So Pizza Hut has done the unthinkable and come up with an app that claims it can predict what food you want by tracking subconscious clues and monitoring your eye movement as you scan various ingredients.
Yes, they’ve finally put a stop to your annoying mate taking four hours to decide what pizza she wants while you sit and listen to your own stomach playing an orchestral score that’s heavy on drums and makes you want to eat the table.
It takes 2.5 seconds for the app to determine what ingredients you’ve lingered on the longest, and a powerful algorithm presents your ultimate pizza choice in no more than a few further seconds, so the fannying around really is kept down to a minimum.
With 4,896 different possible combinations, we wanted to see just how accurate this badboy really is, so decided to put it to the ultimate test and get someone who can’t eat 90 per cent of the menu to try it out. As in, a vegetarian. As in, me.
Thinking about it, we could have been a lot meaner and got a vegan to do it – vegetarians are fairly common, and Pizza Hut has an excellent range of veggie options. Or used someone who is dairy free. Or only eats melons.
Anyway, the process was simple and totally terrifying in a robots-are-going-to-take-over-the-world way: the screen calibrates your eye movement, showing a little *Pizza Hut *logo wherever you look, and making you feel like it knows the weird dream you had last night where Selma Blair tried to cop off with your dad.
Then, an array of different ingredients set in a grid – onions, chorizo, sweetcorn, cheese and loads more – is displayed for just 2.5 seconds. And that’s it. Done! If going by the subconscious menu, I apparently would have to order the Chicken Bacon Club pizza.
READ MORE: There’s A New Bacon Lube Out, So We Got A Vegetarian To Test It Out
‘Haha, see you secretly wish you weren’t a vegetarian and miss the salty taste of bacon!’ I hear everyone crying, silently. But actually I’ve been a veggie since birth because I actively despise meat, and only know bacon is salty because I once overheard someone saying they like bacon because, and I quote, ‘It’s salty’.
I tried again and this time got a different result: The Supreme, which involves chicken, beef and indeed pepperoni. So does this mean it’s a load of shit, and doesn’t work? Not at all.
‘We have quite an extensive subconscious relationship with our food and it’s certainly the case psychologically that “we eat with our eyes”. Quick brain responses are probably hardwired to our evolutionary survival reflex,’ explains Dr Simon Moore, a chartered psychologist. ‘We are automatically drawn to foods that give us more nutrition – it is a safety mechanism we’ve inherited from primitive man that still plays a role in our subconscious decision-making, even when we might be choosing pizza!’
Suddenly something clicked: even though I hate meat on a mouth-level, my brain is yelling out for protein because over the last week I’ve really neglected my usual bean, egg and quorn binges, thanks to being either ill with a cold (first part of the week, couldn’t be arsed eating anything that wasn’t mashed potato) and drunk (have only eaten bread and cheese in as many forms as you can imagine). Which, in turn, means that this subconscious menu is actually way more wise than my own brain (for lunch I just had a cheese sandwich which, again, has barely any protein).
No wonder my mind is commanding I put beef on my pizza. Even if my stomach is, at the same time, cowering in fear and rooting through its tool box to see if it has anything that’ll deal with a bit of cow after years of vegetables. Who am I kidding – after years of just bread and cheese in a variety of styles.
It’s still in the trial stages, having only been developed over the last six months, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens when the subconscious pizza menu inevitably hits the restaurants.
It worked on my ravenous meat-eating colleagues, so just don’t expect to get the answer you want if you’ve got weird dietary requirements. Which is totally fair enough.
PS. Here's a totally banging veggie pizza recipe you can make all by your very self.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.