Psychology + Food = Dinner with Dr Wansink at U of I

Hi,

Sometime ago I wrote a post Psychology + Food = Let the mind games begin!!!

I contacted Dr. Wansink recently who indicated their experimental restaurant is evaluating food rather than the psyche games. Nonetheless he and his wife agreed to have dinner with us on April 29th in Champaign in their experimental restaurant, costing about $20 each without tax and tip. Presently, Trixie Pea, Pigmon, Soupcon and her boyfriend and I plan to drive down to Champaign.

Some may go on to Owensboro, KY, though dining in Champaign is not contingent in joining in that trip.

I suggest coming earlier in the day to meet up with Champaign local poster Adam Stephanides for a short BBQ crawl. For those staying the night and desiring late night entertainment should check the website http://www.openingbands.com covers the C-U music scene, so you might want to check them out as the time approaches," according to Adam.

Let me know if you want to join us.

Regards,

Hi,

I plan to come around noon to Champaign to spend the afternoon checking out BBQ and Jarlings soft custard with Adam Stephanides. We plan to cover Little Porgy's, Old Fashioned Donut and BBQ, Jackson's Ribs & Tips and Po' Boys BBQ, which doesn't open until 5:30 PM. If anyone wants to drive down with me to please advise.

Our reservations are at 6:30 at the 'Spice Box,' located on the University of Illinois Campus at:

Bevier Hall
905 South Goodwin Avenue
Room 286
Champaign, IL
217/333-6520

This is a red brick administrative and classroom building associated with ACES (Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences). There is some construction of the building with two entrances open and easy to access to our destination.

We will also meet Jill North who was Dr. Wansink's coauthor on those restaurant articles and who is in charge of the fine dining kitchen.

Afterwards, we've been invited for dessert and wine at Brian Wansink's home. As I stated earlier, this is a last hurrah as Brian is moving to Cornell in early May.

I expect this to be an evening of interesting discussion. If anyone else cares to join us, then speak up now!

Regards,

Locations potentially visiting on Friday afternoon:

Delights Frozen Yogurt & Ice Cream (MAYBE)
629 East Green Street
Champaign, IL 61820
217-352-2697

Hickory River Smokehouse Inc (MAYBE)
1606 Willow View Road
Urbana, IL 61802
217-239-2472
http://www.hickoryriver.com/

Jackson's Ribs-N-Tips Restaurant & Lounge
116 North 1st Street
Champaign, IL 61820
217-355-2916

Jarlings Custard Cup
309 West Kirby
Champaign, IL 61826
217-352-2273

Lil Porgy's Bar-B-Que
1917 West Springfield Avenue
Champaign, IL 61821
217-398-6811

Lil Porgy's Bar-B-Que
101 West University Avenue
Urbana, IL 61801
217-367-1018

PO Boy's Bar-B-Que
58 East Columbia Avenue
Champaign, IL 61820
217-352-5521

Ye Olde Donut Shop
60 East Green Street
Champaign, IL 61820
217-359-3311

We will visit one or the other Lil'Porgy's, but not both. Hickory River Smokehouse is a franchise originating in Champaign-Urbana, if there is time available we'll check it out.

Regards,

Did you ever consider trying Longhorn Smokehouse? They make a really good brisket in Urbana....around Cunningham and Kerr...

Longhorn Smokehouse changed its name to Hickory River.

We never provided a report on our trip to Champaign from last week. The final group included Cathy2, Adam, Pigmon, Trixie-Pea, and me.

For me the highpoint of the visit was not the food, but our discussion with Brian Wansink. As noted, Dr. Wansink is leaving for Cornell this summer. This is a major loss for our friends at U of I. As he tells us, UC Davis, Cornell, and Illinois are the top schools for serious reserch in food science. Dr. Wansink's home discipline is marketing, and this becomes clear as his core interest is how the setting and priming cues permit people to think about and appreciate food. For instance he showed us his "refilling" soup bowls (something out of Candid Camera or out of Rube Goldberg). You are served tomato soup (an opaque soup so you can't see the bottom of the bowl) and find that no matter how much you eat, there is still soup in the bowl. Those who are served soup in this way eat a considerable amount more than those who are not (but I was surprised that the amount was only about a third more, IIRC). His experiments with wine labelling (asking subjects to judge North Dakota wines as opposed to the same California wine) also demonstrates the importance of priming. What we think we are eating determines how much we will eat and how much we will appreciate what we eat.

All of this is important to us in that it raises the question of whether we enjoy the restaurants that are frequently praised because of their ambiance of authenticity or because of the qualities of the food. Would we choose fried chicken at Evanston Chicken Shack over Popeye's, say, if it were a blind tasting. Of course, we shouldn't push this too far - taste cannot be totally overwhelmed by expectations, but it should give us pause.

My sense was that Dr. Wansink is decamping for the food program at Cornell, because of the unwillingness of Illinois to permit his experients in the University's training restaurant, which is a pity, although perhaps the residents of C-U can breathe easier.

We were particularly grateful that Dr. W shared the evening with us (ending with wine and dessert at his home - and offering us lodging!). Not only was he on crutches, but the Wansinks are selling their home and, I believe, had an Open House the next day. What a guy! The best food of the day was without question the Almond Pie of Mrs. W., a Cordon Bleu-trained chef. It was superb. What a gal!

The food at the U of I student restaurant was well-presented and speaks well for the culinary competency of late-teen Mid-Americans.

Other than this, my favorite food of the day (aside from perfectly fried shrimp at Frank's Shrimp House in Beverly) was BBQ tips at Lil' Porgy's in Champaign. They were a little tough, but the sauce was nicely spiced, and the steak potatoes were good when hot.

Thank you, Cathy, for arranging this road trip. And godspeed to Dr. and Mrs. W.

Hi,

I edited the announcement post and left in all the salient points. I will hopefully write up my impressions sooner rather than later!

I appreciate the consideration, though I also offer thanks to Adam Stephanides who very nicely escorted us all over Champaign Urbana. Dr. Wansink was quite impressed we found PO Boy's Bar-B-Que and that it was open! Following our lead, he was planning to visit Jackson's Ribs-N-Tips Restaurant & Lounge, which he'd never heard of, before leaving town.

Dr. Wansink will likely be visiting Kendall College later this year. I hope he can lecture the Roundtable, then we can take him on a food crawl.

Regards,

GAF wrote: All of this is important to us in that it raises the question of whether we enjoy the restaurants that are frequently praised because of their ambiance of authenticity or because of the qualities of the food.

According to research done by the National Restaurant Association, the most important restaurant customer satisfaction metrics, in order of declining importance, are:
1. Restrooms
2. Ambience
3. Service
4. Food

Real research results. That said, I can't blame anyone for wanting to be at Cornell -- a nice place to be indeed, and very nice restrooms.

Excellent article in today's Times on Dr. Wansink (who has apparently moved on from C-U)


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/dining/11snac.html?ref=dining

HI,

We met him on his last days at C-U, before moving on to Cornell. Our visit there is one of my posts I have never finished writing. Maybe I will get to this finally because it was a very interesting experience.

Thanks for highlighting the article on Brian.

Regards,

Cathy2 wrote:HI,

We met him on his last days at C-U, before moving on to Cornell. Our visit there is one of my posts I have never finished writing. Maybe I will get to this finally because it was a very interesting experience.

Thanks for highlighting the article on Brian.

Regards,

I look forward to that. I remember and quote some of his findings regularly, both ones you have shared and from reading other things he wrote.

Of course I am above being influenced by the restrooms, or the provenance of the wine and am able to focus solely on what is on the plate, but it is useful to understand how those with less focus and self-awareness can be swayed .

For what it's worth, I happened to catch Dr. Wansink on the Sunday Today show while I was visiting my mom this weekend. He was promoting his new book, Mindless Eating.

It was very routine, they basically moved down a table with little settings and revealed a brief tidbit about each. I can't actually recall any of them.

But good for him for getting the exposure.

Sorry, apparently Today show viewers are not the demographic who post clips of everything to YouTube!

Hi,

Five and half years may be a record for how long it took to post an event report.

In this time, Brian Wansink and his wife have had at least one child. Brian moved on to Cornell and spent a year as a Presidential appointment to be the Executive Director for USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP) -- it's the group in charge of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines and the Food Guide Pyramid (MyPyramid).

Reading back old e-mails this evening, yes I keep almost all of them, it refreshed my memory. When we went to U of I, I was hoping to be part of one of those behavior studies. Maybe I was and never detected it, though I think not. We learned from Brian the school had frowned upon these behavior studies at the school's fine dining kitchen restaurant.

What surprised me, and I am kicking myself this evening, he had proposed to cook dinner at his home. While I am sure I declined to save him extra work, it sure seems stupid now to have declined to eat instead at U of I's fine dining kitchen restaurant. Modesty has a price.

Brian Wansink introduced us to Jill North, his co-author on the bottomless soup bowl and other papers, who was then head of fine dining. He was very complimentary of her efforts to these studies.


4-29-05-010 Jill North and Brian Wansink by cal222, on Flickr

After dinner, we went to his home for dessert and wine. In the garage, he kept the endless soup bowl contraption. When a diner came to the table set with two bowls and a soup pot, the bowls were already filled with soup.


4-29-05-052 table set by cal222, on Flickr

Each bowl had a hole to convey more soup into it.


4-29-05-047 Bowl with hole by cal222, on Flickr

The soup pot had a hole to drain soup from.


4-29-05-050 soup pot dispenser by cal222, on Flickr

Connecting pot to bowl were tubes with a shut-off valve in between.


4-29-05 Soup pot coupler by cal222, on Flickr


4-29-05-046 bowl with coupler by cal222, on Flickr


4-29-05-002 under table control by cal222, on Flickr

Wikipedia wrote:Brian Wansink is a 2007 recipient of the Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition. The Ig Nobel prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prize and are awarded for achievements (or sometimes veiled criticisms thereof) that "first make people laugh, and then make them think." Wansink's award was issued for investigating people's appetite for mindless eating by secretly feeding them a self-refilling bowl of soup. It has come to be known as the Bottomless Bowl Principle.[24]

You have to wonder if this garage kept set-up will someday be in the collection of the Smithsonian's American History Museum. I hope it didn't go to the curb when he moved.

It was quite a memorable evening.

Regards,

A Cornell Scientist’s Downfall

The irreproducibility crisis cost Brian Wansink his job. Over a 25-year career, Mr. Wansink developed an international reputation as an expert on eating behavior. He was the main popularizer of the notion that large portions lead inevitably to overeating. But Mr. Wansink resigned last week as head of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University and professor at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business after an investigative faculty committee found he had committed a litany of academic breaches: “misreporting of research data, problematic statistical techniques, failure to properly document and preserve research results” and more.

This piece in the print Wall Street Journal today caught my attention. A sample of other reports that are not behind pay walls.

Atlantic A Credibility Crisis in Food Science

Mother Jones This Cornell Food Researcher Has Had 13 Papers Retracted. How Were They Published in the First Place?

NPR The Salt Cornell Food Researcher's Downfall Raises Larger Questions For Science

Been following/being influenced by him for yrs. Sad.

I read all the articles linked to above and many that they link to. They highlight a troubling issue that affects not only food science but arguably every hard and soft scientific and engineering discipline. People publish an awful lot of sloppy statistics, either as a result of their motivation to find what they want to find or just simply their innocent ignorance of the requirements of rigorous statistical analysis. It got to the point long ago that I cringe whenever I read about analysis results being reported with p values. Such results are descriptive but, by definition, posteriori, and, as the cited articles show, deserving of skepticism, given the prevalence of p hacking, whether unscrupulously or naively motivated. If you really want me to believe you, establish an a priori criterion (e.g., an alpha value such as 0.05 for a t-test or paired t-test) and stick to it.

Don't even get me started about people performing the wrong type of statistical test, i.e., the one type they know how to do or the one they copied from someone else who seemed to know what to do, rather than the type that is appropriate for the data and the hypothesis they are trying to test.

Another pet peeve of mine is when multiple conclusions are reported for a single data set based on multiple statistical tests conducted at a given confidence level. There are robust ways (not usually taught in the first or even second college statistics course, and I am referring to those beyond first-semester Tukey tests, by the way) for conducting multiple statistical tests and for determining what overall confidence level can be attributed to the results of multiple tests at any given level of confidence for a single data set. As a simple example, four separate statistical tests conducted at a 95% confidence level have an overall simultaneous confidence level of not 95% but rather 95% to the fourth power = 81%. If you want to have 95% confidence in the results of four independent statistical tests at the same time, you have to conduct those tests at individual confidence levels of 98.75%. This is a mistake that I have witnessed often and believe that many researchers in many fields make routinely out of ignorance of correct statistical practices rather than an intent to deceive.

I remember a meeting with an influential research sponsor who took issue, fiercely, with our commenting on several points on which the data did not support a conclusion. "Don't tell me what you don't know," I remember him saying, "tell me what you know!" That would make for a better one-paragraph press release, but, sorry, no, that's not how hypothesis testing works. Just because something can't be proven with the data available doesn't mean for sure that it couldn't be proven with other data. So when a hypothesis fails a statistical test, all we can say in good conscience is what we can't prove, not that we've proved the opposite. This is hard, though, for the public and the media to grasp.

As a result, I'm a little troubled by the conclusion reached by the author of the Mother Jones article. The real solution is not to just be more skeptical of research findings. At first, that seems like a step in the right direction, but upon reflection, it strikes me that it's only marginally less random than being no less skeptical of research findings. The real solution is to educate yourself better, or seek out better advice, about what constitutes rigorous statistical analysis and how to recognize signs of analysis techniques and reporting methods that are not rigorous. I don't hold my breath, however, about the public or the media (other than the 538 blog, for example) wanting to go to that trouble.

Hi,

I was really glad to offer this opportunity for some of us to interact with Dr. Wansink.

I hope his career can recover from this.

Regards,
Cathy2

Katie wrote:I read all the articles linked to above and many that they link to. They highlight a troubling issue that affects not only food science but arguably every hard and soft scientific and engineering discipline. People publish an awful lot of sloppy statistics, either as a result of their motivation to find what they want to find or just simply their innocent ignorance of the requirements of rigorous statistical analysis. It got to the point long ago that I cringe whenever I read about analysis results being reported with p values. Such results are descriptive but, by definition, posteriori, and, as the cited articles show, deserving of skepticism, given the prevalence of p hacking, whether unscrupulously or naively motivated. If you really want me to believe you, establish an a priori criterion (e.g., an alpha value such as 0.05 for a t-test or paired t-test) and stick to it.

Don't even get me started about people performing the wrong type of statistical test, i.e., the one type they know how to do or the one they copied from someone else who seemed to know what to do, rather than the type that is appropriate for the data and the hypothesis they are trying to test.

Another pet peeve of mine is when multiple conclusions are reported for a single data set based on multiple statistical tests conducted at a given confidence level. There are robust ways (not usually taught in the first or even second college statistics course, and I am referring to those beyond first-semester Tukey tests, by the way) for conducting multiple statistical tests and for determining what overall confidence level can be attributed to the results of multiple tests at any given level of confidence for a single data set. As a simple example, four separate statistical tests conducted at a 95% confidence level have an overall simultaneous confidence level of not 95% but rather 95% to the fourth power = 81%. If you want to have 95% confidence in the results of four independent statistical tests at the same time, you have to conduct those tests at individual confidence levels of 98.75%. This is a mistake that I have witnessed often and believe that many researchers in many fields make routinely out of ignorance of correct statistical practices rather than an intent to deceive.

I remember a meeting with an influential research sponsor who took issue, fiercely, with our commenting on several points on which the data did not support a conclusion. "Don't tell me what you don't know," I remember him saying, "tell me what you know!" That would make for a better one-paragraph press release, but, sorry, no, that's not how hypothesis testing works. Just because something can't be proven with the data available doesn't mean for sure that it couldn't be proven with other data. So when a hypothesis fails a statistical test, all we can say in good conscience is what we can't prove, not that we've proved the opposite. This is hard, though, for the public and the media to grasp.

As a result, I'm a little troubled by the conclusion reached by the author of the Mother Jones article. The real solution is not to just be more skeptical of research findings. At first, that seems like a step in the right direction, but upon reflection, it strikes me that it's only marginally less random than being no less skeptical of research findings. The real solution is to educate yourself better, or seek out better advice, about what constitutes rigorous statistical analysis and how to recognize signs of analysis techniques and reporting methods that are not rigorous. I don't hold my breath, however, about the public or the media (other than the 538 blog, for example) wanting to go to that trouble.

What is this, an ASA forum?

Ha ha, no, but considering how we're regularly treated to research results on what eating habits are good or bad for us, I was thinking that a little commentary on the underlying statistics wouldn't be unwelcome. I hope I made it sufficiently clear that I don't think that every researcher whose statistics don't bear up under scrutiny is necessarily unscrupulous. Much more often, it's because of people, even professional researchers, just not having a good enough grasp of statistics. That said, it might behoove us all to be a little more careful about who we call an "expert".

HI,

From what I could detect during our visit years ago, there was professional jealousy related to Wansink and his efforts.

"I contacted Dr. Wansink recently who indicated their experimental restaurant is evaluating food rather than the psyche games." This was a policy change from the top, because it was not liked by the faculty as I recall.

Politics is in academia, where sometimes interpretations can influenced by whether your efforts are highly regarded or not.

Regards,
Cathy2

As the saying goes about politics in academia, the fights are so fierce because the stakes are so small.

Good call Katie--that quote, IIRC, was about Pres. Wilson, when someone asked how he could be such a good political infighter when his only relevant experience was as a university president!

Your statistical review is welcomed: it's clear, bang on, and useful. We used to call Wansink's 'method' "data dredging." Long ago, I was a junior rocket scientist on the Minuteman Project at Aerojet, doing statistical analysis all the day long. With that experience, I soon learned that nutrition 'science' ain't. It's black art. Indeed, I suspect that the animal body has so many interconnected homeostatic systems that analytical methods that work in simpler, non-homeostatic systems, are simply incapable of resolving the questions we want resolved in nutrition. In the end, Feinstein's long ago Science article still sets the tone: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1702542?origin=JSTOR-pdf&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Geo

Re "It's just politics".

Sorry, no.

Wansink repeatedly falsified data. When found out, he lied, lied, and lied some more. E-mails show that the deceptions were deliberate, as opposed to errors. His downfall was long in coming and well deserved.