Anyway, the restaurant industry has particularly exploited this psychological technique. Watch out, a mac and cheese will have "toasted bread crumbs" when what they really mean is "stale ritz crackers". Or the "summer veggie lasagna" really means they made it a week ago and its been sitting in the back of the fridge. The essence of this idea is that by describing a dish positively, the customer preps their brain to seek out and taste the things described; hence why my friend found the health precedents a turn off.
If you can't already tell, this idea drives me crazy; it means screw objectivity, all that matters is you make people perceive the food how you want them to. Being me, rather than try pulling an Inception, I stopped telling people what kind of food they were tasting, just to see what they would think. One person thought there were avocados in a mint chutney and another thought green tea with creamer was coffee. Then, I negatively precedented a peanut sauce I made (that was obviously fine) to see what feedback I'd get. Immediately the person put on a big show of "objectively" finding the problem with it and concluded that I used too much ginger (which I didn't use at all).
So, this just goes to show you, you don't need an airplane and sci-fi dream machines to change people's reality.
That's all, and I'm offering no offense, which means you can't take any : )
-John
It's a shame that we can be deceived like that sometimes. It's really true though, that so much of the time our perception of something can tend to be a result of how it's packaged. I don't think health food descriptions are a turn off though. I guess, if anything, people tend to associate "health" related foods with expense and perhaps lack of taste, which isn't true all the time. You just have to be frugal and find affordable foods and understand that not all food that is healthy tastes bad.
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