Recently, I switched from a regular hot morning coffee to iced matcha. The routine change was most profoundly felt not in the taste or my energy levels, but the sound.
Sonia Wong, recipe developer and food blogger.Supplied
In swapping my AM beverage, I also replaced the crack and crunch of a manual coffee grinder with the whish of a bamboo whisk against a porcelain bowl, the clink of ice into a glass and the glug-glug of oat milk.
My morning caffeine dose comes with a distinctly new soundtrack. Now that I think about it, so do most of my experiences preparing and eating food.
There’s the gurgle and hiss of a rice cooker, the scrape of brown paper against the hard crust of fresh sourdough and the hollow snap of a green bean. We know we eat with our eyes, but I’m starting to think that our ears have their own, equally important, role to play.
The term ASMR comes to mind – that is, the soothing, brain tingling sensations that are triggered upon hearing certain, often very specific things (nails tapping on hard plastic, beads falling into a deep bowl). ASMR (short for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) exploded in popularity almost a decade ago thanks to YouTube, and today there are thousands of creators and over five million ASMR videos available to watch and bliss out to.
Channels like Peaceful Cuisine focus on the relaxing sounds of cooking: Videos put deliberate emphasis on the chopping, grating, stirring and pouring of various ingredients. I’d argue these sounds are more important to Peaceful Cuisine’s viewers than the outcome of the recipes.
The sonic effects of food have been studied: One famous example is the great Pringle chip experiment conducted at the University of Oxford in 2004. Psychologists asked chip-tasters to wear headphones, and played amplified and altered crunching sounds while the subjects ate. It turned out that the chips that were rated as the freshest and least stale were the ones paired with the loudest and most amplified crunching sounds. Essentially, if a stale chip doesn’t sound stale, then it doesn’t taste stale.
The sounds around us can also have profound effects on how we experience taste. The noted blandness of airplane food can even be partially attributed to the noise of the engine – which can clock in at 80 decibels and dull our sensitivity to salty and sweet tastes.
For Sonia Wong, a recipe developer and food blogger behind Salt n Pepper Here, the intersection of food and ASMR is “super appealing.”
Wong, who describes her cooking approach as veggie-forward and kid-friendly without sacrificing adult sophistication, chalks this up to our collective obsession with TikTok. “I think people are attuned to audio more so than ever. How often do you see videos opening with the scrape of a knife over something crispy, the sizzle of something hitting a hot skillet or someone taking a bite out of the hero food?”
When we’re surrounded by so much food content that we can’t ever taste, our other senses need to be extra engaged in order to appreciate the brilliance of a dish or the sublime simplicity of a recipe.
Creators are also keenly aware that in order to stay relevant and make compelling content, they need to elicit the most visceral response from their viewers. And that often means propping up a high quality boom mic just outside their camera’s frame. Wong’s own favourite cooking sounds bring back feelings of familiarity and comfort. “The sound of spaghetti sauce simmering under a lid, the hissing and popping of hot oil when I fry spring rolls,” she says. Wong also loves the sound of slurping noodles. “When I started watching Korean dramas, I noticed many noodle-slurping moments. I think they know there are a lot of us out there who love it.” When everything in our lives becomes content fodder – our pets, morning routines and even our day jobs – it’s only natural to expect an audiovisual experience from something as simple as grilled cheese. Cooking sounds can serve as an evocative shorthand. The sound of shallots hitting butter is universal, but it can also instantly convey a cooking technique or even hint at the eventual outcome.
Then there are mukbangs, another form of food content taken to online extremes. In these videos, which are akin to a one-sided dinner party, a person eats while interacting with the audience.
Wong loves them – but only the ones starring kids. “I know that sounds creepy!” she’s quick to add, but, she explains, “when they’re eating, they are fully immersed in the experience, digging in with hands and fingers, getting food all over their faces and everywhere else, without any awareness or shyness over ‘rude’ or loud chewing noises. It reminds me of my own girls’ joy of discovering new foods when they were little.”
No matter your age, there’s a lot of joy in slowing down to really listen to our food. In our over-scheduled, overstimulated world of desk-side salads and eating in front of a Netflix screen, pausing to shut off the world around us and savouring our food might be the greatest culinary movement since eating local.
Still, grownups should take note: Chewing loudly is no one’s idea of ASMR.