Taste Words

The product where I found taste terms is “Chips Ahoy! Chewy” chocolate chip cookies, made by Nabisco. The package displays various phrases in bold, colorful text that pop out against the red background, as well as large drawings of the cookies. There is no doubt that the packaging is eye-catching, but the phrases themselves would also draw potential buyers to the product.

Some of these phrases include:
“Real chocolate chip cookies.”
“Snack ’n Seal Keeps Cookies Fresh!” advertised by the “easy open pull tab”
“Experience the taste that your family’s gotta have.”
“Rich, chocolatey, irresistibly delicious.”

The word “fresh” appears five times. The original Chips Ahoy! cookies are very hard, so the repetition of “fresh” could emphasize the chewiness and softness of this newer type of Chips Ahoy! (as does the word “chewy” itself).

The word “real” appears three times. Chips Ahoy! cookies are made by Nabisco, which is a Kraft company. Kraft is most famous for making Kraft cheese, which is about as close to fake as food gets. Nabisco makes products like Swiss Miss hot chocolate (sickeningly sweet), and Nesquick chocolate milk (also very, very sweet). Niether of these products are very much like milk. There is also a slew of ingredients, many of which are not very real-sounding, such as “dextrose,” “partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil,” “high fructose corn syrup,” and “caramel color.” The word “real” seems to be trying to counter perceptions that the cookies may be unreal; the word itself is bright, colorful and large on the package compared to the brand words “Nabisco” and “Kraft,” and the tiny font of the ingredients list.

The phrases on the package are not always grammatically correct, including the “’n” in “Snack ’n Seal” and the “family’s gotta” in “Experience the taste that your family’s gotta have,” and the invented adjective, “chocolatey” in “Rich, chocolatey and irresistibly delicious.” Perhaps this is done to appeal to children, who may identify with this phrasing because it more closely matches the way that they speak, as well as adults and teenagers who would purchase these cookies for themselves. The word “family” appeals to parents who will buy Chips Ahoy! cookies for their children.

Clearly these cookies are not trying to appeal to an educated, health-conscious demographic. However, by using words “fresh” and “real” the brand seems to realize that the general public is starting to become more aware of nutrition and food quality. Yet, at the same time, the packaging is not suggesting that the cookies are no longer a dessert food, or taste bad because they are supposedly healthy. One phrase in particular, “Rich, chocolatey and irresistibly delicious,” which uses words that might also describe a dense chocolate cake, adds a quality of self-indulgence to the product.

It seems that the packaging gives the taster several words to describe the cookies before they actually sample them. “The Color of Odors” pointed out that olfactory transduction is about 10 times slower than visual detection. Since the sense of smell plays a big role in how food tastes, perhaps these words influence the way that Chewy Chips Ahoy! taste. If so, would grammatical differences between different languages cause tasters in other countries to experience different tastes, (or at least to describe these tastes differently) as with experiments in space, time, objects, and substances described in “Linguistic Relativity?” I would be very interested in seeing the results of that experiment.