Hello,



I've been thinking (very hard) about my research/experiment. Firstly, I have to work out how I am going to control all the variables...like;

1) portion control/how much everybody should eat (that'll be difficult, since the food is going to be scrumptious),

2) WHAT SORT of food is important (aiming for quality not quantity),

3) At what times those delectable morsels should be eaten,

4) How long I should wait before recording results

And,

5) Food preferences and allergies, of course, should be taken into account



I need to start recruiting people, by the way - at least 30 participants, I've been informed, is the way to go.

I just found out via the internet that the most common food allergens are; dairy, wheat, soy, nuts, seafood and eggs. So I'll work around the individual, and steer clear of any of those.

Change of plan..
I was contemplating the ethics issue about changing lifestyles and I thought -
well, restaurants dress the plates up before setting the meal before their customer and Mum and Dad heap a pile of edible stuff onto a plate and plop it before you, more often than not. So, I would conduct a study investigating whether food presentation affects our appetite in any way.
I would print pictures of food arranged in all manner of ways (good and bad) and lay them out before each of the participants in my study. I would them ask them to choose which appeals to them most, and which appeals to them the least.
And since smell influences our sense of taste, I would expose them to different odours and aromas while they looked at the food, and record if anything interesting is observed in their choices.
I would also record whether they had eaten the food shown in the examples before, since that ould surely affect their senses.

For example, if I showed them a messy bowl of spaghetti and got them to smell the aroma of, say, flowers, would that change their feelings towards the image.
Or, if there was a plate of chocolate strawberries mounted on a heap of pure cream, but they were smelling the odour of stinky socks, would the smell override the image of the strawberries and therefore change their mind about the deliciousness of chocolate strawberries, or not?

Obtaining the images would be easy, for I would find them in any recipe magazine. the smells are little more complicated - I need them to be portable yet I don't see myself carrying around dirty socks, right?

Of course, there would still be variables, though it would mainly be a survey. Plus the requirement of at least 30 participants involved in the study still stands.