There Isn’t Much Spam In It

1 May 2009 at 11:10 am Dick Langlois 3 comments

| Dick Langlois |

A new working paper from the Association of Wine Economists is called “Can People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food?” Here’s the abstract.

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.

Perhaps the group should broaden its name to the Association of Wine and Hors d’Oeuvre Economists.

Entry filed under: - Langlois -, Food and Agriculture.

The Ethics of Bankruptcy Cheer Up With the Depression Bundle

3 Comments Add your own

1. david | 1 May 2009 at 1:05 pm

As a lad, I recall watching Chris Elliott do the blind dog food taste test on the Letterman show. Of course, that didn’t involve pate. As far as we know, at least.
2. David G. Hoopes | 2 May 2009 at 12:30 am

Were these people who had eaten Pate’ before? You could also through some liverwurst into the mix just for fun. I’ve tasted plenty of pate’ that could easily have ended up on some white bread with mayonnaise and iceberg lettuce (like me old German mom used to give me).
3. Andre Sammartino | 3 May 2009 at 8:40 pm

I’m impressed anyone was able to get that through a university Huaman Ethics committee (if they did). Not sure “so we’re going to feed the participants dog food unwares” would hold much mustard at our school…