Pâte or dog food? Either could be yummy.
That’s because you aren’t likely to identify which is which in a blind tasting, according to a recent study.
Researchers provided a group of 18 volunteers five food samples to try in a blind taste test. Only three were able to identify the canine food.
“We have this idea in our head that dog food won’t taste good and that we would be able to identify it, but it turns out that is not the case,” said Robin Goldstein, a co-author of the study, which was published online Thursday as a working paper by the American Association of Wine Economists.
Goldstein said the tasting demonstrated that “context plays a huge role in taste and value judgment,” even though researchers warned the participants that one of the five foods they were going to taste was dog food.
The five samples came from a wide price range and were processed to all have a similar consistency. The samples were duck-liver mousse, pork-liver pâte, two imitation pâtes — pureed liverwurst and Spam — and Newman’s Own dog food.
Eight participants believed the liverwurst was the dog food, while four thought Spam was the culprit. Two people identified the high-end pâte as dog food, and one identified the mousse as dog food.
Hildegarde Heymann, a sensory scientist at the University of California, Davis who was not involved with the study, said she was surprised that so few people were able to identify the dog food.
“It is specially formulated for dogs and would likely stand out,” Heymann said.
And it did stand out: Seventy-two percent rated the dog food as the worst-tasting pâte.
