3.

4 Interview with Per Møller part 2

Sensory psychology is used, commercially, all over the place. You cannot buy
a food that has not been fiddled with, mixed, spiced up added salt to, or
whatever. That we experience all the time. But there is another angle to the
question, and that is whether, for example, adding a certain smell to the
environment in a store. Might influence people's buying behavior and many
stores do that so if you are in the market for new shoes and you have enough
money to buy your new shoes, I wouldn't be too surprised if expensive shoe
shops have not added tiny small amounts of leather smell in the store.
Because, it gives sort of a the buyer has feeling that this is really high quality. I
can smell the leather, and in supermarkets in the fruit department a little puff of
of citrus, smell, probably wouldn't hurt in terms of people's willingness to buy.
In bakeries the smell of new baked bread is nice. It actually If you are hungry
and you pass by a bakery, you smell it. You almost jump into the store to get
the bread. These are not things that stores that have advertised that they do
because it could be perceived as sort of cheating, right? But I might be
tempted if I ran a store to do things like that. And I think it would work actually.
Another example of, The enormous or very strong effect a smell can have on
people's well being, comes from soldiers who have been to war. And there are
some studies from the US On Vietnam War veterans who, when they were
given smells of burnt flesh, Got really upset and they could quantify, they
could measure stress hormones in the blood, etc., and all sorts of other stress
symptoms. You might say why is that, by having a barbecue or frying some
bacon. And the thing is that these smells of burned flesh they had experienced
on the very traumatic circumstances during the war. And smells connected to
these circumstances really raised the whole body defense system, the stress
reactions. So, that is another example of a, as you might say, psychological
influence of smells. I am one of two editors, or editors-in-chief of a relatively
new journal, called Flavor. And the idea of that journal, is to bring together,
scientists who study different senses, related of importance to food
perception. That is to say taste, smell, vision, hearing actually the whole
charade. To bring these people together with practitioners, cooks, etc. And
cooking, over the last 15 years, has changed and become sort of like a
playground for creativity. And, in Denmark, we have quite a bit of it, this sort of
new-nordic, and etc. And it is highly interesting from a scientific point of view
to tap into the tessit or sort of implicit knowledge that these people have about
what goes well together, so this interaction between scientist and a cooks,
perfumers, you name it. People who work with smells, is a new way of doing it.
Because normally in the journals, there are very strict rules for how to do
things and the areas that sort of papers most journals will accept fall within a
fairly narrow range so we are trying to broaden it up. And to bring in
experiences from other walks of life than the scientific laboratory. And it is of
mutual benefit to both scientist and practitioners. We again, try to do it with an
eye towards what is for real, in real life. What will exist outside the laboratory,
because just like when I held them up before with this standing on one's toes,
there is no limit to what you can do in a lab. Absolutely, no limit, but that is not
to say that it is particularly interesting. Neither from a scientific point of view
nor from a practical point of view. But I think to be more concerned with what
is scientifically interesting, if it can be of any pleasure or applicability to other
people, it's just fine. But I'm a little bit concerned about scientists quite often
being very narrow-minded. So it is healthy to take a more ecological view on
problems. So that is also how I see this journal. [MUSIC]