THE Journal of Food Science has a nice essay today (October 16, 2023) on the Ig Nobel Prizes. We take the liberty of reproducing it here:
EDITORIAL
Ig Nobel Prize
This month’s topic will be a little different, although I promise to bring the discussion back to peer review next month, when we return to Peer Review Week, September 25-29 (which comes too late for this editorial). Instead, I’m going to take a lighter look at some unique research.
Most scientific researchers dream of being recognized for their work, especially for innovative work that merits consideration for a Nobel Prize. It’s a shame they don’t offer prizes in the food science category. But there is another prize perhaps better suited to the type of research sometimes published in JFS: the Ig Nobel Prizes. These are awards given for work that “first makes people laugh, then makes them think.”
Although there is no category for food science, if you look in the Ig Nobel Prize archives (https://fr. wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of _Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners), there are many food-related awards, whether in the physics, chemistry or nutrition category. Some of my favorites include studying the coefficient of friction (this was a tribological study) of a banana peel and a probabilistic study to determine whether a slice of buttered toast lands buttered side down more often . Then there are the two prizes for studying the fluid mechanics of coffee flowing into a walking person’s cup, one for each of them walking forward or backward. One of my favorites, because I’m afraid of suffering from it, is the study that won an Ig Nobel Prize “for diagnosing a long-overlooked disease: misophonia, the distress of hearing others make chewing noises.”
In fact, several Ig Nobel Prize winners are linked to JFS. Indeed, an article published in JFS served as the basis for the awarding of an Ig Nobel Prize to certain Italian researchers. They studied the “speed of ultrasound in cheddar cheese as a function of temperature” (Volume 64, No. 6, 1038-1041, 2006). Although the title seems odd if you look at it the wrong way, and that’s what won him the Ig Nobel Prize, the study had an important foundation: the use of ultrasound as a non-destructive method to characterize quality attributes . In particular, the effect of temperature allowed researchers to characterize the change in state of cheese fat. I suppose anyone outside of the food field would first scoff at the title, then make them think a little more deeply.
There is another connection between the author and JFS, although the article was actually published in the Journal of Sensory Studies. An Ig Nobel Prize was awarded to M. Zampini and C. Spence for “demonstrating that food tastes better when it looks more attractive.” In fact, this was a study correlating acoustic signals with the crispness and staleness of potato chips, a sensory topic that we all recognize as important in our field. The connection is made through a co-author of this article, Dr. Charles Spence, who recently contributed an article to a special issue of JFS on Advances in Sensory Science: From Perceptions to Consumer Acceptance (https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/ 17503841/2023/88/S1). His contribution to the special issue focused on the importance of color in the sensory perception of food. Congratulations to Dr. Spence for winning an Ig Nobel Prize. He said he was “looking to win a second prize, but alas, without success so far.”
For many years now, I have thought that some of my own work might be eligible for an Ig Nobel Prize. In my lab, we study things that might seem strange from a certain angle, but actually have important consequences. I often joke that no one else cares more than we do about how ice cream melts, but apparently that’s not weird enough for an Ig Nobel.
If you’re looking for a few laughs, I recommend spending some time reading the list of Ig Nobel Prizes.
Sincerely,
Rich Hartel
Editor-in-Chief Journal of Food Science
