Why Food Tastes Better When Someone Else Cooks It

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The process of prepping and cooking a large meal, especially if it's just for you, can be tiring. It makes sense that, once the meal is made and the kitchen is cleaned up, you don't feel super enthusiastic about eating. Your enthusiasm may be dampened even further if you sampled ingredients while cooking and your appetite has been sated. For those reasons, many people feel like food tastes better at a restaurant or when someone else cooks it. To get more insight into this phenomenon, Tasting Table spoke with Meredith Hayden, creator of Wishbone Kitchen and author of "The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook." Hayden recently partnered with Barilla as the pasta producer expands its Al Bronzo line with organic certification and a new radiatori shape.

Hayden told us, "I think food tastes better when someone else cooks it because I don't have to clean up...I'm always really on cooking and cleaning duty [so] when somebody's cooking for me, they handle it from cooking to cleaning." She also explained that another factor that influences food perception or enjoyment is self-criticism: "I think there are so many small decisions we make while we're cooking, whether it's to add more salt or to add more butter or to tinker with each sort of different flavor element and we're very critical of ourselves. And so I think sitting down and eating that final dish, I personally just run through all the things I would've done differently and all the things I would change for next time. But when somebody else makes it and you have no insight into the process, you're really just having a purely enjoy[able] experience rather than [being] critical."

We also asked Hayden about the biological phenomenon of olfactory fatigue. Also called nose blindness, it can occur when you have been exposed to a specific scent for long enough that your brain develops a temporary inability to distinguish it from other smells. This adaptation can result in you becoming unaffected by the fragrant cooking aromas that would otherwise stimulate your appetite and make you excited about eating. 

As Hayden told us, "half the time when I'm cooking dinner, whether it's for a group of friends or my family, [and] by the time I sit down for dinner, I've already had at least half of my portion standing in the kitchen. And so when you think of those best bites of a meal, they're usually the first few bites and I've already had those. So I can totally see how that would play into this." Because scent and taste are so closely linked, becoming blind to mouth-watering food odors can cause a temporary decrease in appetite. 

Conversely, if someone else is cooking, you're less likely to become over-exposed to the food smells. Because you don't have the burden of food prep, cooking, and clean-up, and you haven't been tasting each dish as you make it, you have the pleasure of sitting down to a beautifully plated, fragrant meal that is a feast for the eyes and stomach. So before you grab the saucier pan Hayden recommends for pasta lovers and start making dinner, consider asking someone else in your household to take over cooking duties for the night so that you can experience the full joy of the meal.