Rachel Herz, an adjunct assistant professor in Brown’s Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, arrives at an East Greenwich, Rhode Island, café feeling stressed. She’d lost a document when her computer crashed and she isn’t sure how to retrieve it. “If I were an emotional eater, I’d be running to get a huge slice of cheesecake,” she says with a laugh.
We’re not eating, in fact. We’re just catching up over a coffee—Herz was my professor at Brown—to discuss her book “Why You Eat What You Eat,” published last year by Norton. (Disclosure: I blurbed it.) Yet if we were eating, Herz notes, we would not be in a good environment: the music’s too loud, the café too dark, and we’re competing with surrounding conversations, plus the hiss of the cappuccino machine. “We’re so bombarded,” she says.
But these stimuli—sights, sounds, smells, emotions—have a huge, often unnoticed, influence on how we experience the world. Particularly on food, how we taste it, and how it makes us feel. And that is exactly where her new book focuses: at that nexus between appetite and psychology. In its pages, she unpacks how (and why) all of our senses influence our experience of food and our motivations to eat. She investigates how our minds and our environment change our perception of flavor. And she also tackles the reverse: how our experience of food and eating changes our own physiology, mood, and behavior.
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