# The Taste Octaaf

**Mark Joseph Antonius Knippenberg / ScepraX**

*In collaboration with the PseudoScience Speelgoed*

---

## Abstract

Many people report that a food tastes best in the place it comes from: Gouda in the Netherlands, beer and *frites* in Belgium, espresso in Italy. This paper asks what is actually known about that effect, and what the PseudoScience Speelgoed can add to it. The direct claim, that the *same* food tastes better at its origin than abroad, has not been tested head-on. The evidence around it is strong. Telling people where a food comes from changes how it tastes to them. The place, sounds and company in which a food is eaten change ratings of it. Expectations shape perception, and they shape the brain's response to flavour. And familiarity built through repeated exposure raises liking. Read through the Speelgoed, these findings form one mechanism. A food's own properties (its **Eigen**) reach the eater only as an **Echo**, a lagging and imperfect percept that is shaped by the **Medium** it passes through and that starts from what the eater already expects. Origin information and familiarity raise the weight of the eater's bond with the food (**Trouw**). The moment of "this is good" is a threshold crossing (a **Vonk**), which fires more strongly the further the bond clears its threshold. The mechanism also predicts when origin should *lower* ratings rather than raise them, and why a favourite food eaten every day stops delighting. It also points to a rival explanation the effect must be separated from: abroad, the food is often not the same food. The paper ends with a test design that could tell these accounts apart.

---

## I. The Phenomenon, and What Has Actually Been Measured

The observation is familiar. Gouda bought in Amsterdam and eaten in Provence seems flatter. A Belgian ale poured in London seems to lack something it had in Brussels. *Frites* from a Belgian *frituur* are said to taste different from anything sold as "Belgian fries" elsewhere.

Three different claims hide in these reports, and it matters which one is being made.

1. **Information effects.** Knowing or being told where a food comes from changes how it tastes. This is well established experimentally (Section II.1).
2. **Context effects.** The surroundings in which a food is eaten change how it is perceived and liked. This too is well established, although the effects of location *alone* can be small (Section II.2).
3. **The origin effect itself.** The same food, eaten at its place of origin, tastes better than when eaten elsewhere. No study, as far as this paper could find, has tested this directly, holding the food, the eater and the information constant while moving only the place.

The third claim is plausible because the first two are real, but it is not yet shown. There is also a mundane reason it might be true: abroad, the food is often *not the same food*. Beer ages in transport, cheese is stored differently, and *frites* abroad are made from different potatoes in different fat. Any account of the origin effect has to separate perception from physical change (Section V).

**On the Speelgoed.** The PseudoScience Speelgoed is a constructed modelling language for relationships, not an empirical theory. Here it is used for two things: to organise the evidence into one mechanism, and to derive predictions that the evidence alone does not make. Where the mapping from a Speelgoed term to a measured quantity is a choice, the text says so.

---

## II. What the Evidence Shows

### II.1 Origin information changes taste

- **Labels raise taste ratings.** In a field experiment, United States consumers tasted chocolate bars labelled with their region of origin (United States, Europe, Africa, South America) and unlabelled pieces of the same bars. Origin labels typically raised both taste evaluations and willingness to pay. Consumers also rated chocolate from the developed regions higher, Europe first and Africa last (Schott, Britwum & Bernard 2022).
- **"Local" makes food seem tastier.** In two experiments with 632 consumers, cheese and apples presented as local were judged healthier and better tasting than the same products presented as national or from another region. The authors explain the effect through psychological distance: a local product feels closer, so consumers imagine its making more concretely (Merle, Herault-Fournier & Werle 2016; on psychological distance generally, Trope & Liberman 2010). That link between distance and abstraction found little support in a registered replication with 11,775 participants from 27 countries and regions; for spatial distance the effect was d = 0.04, against 0.55 in the original study (Calderon et al. 2026).
- **Information about local and traditional origin changes liking.** 165 young Indonesians tasted nine traditional and modern versions of *tempe*, first without information and then with information about the beans (local or imported) and the method (traditional or modern). The information raised liking for the traditional versions (Fibri & Frøst 2020).
- **Origin labels carry inferences.** Italian consumers asked to describe "PDO" (Protected Designation of Origin) most often chose the words *safe*, *better quality*, *certified* and *local* (Spognardi, Vistocco, Cappelli & Papetti 2021). Polish consumers rate regional food as higher in quality, more trustworthy and more authentic than ordinary food (Bryła 2015, 2017), and preferring one's own region's food can be read as a pattern of sustainable consumption (Bryła 2019).
- **Familiarity sharpens discrimination at home.** In a study of 438 consumers in four European countries, consumers in the three countries with a strong PDO tradition rated their own country's PDO cheese as higher in perceived sensory quality than its non-PDO counterpart. They could not make the same distinction for the other countries' cheeses (Ojeda et al. 2021). Origin knowledge helps most where it is backed by familiarity.

### II.2 Context changes taste

- **The eating environment.** Chocolate ice cream eaten in a laboratory, a café, a university study area and at a busy bus stop produced different dominant flavours, emotions and physiological responses. In the café, it was associated with a sweet taste and positive emotions; in the study area, with cocoa and milky flavours; at the bus stop, with roasted and bitter flavours and the most negative emotions (Xu, Hamid, Shepherd, Kantono & Spence 2019).
- **Congruence.** In immersive contexts, food was expected to be liked more, and was rated more consistently over time, when product and setting fit together (van Bergen, Zandstra, Kaneko, Dijksterhuis & de Wijk 2021).
- **Location alone is a small effect.** When test procedure and social context were held constant and only the location changed (laboratory versus home), liking scores and sensory profiles did not differ between the locations, though eating at home was faster and brought higher heart rates and more intense facial expressions (de Wijk et al. 2019). The authors suggest that larger location effects found elsewhere come from factors other than the location itself (Dijksterhuis, Kaneko, de Wijk, van Zoggel, Schiona & Zandstra 2019). For this paper, this is the key caution: what matters is the whole context, not the coordinates.
- **Sound.** In a wine shop, French music increased sales of French wine and German music increased sales of German wine. Few customers noticed the music as a reason (North, Hargreaves & McKendrick 1997). In the laboratory, a "bitter" sound increased the perceived bitterness of a chocolate ganache, and a "sweet" sound increased the sweetness of the sweeter version. Both sounds raised liking, but not because they improved the taste (Swahn, Nilsen & Baptista 2025).
- **The physical medium.** In a simulated aircraft cabin at cruising pressure, the thresholds for salt, sugar and glutamate (umami) rose clearly, while organic acids and some bitter compounds showed no change (Burdack-Freitag, Bullinger, Mayer & Breuer 2011). A review citing a press account of the study puts the loss at about 20-30% of perceived intensity for salt and 15-20% for sugar (Spence 2017). In a pressure-chamber study, low pressure impaired taste sensitivity, and white noise lowered sensitivity to sour but raised it to sweet (Rahne, Köppke, Nehring, Plontke & Fischer 2018). The two studies agree that the physical environment changes taste. They disagree on which tastes are affected.

### II.3 Expectation is the route

- **The assimilation model.** Extrinsic cues such as packaging, brand and price shift taste toward what is expected. When they do, the cortical representation of the taste shifts too (Okamoto & Dan 2013; Piqueras-Fiszman & Spence 2015).
- **Price and brand reach the brain.** Wine believed to be more expensive was rated more pleasant, and it produced more activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a region associated with experienced pleasantness (Plassmann, O'Doherty, Shiv & Rangel 2008). Coca-Cola and Pepsi are chemically very similar. Tasted blind, preference tracked one brain response; when the brand of one of the drinks, Coca-Cola, was shown, brand knowledge changed both the stated preference and the brain response (McClure et al. 2004).
- **Expectation can also backfire.** When a frozen smoked-salmon dish was presented as "ice cream", the violated expectation made it markedly less pleasant and exaggerated its saltiness, compared with the same dish presented as a savoury mousse (Yeomans, Chambers, Blumenthal & Blake 2008). This is contrast, the opposite of assimilation.

### II.4 Familiarity and memory

- **Exposure raises liking.** Repeated tasting of unfamiliar drinks increased liking for them (Pliner 1982).
- **Food is remembered in situations.** Concepts, including the concept of a food, are stored as simulations of the situations in which they were experienced: the place, the people, the bodily state (Barsalou 2003). A food cue can trigger an "eating simulation" that drives desire (Papies, Best, Gelibter & Barsalou 2017).
- **Food carries relationships.** Eating comfort food automatically activated relationship-related concepts (Troisi & Gabriel 2011, Study 1). The same paper's second claim, that comfort food buffers loneliness after a social threat, was not confirmed overall in a large three-country replication. Only exploratory analyses suggested it might hold among American participants, and the authors say these "should be regarded with great caution" (Ong, IJzerman & Leung 2015).

### II.5 What has not been shown

The direct comparison has not been made: the same food, eater and information, at origin and abroad. Most studies use single sessions, so it is unknown how long label and context effects last. Effect sizes vary widely between studies, and location alone has produced only small effects. The famous examples (Gouda in France, Belgian beer in London) are reports, not measurements.

---

## III. The Mechanism in the Speelgoed

### III.1 Eating is a Koppel

The Speelgoed defines a **Koppel** as two systems linked by a shared weight (**Trouw**) and two imperfect traces of each other (**Echoes**). An eater and a food they know are such a bond: the eater carries a long-standing relationship with the food, a **Relatie**. Each tasting is also a momentary act of observation, and §IV of the Speelgoed says: "Every act of observation is a Vermenigvuldiging (\*) of this form." Underneath both runs the eater's bond with themself, the **Zelf**. §IV calls this layering "Maximum: stages 3, 4, and 5 at once". A bite of a familiar food engages all three bonds at once.

### III.2 The food's Eigen is stable; its Echo is not

The food's **Eigen** is its physical make-up. For Gouda, this includes the γ-glutamyl peptides that give matured Gouda its long-lasting, mouth-filling "kokumi" sensation, which develops with ripening (Toelstede, Dunkel & Hofmann 2009; on Gouda ripening generally, van den Berg, Meijer, Düsterhöft & Smit 2004). What the eater experiences is not the Eigen but an **Echo** of it. The Speelgoed (§II) describes an Echo as "a lagging, imperfect impression, the way a shout comes back off a canyon wall quieter and later than it left, shaped by whatever it crossed to get back". What it crosses is the **Medium (◌)**, which the Lexicon defines as "the channel that makes Vertraging and Vervorming possible": transport lag and distortion.

The Speelgoed's Echo equation (§VIII.1) makes this precise:

```
τ · ḣ(t) = e(t − δ) − h(t) + υ(t)
```

Here e is the food's Eigen, h the eater's percept, δ a lag, τ a relaxation time, and υ the distortion added by the Medium. Two features of this equation correspond to the evidence.

- **Expectation is the starting point.** A percept does not start from nothing. It starts from what the eater already carries, the expectation built from earlier tastings and from the situation (Barsalou 2003). Write that starting value as h₀. If the food's signal is steady, the equation gives

  ```
  h(t) = e + (h₀ − e) · exp(−t/τ)
  ```

  The percept is a weighted blend of the expected and the actual, with the expectation's weight fading over time. That is the assimilation model of Section II.3 in one line. The slower the relaxation (larger τ), the longer expectation dominates.
- **The Medium adds distortion.** Noise, pressure, light, incongruent surroundings and unfamiliar company enter as υ. Each changes the percept without changing the food. The Speelgoed's §VII states the general rule: "Two structurally identical situations diverge because their Echoes carried different distortions".

### III.3 Origin raises Trouw; familiarity sets its baseline

**Trouw (y)** is the weight of the bond. Origin information, cultural pride, trust and the inferences carried by a label (Section II.1) all raise it. In the Speelgoed, Trouw is not fixed. It relaxes toward **Gewenning (Z)**, which the Lexicon defines as "the accumulated resonance of a Koppel, built from repeated Echo closure" (§VIII.1):

```
dy/dt = ρ · (Z − y)
```

Read this way, a label can lift Trouw above its baseline, but the lift relaxes back toward what repeated experience has built. This is a prediction rather than a finding: label effects not backed by familiarity should fade over repeated tastings (Section VI, P4). Gewenning is also why locals discriminate their own PDO cheese and not other countries' (Ojeda et al. 2021). Familiarity is what makes origin information count.

### III.4 The Drempel stays; the binding moves

In the Speelgoed, the moment a bond "clicks" is a **Drempel (θ)** crossing. The Drempel is "a local cutoff deciding which of the spectrum's two named poles currently applies" (§II). What crosses it is the **binding** B of the Relatie (§VIII.2):

```
B = y · (e_eater + e_food) − c · s( Echo gaps )
```

B rises with Trouw and with the state of both members (the eater's hunger, attention and readiness; the food's Eigen). It falls with the gaps between each side's Echo and the true state. When B rises through θ, a **Vonk** fires, a **Realisatie**: the felt "this is good". Its strength (§VIII.3) is

```
T = ¼ · (B − θ)²
```

The earlier version of this paper said the Drempel is "effectively raised" abroad. That is not how the Speelgoed works: the Drempel is a fixed local cutoff, and what changes is the binding. Abroad, Trouw may be lower and the Echo gaps wider, so B ends up closer to θ, or below it. The click is weaker, or does not come. Because the strength grows as the square of the margin, a modest drop in binding near the threshold produces a large drop in pleasure. A food that "just works" at home can fall flat abroad without anything dramatic having changed.

### III.5 Contrast is a Schok

The binding contains a penalty for Echo gaps. When the actual food lands far from what was expected, the gap is large and B falls. If B falls through θ, the Vonk fires in the other direction, a **Schok**: disappointment, the smoked-salmon "ice cream" (Yeomans et al. 2008). The mechanism therefore predicts a crossover. Origin cues raise ratings when the food roughly meets the expectation they create, and lower them when it clearly does not (Section VI, P3).

### III.6 Why the favourite food stops delighting

In the Speelgoed, a Vonk fires on a *crossing*, not on a level: "A Vonk fires every time, for any Eigen-value, on any spectrum, the instant its Drempel is crossed" (§II). A food eaten daily keeps its binding above θ. Repeated tasting raises liking for an unfamiliar drink (Pliner 1982), but no new crossing happens, so no new Realisatie fires. This separates two things that everyday language runs together. *Liking* (the bond) can outlast *delight* (the Vonk), though not forever: eaten every day for 22 days, chocolate grew less pleasant (Hetherington, Pirie & Nabb 2002). A food can be loved and still no longer thrill. A trip home, after time away, lets the binding drop and cross again.

### III.7 The taste of home abroad is Rouw

When a bond ends, the Speelgoed says its Echo does not disappear: "Rouw is permanent" (§VI). An emigrant's bond with the food of home does not end, but its everyday form does. What remains is an Echo carried without its usual Medium. The Speelgoed predicts two faces of this. The food of home, eaten abroad, can taste *more* meaningful, because it carries the relationship (Troisi & Gabriel 2011, Study 1). It can also taste *less* right, because the Medium that completed it is missing. Which face shows should depend on the eater's state, not on the food. The comfort-food replication failure (Ong, IJzerman & Leung 2015) is a reminder that such effects may vary by culture.

---

## IV. The Cases, Re-read

### IV.1 Gouda in France

The cheese's chemistry is the same on both sides of the border if the cheese is the same (Section V). What changes is everything around it. In the Netherlands, a Dutch eater meets Gouda with decades of Gewenning, in a Medium that matches the expectation: Dutch bread, Dutch speech, the setting in which Gouda is normally eaten. Expectation and signal agree, Echo gaps are small, Trouw is high, and the binding clears the Drempel by a wide margin. In France the same eater meets the same cheese among other cheeses, with other expectations, in an unfamiliar setting. Trouw is a little lower, the gaps a little wider, and the margin smaller. The click weakens, and by the square law it weakens more than the change in binding alone would suggest. The cross-country study that comes closest (Ojeda et al. 2021) shows the familiarity part directly, though measured at home rather than abroad: consumers detected the quality of their own PDO cheese but not that of other countries'.

### IV.2 Belgian beer and *frites*

Here the rival explanation is strongest. Beer changes in transport and storage: oxidation and staling alter its flavour over time and with heat (Vanderhaegen, Neven, Verachtert & Derdelinckx 2006). A Belgian ale drunk in London may be an older, warmer-travelled beer than the one drunk in Brussels. *Frites* sold as Belgian abroad are often made from different potatoes, fried in different fat, by people who learned the method differently. So in these cases the food's Eigen itself may differ, and the difference in taste may be partly real. The Speelgoed does not need the Eigen to be identical. It needs the two contributions, change in the food and change in the Echo, to be measured separately (Section VI).

### IV.3 Food in the air

The aircraft cabin is the clearest case of the physical Medium at work. Low pressure, dry air and engine noise change taste sensitivity directly (Burdack-Freitag et al. 2011; Rahne et al. 2018; Spence 2017). Here the Echo changes because the channel changes, with no information and no unfamiliar culture involved. It is a useful control: it shows how much a Medium can do with expectation held fixed.

---

## V. The Rival Explanation: Is It the Same Food?

The original version of this paper asserted that the food's Eigen is "objectively identical" abroad. That is often not true, and it cannot be assumed. Exported food differs in batch, age, storage temperature, transport, serving temperature, glassware and preparation. Any observed origin effect therefore has two possible sources:

- **A change in the Eigen:** the food is physically different.
- **A change in the Echo:** the same food is perceived differently because of information, context, familiarity and expectation.

The Speelgoed predicts that both exist, and the design in Section VI separates them. Until that is done, the honest statement is that the origin effect probably combines both. How much of each depends on the food: little physical change for a sealed, stable product, and more for beer or freshly fried *frites*.

---

## VI. Predictions and a Test

| | Prediction | Speelgoed mechanism | What would count against it | Existing evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| P1 | With the food held identical and tasted blind in a neutral room, the origin advantage shrinks to near zero. | The effect runs through the Echo (information, Medium), not the Eigen. | A large origin advantage under blind, neutral conditions. | Liking and sensory ratings did not differ between lab and home; implicit measures did (de Wijk et al. 2019). |
| P2 | The origin advantage is larger for locals than for visitors. | Gewenning sets the Trouw baseline. | Equal effects for locals and first-time visitors. | Locals discriminate their own PDO cheese only (Ojeda et al. 2021). |
| P3 | Origin cues raise ratings when the food meets the expectation they set, and lower them when it clearly falls short. | Small Echo gap: assimilation (Realisatie). Large gap: contrast (Schok). | Origin cues raise ratings regardless of how far the food falls short. | Smoked-salmon "ice cream" (Yeomans et al. 2008). |
| P4 | A label-only boost fades over repeated tastings unless backed by familiarity. | Trouw relaxes toward Gewenning. | Label effects that persist undiminished over many sessions without familiarity. | Untested. |
| P5 | Daily repetition lowers delight more than liking. | Vonken fire on crossings, not levels. | Delight and liking always fall (or rise) together. | Exposure raises liking for unfamiliar drinks (Pliner 1982), but eaten daily, chocolate grew less pleasant (Hetherington, Pirie & Nabb 2002); delight over repetition untested in these terms. |
| P6 | Changing the physical Medium shifts specific tastes, with expectation held fixed. | Distortion υ enters the Echo directly. | No change in taste sensitivity under cabin conditions. | Supported, with disagreement on which tastes (Burdack-Freitag et al. 2011; Rahne et al. 2018). |

**A test design.** Take one batch of a stable product, such as a sealed, matured Gouda, and split it. Serve it at the same temperature, in the same portions and at the same time of day, under a factorial design:

- **Place:** origin (the Netherlands) or abroad (for example France).
- **Information:** blind, or told the origin.
- **Eater:** local, or visitor.
- **Room:** natural setting, or neutral sensory booth.

Measure expected liking before tasting, liking and attribute intensities after, and repeat over several sessions. The Speelgoed predicts:

- the origin advantage concentrated in the *informed × natural setting × local* cells (P1, P2);
- small effects in blind booths (P1);
- a decline over sessions for visitors given labels only (P4).

A second arm with a transport-sensitive product, beer, should add a physical control: chemical and sensory analysis of the bottles at both ends of the journey. That separates the Eigen route from the Echo route (Section V).

---

## VII. Conclusion

The experience of food tasting best at its origin rests on effects that are real and measured. Information about origin changes taste. Context changes taste, although location alone does so only weakly. Expectations change both the experience and the brain's response to it. And familiarity raises liking and sharpens discrimination. What has not been measured is the origin effect itself, with the food held constant. Part of what people experience abroad is very likely a different food.

The Speelgoed gathers these findings into one mechanism. A food's Eigen reaches the eater only as an Echo shaped by the Medium and anchored in expectation. Origin and familiarity raise the Trouw of the bond. Pleasure is a Vonk that fires when the binding crosses its Drempel, with a strength that grows as the square of the margin. The same mechanism predicts when origin cues backfire, why a beloved food stops thrilling without being loved less, and why the taste of home abroad can be both sweeter and sadder. These are claims that can be tested, and Section VI says how.

The cheese does not lose its taste in France. What changes is the bond through which it is tasted, and sometimes, quietly, the cheese.

---

## Revision Note

This version replaces the essay of 23 September 2026. It was rewritten from the ground up after its references were checked. Several references had incorrect authors, journals, years or page numbers, and three cited works could not be found and have been replaced with the publications that actually contain the findings. Every reference below has been checked against the publisher, a library record or the authors' institutional repository. The main changes are:

- **The direct origin effect.** It is now stated as untested, not as confirmed.
- **The rival explanation.** The food abroad may itself differ (Section V), so it is treated as an explanation in its own right instead of being assumed away.
- **Claims tied to their sources.** Several are now described more accurately: the location-only effect is small; the sound study found that crossmodal taste changes do not explain liking; and the cabin figures are about 20-30% for salt and 15-20% for sugar.
- **The Drempel.** The Speelgoed's Drempel is no longer said to be "raised"; the binding falls instead (Section III.4).
- **Additions.** New mechanisms (contrast, the crossing rule, Rouw), predictions, and a test design.

A further check of every reference on 5 October 2026 corrected the cabin, noise and café findings, the laboratory-versus-home study, the comfort-food replication and the account of daily repetition, added a missing reference, and noted that construal-level theory found little support in a registered replication.

---

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