Towards the end of our hour-long chat in a cosy Oxfordshire pub, Professor Charles Spence picks up my iPhone and holds it in the palm of his hand for a moment. ‘This could be a bit of crockery, a bit of cutlery,’he says matter-of-factly. ‘It spoils the surprise when you have already seen the dish that you’re going to have but this would be an un-Instagrammable dish. Yes, that could be exciting.’
It’s fair to say Charles looks at culinary matters a little differently from most. A pioneer of ‘gastrophysics’ – a nascent field concerning the ways environmental, behavioural and sensory factors influence our culinary perceptions – he has spent the last twenty years fastidiously unpicking every aspect of our dining habits, from the role background music plays in determining how quickly we eat to how the colour of the plate can affect flavour.
Then there’s his Sonic Chip experiment, in which, essentially, he discovered that the crunchier the chip, the better it tastes. Earning him a Nobel Prize for Nutrition, this was the study that opened up his work to the wider world. The cream of the food industry soon began to get in touch.
Heston Blumenthal was one of his earliest advocates. The Fat Duck chef visited him in Oxford to witness the Sonic Chip for himself and consequently began to incorporate audio elements into his dishes, the most famous being Sound of the Sea. Charles also continues to work closely with freelance experimental chef Jozef Youssef.
‘There’s lots of stuff to be done – important things, fundamental things, that haven’t been touched on at all,’ he says. ‘If you can convince Jozef or Heston or somebody else, they will put it on the menu, they will try it and it will appear next week. They don’t have layers of management. Innovation happens much, much quicker.’