KEY POINTS:
"Watching what you eat" has taken on a new meaning at the Restaurant of the Future.
Although the university canteen in the Dutch town of Wageningen looks like an upmarket eatery it is, in fact, a laboratory in disguise.
Banks of hidden cameras zoom in on every morsel that enters diners' mouths, invisible scales built into the floor weigh you as you pay for your meal, and beware of that comfy-looking chair which could be monitoring your heartbeat as you chew.
From the country that gave us Big Brother comes a new scientific venture into human eating habits.
Is food on square plates more appetising than on circular ones? Will certain dishes be more popular when there is a warm reddish tone to the lighting than when the ambience takes on a colder, bluer hue?
These are some of the questions Dutch scientists will try to answer with their extensive menu of electronic wizardry.
Rene Koster, the director of the restaurant's research team, said: "Before birth, a mother passes on her food habits to her unborn child in the womb and even in adulthood most of the decisions in the process of food choice and eating are made subconsciously, so you can't get reliable answers by just asking people.
"We now have a setting with realistic conditions, where we can truly observe."
To illustrate his point about the idiosyncrasies of the human palate, he tells the story of the milk machine. The Dutch like their calcium at lunchtimes and in many canteens milk is dispensed from a nondescript metal container.
Without any fanfare, the managers decided to switch to organic milk and, for nine months, diners slurped away quite happily. Then the supplier asked that an "organic" sticker be stuck on the box. "Straight away, complaints started, people were moaning the milk tasted funny, that it was off," recalls Koster.
"The sticker triggered the thought that something had changed, and then that was their reality."
It is that sort of knee-jerk reaction, peer pressure and social conditioning that the Restaurant of the Future hopes to circumvent.
More than 200 people, mainly staff and students from the university, have signed up to be human guinea pigs for the experiment. Everyone eating in the canteen has to consent to being watched by the team of 22 scientists who will manually code each action and feed it into a huge databank from which trends can then be extrapolated. The puppet masters at Wageningen University will play around with every aspect of their canteen, from the dispositions of the serving staff - who can be ordered to be super-surly or obsequious as required - to prices.
The ¬3 million ($5.5 million) venture has been set up in conjunction with a catering company, a kitchen manufacturer and a software firm.
For the newcomer, it is hard to forget about the cameras. Predictably, you find yourself drawn towards the healthier option of the salad bar; you don't sit down at a table with two good-looking guys, conscious of the wry smile that will probably settle on the monitoring scientists' faces; and you're paranoid about talking with your mouth full.
- INDEPENDENT
