How Not to Frame Food Choices
Jul. 16th, 2022 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI don’t even remember how I stumbled across this, but when I read it, I got hives in my brain (<— obviously, not seriously. Probably).
https://www.seriouseats.com/what-are-the-best-eggs
TL;DR : author of piece has neighbor with chickens. The eggs are amazing. Then, the author scrambles them and it occurs to him, what if this is “all in my head”? What if the eggs are not really that amazing.
Now, I just want to pause here and draw attention to a crucial element of this analysis that appears to have totally escaped the author. The enjoyment of food is a multi-sensory experience. _Every restaurant knows this._ It isn’t _just_ about the taste. It’s about the smell, and what it looks like, and the environment in which it is eaten. This is _literally_ in the Bible. (Proverbs 15:17 Also, yet another example of the OT harshing on vegetarians. Really, it is absolutely _relentless_ in its harshing on vegetarians, usually with backhanded comments.) Now, you might think, sure, walkitout, that’s why he was trying to _remove_ those confusing elements. Ah, but he _did not_ remove those confusing elements. He introduced more, and when they weren’t enough, he put his thumb on the scale.
The author learned, to _absolutely no one’s surprise_, that if you scramble eggs with salt and butter and green food coloring, it is difficult to tell eggs from various sources apart. Then, the author produces this absolute _gem_ of a paragraph:
“I may or may not have even implied that I was purposely trying to trick them as I served them the eggs.”
This was enough gaslighting to convince the people now tasting side by side sunny side up eggs that they liked an egg better that they didn’t.
What do we learn from this?
First — and this is the absolutely most important thing to learn: if you are friends with a person that you think might do what this writer did, you really should not be hanging out with them. Block their number. Unfriend them on facebook. Definitely do not eat anything they cook for you. What this person did is _not_ science. That paragraph above tells you how Not Science this is, unless it is social science, and in that case, where is the ethics committee who signed off on this nonsense.
Second — you totally _can_ tell the difference between high quality ingredients in food and low quality ingredients in whole foods eaten minimally processed. Until he started gaslighting his victims, some of them were able to tell the difference all the way through butter, salt, scrambling and green food coloring. _Food coloring has flavor_. How much, and who can detect it is variable, depending on what the source of the coloring is, but this is a really well-documented fact. Most food colors are bittering, and by the time you’ve added salt, butter and a bittering agent to egg _and scrambled it_, it is going to be difficult to tell egg quality. You can use this information to your benefit if you are trying to make aging eggs palatable, but you _should not_ use this information to try to convince people that Eggs Are All the Same Really or WTF.
Actual, real science (which none of the above was! At all!) often makes choices that influence outcomes. That is unfortunate, and it qualifies the results, even when it does not outright invalidate them. We’ve got some painful public policy results from this — lots of pharma testing is done on a various limited demographic range, for example, and the results apply erratically and sometimes dangerously don’t apply at all to people not in that group. This egg thing _looks_ like it is trying to remove irrelevant cues to focus in on the taste. However, it then attempts to apply the results to anything involving eggs. Which is nuts. He knew at the beginning that his neighbor’s eggs were fantastic. He did everything in his power to conceal how fantastic those eggs were, and even then, it was not enough. He had to deploy fairly powerful psychological techniques to confuse his victims.
Don’t let a magician’s smoke and mirrors confuse you. Also, don’t hang out with assholes like this. Anyone _this_ committed to fucking with people is going to do unpredictable stuff in the future, and the green eggs is going to be the least of it.
Finally, as much as we love the RCT, it just doesn’t work for everything. Also, he didn’t double blind himself, which is a huge problem, but totally irrelevant, because he admitted to gaslighting people during the experiment.
https://www.seriouseats.com/what-are-the-best-eggs
TL;DR : author of piece has neighbor with chickens. The eggs are amazing. Then, the author scrambles them and it occurs to him, what if this is “all in my head”? What if the eggs are not really that amazing.
Now, I just want to pause here and draw attention to a crucial element of this analysis that appears to have totally escaped the author. The enjoyment of food is a multi-sensory experience. _Every restaurant knows this._ It isn’t _just_ about the taste. It’s about the smell, and what it looks like, and the environment in which it is eaten. This is _literally_ in the Bible. (Proverbs 15:17 Also, yet another example of the OT harshing on vegetarians. Really, it is absolutely _relentless_ in its harshing on vegetarians, usually with backhanded comments.) Now, you might think, sure, walkitout, that’s why he was trying to _remove_ those confusing elements. Ah, but he _did not_ remove those confusing elements. He introduced more, and when they weren’t enough, he put his thumb on the scale.
The author learned, to _absolutely no one’s surprise_, that if you scramble eggs with salt and butter and green food coloring, it is difficult to tell eggs from various sources apart. Then, the author produces this absolute _gem_ of a paragraph:
“I may or may not have even implied that I was purposely trying to trick them as I served them the eggs.”
This was enough gaslighting to convince the people now tasting side by side sunny side up eggs that they liked an egg better that they didn’t.
What do we learn from this?
First — and this is the absolutely most important thing to learn: if you are friends with a person that you think might do what this writer did, you really should not be hanging out with them. Block their number. Unfriend them on facebook. Definitely do not eat anything they cook for you. What this person did is _not_ science. That paragraph above tells you how Not Science this is, unless it is social science, and in that case, where is the ethics committee who signed off on this nonsense.
Second — you totally _can_ tell the difference between high quality ingredients in food and low quality ingredients in whole foods eaten minimally processed. Until he started gaslighting his victims, some of them were able to tell the difference all the way through butter, salt, scrambling and green food coloring. _Food coloring has flavor_. How much, and who can detect it is variable, depending on what the source of the coloring is, but this is a really well-documented fact. Most food colors are bittering, and by the time you’ve added salt, butter and a bittering agent to egg _and scrambled it_, it is going to be difficult to tell egg quality. You can use this information to your benefit if you are trying to make aging eggs palatable, but you _should not_ use this information to try to convince people that Eggs Are All the Same Really or WTF.
Actual, real science (which none of the above was! At all!) often makes choices that influence outcomes. That is unfortunate, and it qualifies the results, even when it does not outright invalidate them. We’ve got some painful public policy results from this — lots of pharma testing is done on a various limited demographic range, for example, and the results apply erratically and sometimes dangerously don’t apply at all to people not in that group. This egg thing _looks_ like it is trying to remove irrelevant cues to focus in on the taste. However, it then attempts to apply the results to anything involving eggs. Which is nuts. He knew at the beginning that his neighbor’s eggs were fantastic. He did everything in his power to conceal how fantastic those eggs were, and even then, it was not enough. He had to deploy fairly powerful psychological techniques to confuse his victims.
Don’t let a magician’s smoke and mirrors confuse you. Also, don’t hang out with assholes like this. Anyone _this_ committed to fucking with people is going to do unpredictable stuff in the future, and the green eggs is going to be the least of it.
Finally, as much as we love the RCT, it just doesn’t work for everything. Also, he didn’t double blind himself, which is a huge problem, but totally irrelevant, because he admitted to gaslighting people during the experiment.