Eat your own dog food pâté
Tim Finin, 8:10pm 4 May 2009
This one is going into the ebiquity research archives.
John Bohannon, Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch, Can People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food?, American Association of Wine Economists, AAWE Working Paper No. 36, April 2009.
“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. However, the social stigma associated with the human consumption of pet food makes an unbiased comparison challenging. To prevent bias, Newman’s Own dog food was prepared with a food processor to have the texture and appearance of a liver mousse. In a double-blind test, subjects were presented with five unlabeled blended meat products, one of which was the prepared dog food. After ranking the samples on the basis of taste, subjects were challenged to identify which of the five was dog food. Although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste (Newell and MacFarlane multiple comparison, P<0.05), subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food.”
It puts a new spin on the concept of eating your own dog food.
Ebiquity Blog
May 5th, 2009 at 7:47 am
Hm, who were the test subjects, and what kind of pate? Those would be big questions… the pate sold down at the local Giant or Food Shoppers Warehouse is probably in reality little better than the dog food, its more of a gourmet item. Also, perhaps the people have less than refined palettes or had never had pate and were relying completely on texture when gauging things.
They did something like this with a moderately priced champagne and don perignon, and people couldn’t tell the difference. Or take beer for example. Who here liked beer the first time they tried it, vs enjoys the flavor now and can appreciate the difference between budweiser and a belgian ale?
Still, its always funny to see how much perception influences us; obviously if you’re one of those people who isn’t a wine snob, it’d be a good thing to know shelling out an extra $100 will get you nothing more than the ability to be a regular snob by saying (or thinking) “I spent over $100 on this”
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:40 am
Now that’s one to remember! @Anonymous: I agree. Who were the tasters? I’d like to think I could spot the difference pretty clearly, but maybe not. Dog food keeps getting better with more high-end ingredients so who knows.