Ever bite into a delicious-looking apple, only to be rewarded with a chunk of mealy pulp? Or take a swig of milk, and get something lumpy in your mouth? Yeah, yuck. Well, it turns humans have company in associating the texture of food with how tasty it is. In a new study published in the journal PLOS Biology , researchers found that when it comes to food preferences, texture can be just as important as taste in fruit fly maggots.
The lead author and neurobiology Ph. He hopes the deeper understanding of how texture plays into the whole experience of eating might one day provide insights into eating disorders among people. On the flip side, it may also inform how we might tweak the texture of foods β healthy or otherwise β to make them more palatable. In addition, Devasena Thiagarajan , a neurobiologist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology who wasn't involved in the research, says, "this study could help us understand what drives pests to different crops, and then how maybe that can be used to manage their influence on agriculture" by creating texture-based traps.
The persimmon was Komarov's favorite fruit when he was growing up in Moscow. Just before that, though, they're wretched. Komarov learned to tell from the first bite whether it'd be bliss or blah based on the texture of the fruit β even before he tasted anything.
The reason is that taste signals take a bit of time to register in the brain, "whereas with physical attributes of food, for example, texture β this is an instant form of feedback when we put something in our mouth before we even perceive what we're tasting," says Komarov. This sense of mouth feel β is a food crunchy, soft, chewy, or gooey β provides important information about food safety and quality, helping the eater avoid consuming something that might be dangerous.
Very little is known, however, about how animals perceive food texture, so Komarov and his colleagues turned to study the phenomenon in a species that's easy to manipulate β fruit flies.
