Think about the last time a meal genuinely moved you. Not just satisfied, you moved me. Maybe it was a bowl of soup that tasted exactly like your grandmother used to make, and for a few quiet minutes, you were somewhere else entirely. Or maybe it was a dish so unexpected, so layered with texture and sound and scent, that you put your fork down and just sat with it. These moments are not accidents. They are the result of design, sometimes deliberate, sometimes inherited, operating on our most ancient emotional circuits.

For a long time, the worlds of food technology and product design treated eating as a largely instrumental activity: fuel goes in, energy comes out, and health metrics are optimized. But a wave of recent research is pushing hard against this reductive picture. Studies on multisensory food experiences, personalized nutrition modeling, and food-evoked nostalgia are converging on a richer truth that eating is one of the most emotionally loaded things a human being does, every single day. And crucially, this emotional loading has a structure that designers and researchers can actually work with.

That structure was mapped, with elegant precision, by Don Norman in his 2004 book Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Norman argued that human beings process designed objects and, by extension, any designed experience on three distinct but intertwined levels: the visceral (immediate, automatic, sensory response), the behavioral (usability, feedback, control), and the reflective (meaning, memory, identity). Each of these levels shapes the depth of emotional engagement a person has with what they are using or eating. What the research gathered here makes clear is that food is, perhaps more than any other daily experience, a domain where all three levels are operating simultaneously and at full intensity. Understanding this is not just intellectually interesting. It has real implications for how we design food products, dining environments, health technologies, and eating experiences of every kind.

The visceral layer: food as a full-sensory event

Norman's visceral level is the one most people intuitively understand. It is the layer of the pre-rational response:e the gasp at a beautiful plate, the saliva triggered by the smell of something roasting, and the involuntary pleasure of biting into something perfectly crisp. It happens before you think. It is, in a very literal sense, designing and working on the body directly.

Rostami et al. (2020) formalized this in their Personal Food Model (PFM), a computational framework for capturing and modeling the food-related characteristics of individual people. One of the model's foundational claims is that food enjoyment is a genuinely multimedia experience, requiring the participation of visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory senses at once.

The researchers are explicit that sensory pleasure and biological sustenance are different needs that food design must address concurrently,y a point that maps directly onto Norman's insistence that aesthetic pleasure is not a luxury bolt-on to functional design but a fundamental driver of how humans relate to any designed thing. To capture this richness, Rostami et al. (2020) propose a six-dimensional taste space that models culinary characteristics alongside personal preferences, context, and experiential history. What they are really building, in Norman's terms, is a visceral profile for each individual eater.

Wang et al. (2024) take the visceral dimension somewhere genuinely surprising. Their GustosonicSense system uses wireless earbuds to detect eating and drinking actions, such as chewing, swallowing, and sipping, via a machine learning algorithm and then triggers responsive, playful sounds in real time. The idea sounds strange until you experience what it does: by adding an auditory layer to an act we usually experience in visual and gustatory terms only, it makes eating feel new.

Participants in the in-the-wild study reported heightened sensory stimulation, a more vivid awareness of texture and pace, and increased pleasure in what was otherwise a routine meal (Wang et al., 2024). This is visceral design thinking pushed to its logical extreme,e not simply presenting food beautifully but actively intervening in the sensory field around eating to amplify hedonic response. Norman (2004) would recognize this as exactly the kind of multisensory aesthetic engineering that transforms a functional act into something people actually look forward to.

The behavioral layer: feedback, control, and the problem of eating well

Norman's behavioral level is the one designers most readily gravitate toward because it is the most legible: does it work? Does the user feel in control? Is there a feedback loop that makes the experience satisfying to repeat? In the context of eating, the behavioral level is where the hardest problems live because the gap between what people enjoy eating and what keeps them healthy is one of the defining struggles of modern life, and most existing food systems do a remarkably poor job of bridging it.

Rostami et al. (2020) diagnose this problem with clarity. The people who work on food enjoyment, the chefs, food scientists, and the commercial food industry have historically paid little attention to health. The people who work on food health,h doctors, nutritionists, and dietitians have historically treated enjoyment as secondary or even suspect. This split has produced a food environment full of things that are either pleasurable but harmful or healthy but joyless. The Personal Food Model is conceived as a computational architecture for closing this gap: a system that collects real-time biometric and contextual data (blood glucose, heart rate, location, and activity) and uses it to generate eating recommendations that genuinely optimize for both pleasure and biological well-being simultaneously. In Norman's terms, this is the aspiration of perfect behavioral design feedback loops so well-tuned that making the right choice is effortless, even pleasurable.

Wang et al. (2024) engage the behavioral level from a different angle, one that is perhaps more immediately accessible. Their GustosonicSense study found that sound-augmented eating prompted participants to slow down to actually pay attention to what they were putting in their mouths, how it felt, and what it tasted like. The authors frame this as "reflexivity," a metacognitive awareness of eating that the system's real-time feedback scaffolded almost incidentally (Wang et al., 2024). This is nudge design at its most elegant: rather than restricting choice or imposing discipline, it makes the act of eating itself more interesting, thereby naturally encouraging more mindful engagement. Norman (2004) is insistent that the best behavioral design leaves people feeling empowered rather than constrained. A person who eats more slowly and attentively because a gentle sound cue made them curious about their food is having their agency expanded, not curtailed.

There is a lesson here for health technology more broadly. Too much of it operates through restriction, guilt, and surveillance:e calorie counters that shame and diet apps that frame every meal as a risk to be managed. Behavioral design in the Normanian sense would look very different: it would work with pleasure, not against it, finding the feedback loops that make healthy eating feel like a satisfying activity rather than an ongoing act of self-denial.

The reflective layer: memory, nostalgia, and the meals that make us

Norman (2004) describes the reflective level as the deepest and most personal: the layer of self-image, cultural identity, memory, and meaning. It is the layer at which we ask not "does this feel good?" or "does this work?" but "what does this mean?" and "who does this make me?" It is also the layer that is hardest to design for deliberately, because it operates on memory and association accumulated over a lifetime. And yet it is the layer where food has perhaps its greatest power over us.

Reid et al. (2023) provide the empirical foundations for this claim in their multi-study investigation of food as a trigger of nostalgic experience. Across studies involving both mental visualization of nostalgic foods and actual consumption of food samples, they found that food is a robust and powerful elicitor of nostalgia, a producing an emotional profile similar to that triggered by music or scent, but with a more reliably positive emotional tone. The psychological functions served by food-evoked nostalgia were striking in their breadth: enhanced positive affect, elevated self-esteem, a deeper sense of social connectedness, and increased feelings of meaning in life (Reid et al., 2023). All of this from eating something familiar. This is the reflective level in full operation;n a single bite or aroma can instantaneously reconnect a person to their autobiography, to the people who fed them, and to the version of themselves they were when they first tasted it.

Simpson et al. (2024) bring a necessary human texture to these findings through a qualitative phenomenological study with Australian participants from diverse cultural backgrounds. Where Reid et al. (2023) measure nostalgia's effects, Simpson et al. (2024) let people describe them in their own words,s and what emerges is a portrait of food as an active and conscious emotional tool. Participants were not simply passively triggered by nostalgic foods; they were purposefully reaching for them when they were low, stressed, or feeling disconnected. The title of the study captures this directly: participants described nostalgic food as something that "heals" notmetaphorically butt in a genuinely felt, psychologically grounding way (Simpson et al., 2024). The researchers identified three interlocking themes: the bittersweet quality of food-evoked nostalgia (joyful and melancholic at once), the role of nostalgic food in maintaining continuity of identity and cultural connection, and the active use of familiar foods as a mood-regulation strategy across the lifespan.

What is particularly striking in Simpson et al. (2024) is how universal this pattern proved to be across different cultural backgrounds. Whether a participant was reaching for a specific South Asian dish, a European childhood comfort food, or an Australian family recipe, the underlying dynamic was the same: the food was functioning as a portal to a place, to a person, to a self. This is Norman's reflective level made tangible and edible. Designing a food experience without attending to this dimension is not a neutral omission; it is a choice to leave the most powerful emotional lever untouched.

Reid et al. (2025) take this a step further by examining the specific mechanism through which nostalgic food provides comfort. Their findings reveal a sequential pathway: eating or imagining a nostalgic food triggers nostalgia, which in turn strengthens felt social connectedness, which produces the subjective experience of comfort (Reid et al., 2025). This mediation model is important for designers because it clarifies what nostalgic food actually is;g it is not simply unlocking a private memory bank. It is re-invoking the relational bonds embedded in those memories. The warmth people feel from a childhood dish is, in a very real sense, the warmth of the people who made it for them, still present in the flavor. Designing for this,s creating food experiences that explicitly honor and activate relational meaning,g is operating at the highest register of Norman's reflective framework.

Designing across all three levels: what this means in practice

What this body of research collectively suggests is that the most resonant food experiences,s whether in a restaurant, a health app, a food product, or a technological system,m succeed precisely because they operate across all three of Norman's levels at once. Each level matters; none is sufficient alone.

The GustosonicSense system (Wang et al., 2024) is an illuminating case study in this respect. It delivers visceral stimulation through augmented sound, behavioral benefit through reflexive mindfulness, and at least the possibility of reflective engagement through its framing of eating as a playful, personal, and meaningful act rather than a mechanical one. The three design implications the authors draw from their study supporting stimulation, hedonism, and reflexivity in interactive eating systems map with remarkable neatness onto Norman's three levels. This is not a coincidence. It reflects a shared understanding, arrived at from different directions, that human engagement with experience is inherently multi-layered and that good design must honor each layer.

Rostami et al. (2020) build something similarly layered. Their personal food modell attends to sensory enjoyment (visceral), integrates biological feedback and personal context into recommendation loops (behavioral), and acknowledges,s even if it does not yet fully model it,l that food choices are woven into the fabric of who a person is, culturally and historically (reflective). The vision of a system that helps people identify the right food, in the right place, in the right situation, at the right price, is ultimately a vision of emotionally complete food design.

And the nostalgia research from the carefully controlled studies of Reid et al. (2023, 2025) to the lived-experience richness of Simpson et al. (2024) provides compelling evidence that the reflective dimension of food experience is not a niche concern, not a poetic flourish, not a marketing story. For a significant portion of people, it is the primary dimension. A meal that elevates self-esteem, restores a sense of social belonging, regulates mood, and reconnects a person to their own history is doing something that no calorie count or nutritional panel can capture. Ignoring this in the design of food experiences, food technologies, and food policy is not neutrality. It is a category error,r the mistake of treating a human phenomenon as if it were a metabolic one.

Conclusion

Norman (2004) wrote that human beings are complex creatures with both logical and emotional sides and that good design must speak to both. Food,d humble, universal, and daily,y turns out to be one of the most complete expressions of this complexity that exists. From the sharp, involuntary pleasure of a perfectly seasoned bite to the quiet flood of memory triggered by a taste you have not encountered in twenty years, eating is always visceral, behavioral, and deeply reflective at once.

The research surveyed here,e Wang et al.'s playful technology experiments, Rostami et al.'s personal food modeling, Reid et al.'s nostalgia studies, and Simpson et al.'s qualitative portraits of people healing themselves with food,d collectively builds a case that is hard to ignore: designing for food experience without emotional intelligence is designing with one hand tied behind your back. The tools are available. The frameworks exist. The human need is not only documented but also ancient. What remains is the will to take it seriously.

A meal that delights the senses, that fits seamlessly into a healthy life, and that connects a person to the people and places that have shaped them—this is not an impossible ideal. It is, if Norman's framework is right, simply what good design tastes like.

References

Norman, D. A. (2004). Emotional design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things. Basic Books.
Reid, C. A., Green, J. D., Buchmaier, S., McSween, D. K., Wildschut, T., & Sedikides, C. (2023). Food-evoked nostalgia. Cognition and Emotion, 37(1), 34–48.
Reid, C. A., Green, J. D., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., McSween, D. K., & Buchmaier, S. (2025). Food nostalgia and food comfort: The role of social connectedness. Cognition and Emotion.
Rostami, A., Pandey, V., Nag, N., Wang, V., & Jain, R. (2020). Personal food model. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM '20) (pp. 1–10). ACM.
Simpson, K., Angus, D. J., & Lee, M. F. (2024). 'Nostalgic food heals for us': A qualitative exploration of experiences with nostalgia, food, and mood. Health Promotion Journal of Australia, 35(4), 1343–1351.
Wang, Y., Obie, H. O., Li, Z., Salim, F. D., Grundy, J., & Mueller, F. F. (2024). GustosonicSense: Towards understanding the design of playful gustosonic eating experiences. arXiv.