Does Food Really Taste Better When Someone Else Makes It?

Raise your hand if the following scenario rings a bell. You go to a restaurant or a friend’s house and have the most amazing sandwich/soup/salad/pasta. You fall more in love with it with every bite and resolve to make it yourself at home. You pick up all the same ingredients, prepare everything just as it was prepared the first time you ate it, sit down to eat, and … bummer. It just doesn’t taste quite as good.
Yeah — happens to me all the time, especially with salads. I mean, what could I possibly be missing? I can see all the ingredients, so it’s not like there’s some secret addition (and don’t tell me it’s love). What gives?
Turns out, there might be a couple of reasons why food that’s prepared for you tends to taste better than the food you make for yourself. First of all, according to Carnegie Mellon researchers (via Forbes), it’s because anticipation of and exposure to the food (like when you’re preparing it) decreases the urge to eat it. Even thinking about the food for a while can have this effect, and actually seeing the sandwich getting made makes it somewhat less desirable than it would be if you had just ordered it and waited for it to arrive.
But another theory came my way on Twitter from OMG Facts, and this one, despite the fact that it doesn’t have as much research behind it, makes a little more sense to me. (I mean, sometimes when I’m making a killer sammie that’s been on my mind all day, I cannot wait to bite into it and it ends up being pretty freaking awesome, you know? You know.)
That theory states that the reason food tastes better when prepared by someone else, theoretically somewhere else, is that you haven’t been exposed to the smell of the ingredients, and since smell is so closely related to taste, it stands to reason that smelling the ingredients for 10 minutes prior to chowing down would lead to a noticeable loss of, for lack of a better word, pizzazz. Your tongue isn’t surprised by anything because, basically (and here’s where it sort of ties into the above), it’s been anticipating it since you started making the dish.
Kind of gives you a new outlook on how special it is to make dinner for someone special, right?
Have you experienced this? Do the theories here make sense? And does anybody want to make me a Sparty’s Super Siesta Salad? —Kristen