The Cook, the Diner, and the Mind: Psychology in the kitchen and at the table (new 2020 edition)

This is a psychology book for cooks about food. Not a cook book, but a psychology book. You will see how your brain deals with information from your senses, so you can understand that people actually find a soup called "muoma" creamier than a soup with the name "sitsee", how making up walks and rhymes makes it easy to remember things and why wine in an expensive looking bottle tastes, really tastes, better. You will see why some people like baking and some people are not, why people who enter their homes through the kitchen have a higher chance of being overweight. And much more. I have tried to explain things using examples of food and cooking whenever possible, and avoided explaining anything I could not explain in an amusing or interesting way . I will take you hundreds of thousands of years back, and show you that we are the cooking ape, creatures of the fire. Without cooking we would not exist. You will read how your brain constructs what we see, hear, smell, feel and taste, and how much we actually add to what we think we just perceive, and how this is very much the case when we eat. You will learn how to use your memory efficiently in the kitchen using simple tricks. I will show you different personalities in the kitchen, and what to do with that. We will dig into technique-based cooking and recipe-based cooking and how that affects you and your cooking. Hell, we'll even look at language and food names, pricing strategies, and how we can use that knowledge to our advantage.