Did you ever wonder why people eat popcorn in the cinema?
With the arrival of talking movies and the Great Depression, popcorn suddenly exploded, so to speak. Anybody could afford it with prices as low as five cents a bag, and vendors could get a space inside or outside a theater to give moviegoers a snack on their way into the theater.
Soon popcorn became a major cash cow for theater owners, who could spend $10 for a hundred pounds of kernels and sell over a thousand bags. Most popcorn was generated by hand at first, but during the labor shortage of World War II (which also saw sugar rationing that cut out popcorn's main competitor, candy bars), mechanical harvesting made popcorn faster and easier to make.
The study, in the current issue of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, has important implications for understanding overeating and the conditions that may cause people to eat even when they are not hungry or do not like the food.
Lead author David Neal said: 'When we’ve repeatedly eaten a particular food in a particular environment, our brain comes to associate the food with that environment and makes us keep eating as long as those environmental cues are present.'
The researchers also gave popcorn to a control group watching movie clips in a meeting room, rather than in a cinema.
In the meeting room, a space not usually associated with popcorn, it mattered a lot if the popcorn tasted good. Outside of the cinema context, even habitual movie popcorn eaters ate much less stale popcorn than fresh popcorn, demonstrating the extent to which environmental cues can trigger automatic eating behaviour.
Sources: daily mail, oscars
With the arrival of talking movies and the Great Depression, popcorn suddenly exploded, so to speak. Anybody could afford it with prices as low as five cents a bag, and vendors could get a space inside or outside a theater to give moviegoers a snack on their way into the theater.
Soon popcorn became a major cash cow for theater owners, who could spend $10 for a hundred pounds of kernels and sell over a thousand bags. Most popcorn was generated by hand at first, but during the labor shortage of World War II (which also saw sugar rationing that cut out popcorn's main competitor, candy bars), mechanical harvesting made popcorn faster and easier to make.
The study, in the current issue of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, has important implications for understanding overeating and the conditions that may cause people to eat even when they are not hungry or do not like the food.
Lead author David Neal said: 'When we’ve repeatedly eaten a particular food in a particular environment, our brain comes to associate the food with that environment and makes us keep eating as long as those environmental cues are present.'
The researchers also gave popcorn to a control group watching movie clips in a meeting room, rather than in a cinema.
In the meeting room, a space not usually associated with popcorn, it mattered a lot if the popcorn tasted good. Outside of the cinema context, even habitual movie popcorn eaters ate much less stale popcorn than fresh popcorn, demonstrating the extent to which environmental cues can trigger automatic eating behaviour.
Sources: daily mail, oscars
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