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
