It was evening, we were finishing celebrating my older daughter-in-law's birthday when my nephew grabbed a plastic fork out of the pantry in order to polish off the rest of the lasagna (all the metal forks were in the sink awaiting cleaning). My wife stopped him, telling him that it would taste better with a metal fork and turned to me with a gesture that I should confirm her declaration.

"Well," I sputtered, "I'm sure that different materials emit electrons differently, so perhaps those emissions affect food strongly enough for our taste buds to detect the difference," and, to obfuscate my ignorance of the matter, let drop a few terms such as dielectric effect and brownian movement. My wife immediately caught on to the obvious evasion and, cocking one eye suspiciously, asked: "You don't know if what you're saying is accurate, do you?"

Sheepishly, I had to admit that there was something I didn't know.

But I told her I would look into it and after a little investigation I discovered that a study done a few years ago determined that different metals in cutlery do indeed affect the taste of various foods:

Science Illustrated, 15 May 2012, Does cutlery affect the flavour of food?

Photo Credit: Science Illustrated

There are many factors that can influence the flavour of a dish, including the chemical composition of the ingredients, their temperature and their aroma. Dr Zoe Laughlin and Professor Mark Miodownik, co-directors of the Institute of Making at University College London, suggest that the type of material cutlery is made of can affect the flavour of food as well.

After three years of conducting experiments on volunteers, Laughlin and Miodownik found that people could distinguish the flavours of different metals in their spoons.

...

When the spoons were paired with food, the researchers found that some flavours complimented each other, while others became unpleasant. For instance, the flavour of a lovely baked black cod was ruined when paired with a spoon coated in zinc, but copper spoons harmonised perfectly with mango chutney.

The research above showed that the metallic content of the cutlery affected the perceived taste of the food but did not study the effect of plastic cutlery on taste. For that, I located a study which revealed that yogurt tasted better from a light-weight plastic spoon than a heavier weighted one - so while my wife may be correct that different materials in spoons affect the taste, she may not be right that food taken on metal cutlery in general make all food taste better than those sampled from plastic cutlery.