Vegetables are made more appealing by ”seductive names”, Stanford experiment shows
A team of scientist from Stanford conducted an experiment at the end of which they saw that ”seductive names” given to vegetable dishes would make them 25% more appealing than their counterparts with less exciting labels.
The team of scientists ran their experiment in the university cafeteria over the course of a whole academic term. They labeled each day the vegetable dishes in four different ways: basic – where the description was simply “carrots”, for instance; healthy restrictive – “carrots with sugar-free citrus dressing”; health positive – “smart-choice vitamin C citrus carrots” and indulgent – “twisted citrus-glazed carrots”. The scientists rotated the vegetables every day, so that there would be plenty of variety throughout the week, and everyday they counted how many vegetable dishes were chosen by the 600 diners.
In the end it turned out that 25% more people chose the dishes with indulgent labeling, such as “twisted garlic-ginger butternut squash wedges”, compared to the ones with basic labeling, and 41% more people chose the indulgent labelled dishes compared to the ones with healthy labels.
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“When most people are making a dining decision, they are motivated by taste. And studies show that people tend to think of healthier options as less tasty for some reason. Labels really can influence our sensory experience, affecting how tasty and filling we think food will be. So we wanted to reframe how people view vegetables, using indulgent labels,” the scientists said.
Scientists realized that while many people are aware of the fact that five portions of fruits and vegetables per day is the right thing to do, they find it rather difficult to implement in real life. Prof Heather Hartwell from Bournemouth University in the UK, leader of the European project VeggieEAT, is an advocate of “health by stealth”, which means nudging people in the right direction. “Nudges can work. We have looked at using choice architecture, which is product placement, subliminal cues and descriptive tags, to nudge people,” he says. “Choice is a really complex thing. But this study suggests that giving vegetables an indulgent tag can help raise their hierarchy,” he concluded.
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