GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Fuchsia Dunlop, a favourite food writer, has just put together a wonderful article in the Financial Times about the impact of our cutlery on the way our food tastes.

This is a must-read for flavour and aromas fans, and to whet your appetite, here’s part of it: “The sight of 15 adults sucking their spoons like babies was an unusual start to a dinner party, but they had surprisingly different flavours. Copper and zinc were bold and assertive, with bitter, metallic tastes; the copper spoons even smelt metallic as they gently oxidised in the air. The silver spoon, despite its beauty, tasted dull in comparison, while the stainless steel had a faintly metallic flavour that is normally overlooked. As Miodownik pointed out, we were not just tasting the spoons but actually eating them, because with each lick we were consuming ‘perhaps a hundred billion atoms’.”

Next: try chocolate spoons, please

I do think the people she quotes at the end should pay a visit to Switzerland, where many of us already routinely use high quality chocolate spoons. My favourite supplier: La cuillère suisse, mmmm.