I’m in the university town of Wageningen, about to have the least private lunch of my life, and a Dutchman is playing tricks with my mind. “Would you like coffee?” he says, all cryptically.
“No, water will be fine,” I reply, because I’m not going to be manipulated. A bottle of water turns up with four beakers, all black but different shapes. The Dutchman is smirking, barely able to contain his excitement as he waits for my next move.
If I choose the tall one, it probably means I have issues with the size of my penis. If I choose the short, stubby one, it probably means the same. I choose the one closest to me. The Dutchman nods to himself.
“What does all that mean?” I ask. “Well, you were on edge because I was smirking,” says the Dutchman, smirking at the fact that smirking was part of his test.
“And you were uncomfortable because all the beakers are black, which is the colour we associate with death. The different shapes should have no real significance – they hold the same amount of water – but subconsciously, you were making false assumptions about one holding more than the other. It was interesting.”
At least it had nothing to do with my penis.
Welcome to the Restaurant of the Future, a multi-million-pound experiment that could, and probably will, change the way we eat.
On the face of it, it is just another trendy office canteen, all marble surfaces, floor-to-ceiling windows and mood lighting. But looks are deceptive in Wageningen: it is in fact a laboratory masquerading as a restaurant.
Dotted across the ceiling are 27 concealed video cameras watching your every move. There’s a scale that weighs you secretly as you queue to pay. Soon there will be face-reading technology and smart spoons that measure the speed at which you are eating.
In a locked control room along the corridor, three of the 20 analysts, psychologists and technicians involved in the project sit at banks of screens, watching, watching, watching. If you don’t like your mayonnaise and chips, they will notice and understand why before you do.
From the country that gave us Big Brother, this is Big Brother run by Clever People with White Coats and Clipboards. It’s terrifying.
The Dutchman playing tricks with my mind is Rene Koster, director of the project, who is about to begin the most extensive experiment on our subconscious attitude to food. As he explains, you can’t just ask us why we eat what we eat because we simply don’t know.
Up to 80% of what we do is entirely subconscious and not even particularly rational. But if someone asks you why you made a decision, your brain gives a rational but probably inaccurate answer, often out of sheer politeness.
For example: “Why have you just scoffed three Big Macs?”
“Because I was starving.” The real reason? Because my stomach didn’t notice the nondescript flavour, because the weather was inclement, because the carpet was green, because it was a Tuesday, because Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 3 was playing as it was the last time I had a Big Mac craving. In other words, I really have no idea.
Koster and his team plan to work out the subliminal influences on food choices. With that deduced, the implications for the real restaurants of the future are enormous. They will be able to manipulate us – and we won’t even know it.
I point out to Koster (who, incidentally, has chosen the long, thin water beaker) that I find that scary. “All the things you are afraid of are already happening,” he says. “Fast-food companies and supermarkets already manipulate us, although our understanding of how is still very limited.
“What we do know is that we have big problems with the way we eat. Calories are in abundance but we behave as if they are scarce, as we did when we were hunter gatherers. We can’t tell when to stop. And we can’t simply be told to stop. Diets don’t work – if you are told not to eat cake, you will spend your whole time fixating on cake. If we work out what sort of labelling, presentation, mood and so forth will make you more likely to choose something other than cake, that will be far more effective.”
So mind control is the only way to make us make the right food choices, which is pretty depressing.
“You would call it control. We would call it helping people. The health implications of bad diets, the environmental implications of us throwing away 40% of the food we buy, they’re immeasurable. We have a big problem and if you can induce changes in subconscious behaviour, that is a good thing.”
Used in the right way, the Restaurant of the Future could make fat people thin. It could make children eat apples. It could make lorry drivers eat salad, rather than sleep-inducing fry-ups. Used in the wrong way, it could make us all eat three Big Macs.
It’s time for lunch. Koster and one of his head scientists, Rene de Wijk, vanish into the control room to be all Big Brotherish, leaving me to negotiate the canteen alone. It’s a Dutch canteen and, as you know, the Dutch are quite strange.
There’s a milk bar even though this is a university, not a primary school. I take some milk, then wonder if I’ve only done that because I want to assimilate. Or maybe it’s because I relish the chance to be treated like a baby again. I then begin to wonder if my mother loved me, consider paying a prostitute to change my nappy on my way back through Amsterdam, then get a grip and move on to the next food island.
Herring is an option but I know they’ll read a lot into that so I go for the safer beef taco, some bread and a milky, swirly thing in a glass. I wonder if this makes me a bad person.
When the programme begins fully next week, anyone using the canteen will be told they are participating in a scientific study – but they will soon, Koster maintains, forget they are being watched. At first I find that hard to believe. As I sit alone at my table, I am incredibly conscious of the cameras. But the real lab rats will be watched for months, even years: it won’t take long for them to behave as if the cameras aren’t there at all.
Halfway through the strange dessert, the boffins return. I feel as if I’ve given nothing away but de Wijk declares the past 20 minutes “very interesting”. It takes two days to analyse fully the results of one meal, but in a few minutes the scientists have deduced that I was nervous, which might explain why I was atypically uninquisitive (I didn’t look around as much as they had expected of a lone eater). They had expected that I’d go for the taco because that was the high-calorie option. I had been up since 3am, I was tired, I needed comfort food.
The fact that I didn’t finish my salad didn’t surprise them. Salad is charged by the bowl, so the temptation to take more than I needed was irresistible. If the bowl had been 10% smaller, I wouldn’t have noticed and I would still have had an elegant sufficiency of salad. It’s this sort of manipulation that the restaurant will study in the coming months.
Most interestingly (for them, at any rate), I don’t eat my bread. Why would I take bread and not even try it? That is illogical. Rene II explains that anticipation is a very complex procedure. Trying to understand how I will feel about the food I choose when I actually come to eat it depends on hundreds of factors.
The team has already been asked to look at a Utrecht hospital’s catering system (the restaurant is public-private funded and, for a fee, will test out any new product or help to solve any food-related problem). The Utrecht patients were being asked to choose their meals a whole week ahead. This might have kept the costs down and limited visits by catering staff, but it was a madness.
A patient having a colectomy on Tuesday is not going to know in advance whether he will fancy the fish or the beef come Friday. If he isn’t getting the food he wants, he is less positive, his recovery is hampered – and medical costs spiral. The restaurant should help to quantify all this.
Enough about Utrecht bed-hoggers. How are we going to make children eat more apples, for example? “We don’t know yet. But there is no real reason why children shouldn’t eat apples, which are sweet and taste a bit like lemonade. Perhaps children are put off by the packaging, the crunchiness, the colour – or because they are being told to eat them by their parents. It is very complex, psychologically. We hope to make all that clearer.”
I leave the two Renes and the Restaurant of the Future in a daze. The questions they could answer are mind-boggling. What is the real reason why women eat less in male company? Can green lighting make us herbivores? Does an overattentive waiter make us choose cheese rather than ice-cream?
By the time I reach Schiphol airport I’m getting anxious about the future. We’ll all be eating salad without knowing why. We’ll be stick-thin and glowing. Wine will be served in thin, black glasses to trick us out of binge-drinking. We will live for ever. The prospect is so depressing that I find myself eating a Big Mac. I am eating one because I want to. At least that’s what I think.
