If You're Eating Yogurt With a Metal Spoon You're Doing It Wrong

Ladies love yogurt, the “shoe-shopping good” snack. This is a fact proven time and time again by commercials. But what those ads don’t tell you is that yogurt tastes different, depending on the spoon.

Or so claims a small study published in the journal Flavour. As reported by ABC News, the small Oxford University experiment involved 35 participants. The researchers prompted them to taste yogurt with four different plastic spoons, two large and two small, two of which were artificially weighted. There was also a “fancy” spoon.

The results revealed that yoghurt was perceived as denser and more expensive when tasted from a lighter plastic spoon as compared to the artificially weighted spoons; the size of the spoon only interacted with the spoon-weight factor for the perceived sweetness of the yoghurt.

And:

While spoon size did not affect perceived density and expensiveness of the food, the size of the cutlery appears to be an important factor mediating the effects of cutlery on sweetness – perhaps since some foods (soup or desserts, for instance) are often consumed with cutlery that is of a particular size. The sweetness ratings of the yoghurt were significantly affected by both the spoon’s weight and by its size. When followed up with pairwise comparisons, it turned out that only the lightest spoon was different from most of the others.

In other words, when you eat with a cheap spoon, you may believe you’re eating more expensive-tasting yogurt. That said, eating yogurt with a plastic spoon often hurts the corners of my mouth. So silverware it is. But! If you like your yogurt sweet, know this:

It is thus difficult to determine what kind of cutlery would produce the ‘best’ results; while the yoghurt tasted from the light teaspoon was rated as the most dense, most expensive, and most liked, this spoon would not seem to be the best for eating desserts since the yoghurt tasted from it was rated as the least sweet.

The researchers also did a test with pieces of cheese using a plastic fork, knife and spoon — and a wooden toothpick — but the results just weren’t as exciting. Yogurt is where it’s at.