Salad Arranged to Evoke Kandinsky Painting Tastes Better, Study Finds

A University of Oxford study has apparently found that a salad with its ingredients arranged to resemble Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract Painting Number 201 tasted better to subjects than salads with the ingredients tossed together in the middle of or laid out neatly on their plates. Charles Michel et al., “A taste of Kandinsky: assessing the influence of the artistic visual presentation of food on the dining experience,” Flavour 3:7 (June 20, 2014). Researchers prepared ingredients for salads, arranging them in three different ways—“regular,” “neat” and “art-inspired”—and then asked 60 participants to eat and rate the salads. Each salad was prepared with the same 30 ingredients in the same manner except that the sauce was distributed throughout the salad for the “regular,” in an orderly pile for the “neat,” and in artistic flourishes to match Kandinsky’s Painting Number 201 in the “art-inspired.” Researchers compared questionnaires that the subjects completed before and after eating, finding the only significant change was the “tastiness” variable, which rose 18 percent for the art-inspired salad, remained unchanged for the neat salad, and fell very slightly for the regular salad. They further found that the participants who ate the art-inspired salads said that they were willing to pay more for their meal than the participants who ate the regular or neat salads. “Diners intuitively attribute an artistic value to the food, find it more complex and like it more when the culinary elements are arranged to look like an abstract-art painting,” the researchers concluded. See NPR’s The Salt, June 25, 2014.

Issue 528