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Journalism of Courage
The Netherlands – at first sight, nothing betrays the strange happenings at the Restaurant of the Future, a spacious, bright university canteen where scientists and students stop in for food and lunchtime chatter. The chef, Jan Kiewied, is stir-frying peppers at a glowing stove, his staff is scrubbing pots, and clients scoop up salads and lentil soup. Yet everyone and everything is being recorded by hidden sensors and cameras.
Carry that soup to the cash register and the customer may activate a pair of invisible floor scales. Sit down to eat and the chair may start to measure one’s heartbeat. And as a diner munches on that salad, a researcher on another floor may be watching how fast or slowly the diner chews.
The restaurant, set on the leafy campus of Wageningen University, feels friendly enough, but it is fitted with hidden wiring and switches worthy of a battleship. In reality it is a new research centre, devoted to exploring a question that is both simple and complicated: what makes people eat and drink the way they do?
Food companies and chefs have pondered the question for years, and all manner of test kitchens and taste labs have mushroomed along with the fast food industry in the search for answers. What distinguishes the Dutch probe is the scale of the experiments, unrivaled in Europe, said Rene Koster, who is in charge of the project.
Over the next 10 years, a team of more than 20 scientists, including psychologists and physicists, will be monitoring diners as they come for lunch each day. Close to 250 students and staff members have already signed up to participate in the project, which began in November.
Koster said he hoped that the findings would help policy makers, health experts and food executives who wanted to understand and influence eating habits.
