Eat, Drink, and be Monitored

Ponca City, We Love You writes "A new restaurant has opened at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, fitted with a control center and two dozen hidden cameras devoted to exploring the question of what makes people eat and drink the way they do. Over the next 10 years, a team of more than 20 scientists will use the research facility to watch how people walk through the restaurant, what food catches their eye, whether they always sit at the same table and how much food they throw away. Researchers will examine environmental influences on eating behavior by making small changes in the color of the lights, in accompanying sounds, in the scents or the furniture. "We want to find out what influences people: colors, taste, personnel," said one researcher. "This restaurant is a playground of possibilities. We can ask the staff to be less friendly and visible or the reverse." University staff who want to eat at the new restaurant will have to sign a consent form agreeing to be watched."

Comments

on privacy

[j_166]

I don't really see the privacy implications. Presumably, those going to this research facility to eat know that its a research facility. They have to sign a consent form. The title of the article should be "Eat, Drink, and Participate in Food Science Research", but I guess "Eat, Drink, and Be Monitored" just sounds more Orwellian.

Re:on privacy

[yootje]

Disclaimer: I am Dutch ;) First off, I don't think it has anything to do with religion, people just like to watch people and gossip about it, especially in small communities. You almost don't see this behaviour in the cities and in small towns it's reducing, I think (I live in a city myself). You can also look at this in an other perspective: Maybe the open curtains say: we have nothing to hide, look at us? Or maybe people just like to watch birds. And I don't what you are trying to say about the "doe normaal"-saying: when someone wants to kick someone's ass: that's not conforming to "morally & socially" approved behaviour, is it wrong to say "please act normal" in that situation? Or when someone is shouting through the streets? Or when someone says he likes to have sex with dead chickens?

if you know

[Turn-X Alphonse]

But if you know you're being watched won't it effect how you act?

If that woman knows someone is watching her she might resist eating that extra few fries, but if she isn't she might just go get another bag cause she's had a shitty day.

Re:if you know

[Zironic]

It's rather irrelevant though.

What they want to know isn't "How do you eat"

But "How does your eating change if we do X and Y"

So how you're eating when you're being watched will become the baseline they're doing experiments on seeing how it changed by changing variables.

In response to the "wasteofmoney" tag

[QuantumFTL]

No this isn't research into space, into sexy supercomputing clusters, or other far-flung reaches of technology. This is research into basic elements of human behavior - indeed elements with a very strong environmental impact. Technology cannot solve all of our problems, it cannot solve the human condition. Part of fixing the ills in our society (and those we inflict on our supporting biosphere) is to learn how to subconsciously promote better behavior on the part of everyone. Small changes, done across the board, can make great gains - and much of these benefits "stack" with benefits from new technology.

So don't knock this research until you've looked at the numbers - according to this article in 1997, Americans threw away (for one reason or another) 27% of edible food, that's 96 *billion* pounds, which is ~400 pounds per person, per year! Sure, this occurs at many stages, but each stage can be improved.

I am sure that these tapes will be studied years later by linguists, behaviorists, game theorists, businessmen and efficiency specialists. Besides, with research, we never know what we're going to learn until we try.