, that, as the researchers noted with some concern, “many participants verbally described the food as disgusting.” The idea of assimilation and contrast is why menus always announce the noticeable presence of salt in desserts with chocolate or caramel. As one prominent pastry chef noted, “If we say something is salted, it’s to call out the salt so people aren’t surprised. It gives them a chance to appreciate the contrast of salty against the sweet.” In other words, to like it more. Remember, we are primed to notice—and not like—things that are “wrong” with our food.
    But the salmon ice cream experiment shows that liking is not merely liking a thing in itself. What you like it
as
can be just as important. In one study Cardello conducted on “novel foods” (“The U.S. Armed Forces and N.A.S.A. frequently require the development of ‘novel’ foods for use in extreme environments”), subjects were given “soup” (Campbell’s cream of mushroom from concentrate) and a “liquid diet” (a pulverized, viscous chicken cacciatore substance developed for jaw-surgery patients—which I believe my school cafeteria also once dished up for me). Both were served in a ceramic bowl and a glass with a straw. Everything was labeled “soup.” Perhaps not surprisingly, people liked the actual soup more. But in a second trial, the substance in the glass was labeled “dental liquid diet.” Suddenly people liked the
dentalliquid
more than the soup, when it was in the glass. As the researchers noted, “The change in expectancy, caused by the change in label, made the soup more dissonant