You Know Why Potato Chip Bags are So Noisy? They Make the Chips Taste Better
Every once in a while, I like to veer off into the esoteric areas of odd audio. This is one of those times.
Unless you’re popping the top on a tube of Pringles, there’s no such thing as a quiet bag of potato chips. No matter how quiet you try to be, they inevitably make a big racket. Why? To make them taste better.
Charles Spence is a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University who wondered about the need for noisy crisp packaging (English for potato chip bags). He discovered that a noisy bag makes for a better tasting chip.
He recruited volunteers to eat chips while wearing isolating headphones. They reported that the chips tasted “stale and spongey.” The moment they removed the headphones so they could hear them and the rustling of the bag was the moment the chips started tasting better.
Lots more at the Daily Mail.
