Don’t you just hate it when people who don’t know what they are talking about make statements like they are THE expert? We all know this type of person. I once bought wine for a large gathering that my “expert” criticized as being “pedestrian”. Any authority she had on wine had been thrown out the window years ago when she put ice cubes in a 10 year old Napa Cabernet that I had saved for a special occasion. In her defense, she likes ice in her wine, but a wine expert, she is NOT.
The truth is most people don’t have discerning palettes. I have been trained twice as a flavor panelist. The reason I was trained twice is that I am not very good. Working for Kraft I have been part of thousands of flavor panels. A great example of the average palette not being all that good is a study Kraft did on Jell-O gelatin. If you took the color out of the different flavors of Jell-O the average person could only pick 2 of the 10 flavors correctly.
When I worked in the chocolate business we were always panel testing our chocolate. Quite often the tests came back inconclusive. Well old Joe was THE expert and the loudest and he usually drove results via the volume of his voice. Then we had some training on flavor tasting with a test at the end. Turns out old Joe didn’t know squat. To make matters worse (for chauvinistic Joe) his secretary Sharon turned out to have the most discerning palette. It drove the flavor snob nuts when decisions were being made on Sharon’s expertise.
I was once in a supper club and a food snob asked if the cook had used Hellman’s Mayonnaise in the tuna salad because she wouldn’t eat it unless it was made with Hellmann’s. When you are using mayonnaise in a complex system like tuna salad (tuna, mayo, onion, celery, mustard, relish) there in no way you could tell the difference between brands of mayonnaise in a blind panel test. The standard practice is taste three samples one being different and two being the same control with no labeling or visual difference. Trust me that the food snob could never pick a different mayo in the tuna salad in a statistically valid test. There is one difference you could tell and that is the difference between Miracle Whip and mayonnaise. In my family I grew up calling Miracle Whip mayonnaise, but mayonnaise it is not.
Another one of my pet peeves are the wine ratings advertised. The top wine ratings are not done on a blind basis. The raters are selling advertising space in their magazines. IF you think that they are not being influenced by the label on the bottle and advertising dollars the vintner spends, you are kidding yourself. The truth is that the average consumer reads the wine list from right to left. That is, they look at the price first and assume the more expensive a wine is, the better it is. As we all know this doesn’t always work, but at least the food snob thinks it does.