Things I Like - Food

While it might look like this post is going to be about party food, don’t hold your breath looking for any recipes. Only one of the three items above is something you might find at a cocktail or dinner party. The other two are dog food. Can you pick out the one that doesn't belong in Fido's dish?

Don't be too hard on yourself if you aren’t sure – neither could 83% of the participants in a study conducted by John Bohannon, Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch for the American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE) and they were actually tasting the samples. (I have so many questions. Most importantly, what is a wine economist?)

As reported in their paper ‘Can People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food?’ the authors hypothesized:

Considering the similarity of its ingredients, canned dog food could be a suitable and inexpensive substitute for pâté or processed blended meat products such as Spam or liverwurst…[upon a blind tasting] if the dog food were ranked favorably relative to human comestible goods with similar ingredients, it should be considered fit for human consumption.

In order to test this idea, they conducted a double-blind taste test. 4 blended meat products (duck liver mousse, pork liver pâté, supermarket liverwurst, and Spam) and a can of turkey-chicken dog food were selected. Each of the items was pulsed in a food processor to the consistency of mousse, dished out into serving bowls, garnished with parsley and chilled.

The results were interesting - although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste, only 3 of 18 tasters correctly identified the dog food. In fact, 44% of the test group thought that the liverwurst was the dog food.

The authors concluded:

Even with the benefits of added salt, a smooth texture, and attractive presentation, canned dog food is unpalatable compared to a range of similar blended meat products…We conclude that, although human beings do not enjoy
eating dog food, they are also not able to distinguish its flavor profile from other meat-based products that are intended for human consumption.

Thank goodness for that, imagine if they had found differently. Trendy hostesses everywhere would be serving dog food as canapés. Although if you're a big fan of liverwurst it seems that you can lower your grocery bill and improve your dining experience by switching to canned dog food. I believe the brand was Newman's Own.

Btw, the 1st photo is chicken-liver pâté, the other two are organic dog food and a doggie sausage snack.

via Marginal Revolution