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One bright summer day, I had lunch with two women who run a company in New Jersey called Sensory Spectrum. Their names are Gail Vance Civille and Judy Heylmun, and they taste food for a living. If Frito-Lay, for example, has a new kind of tortilla chip, they need to know where their chip prototype fits into the tortilla chip pantheon: How much of a departure is it from their other Doritos varieties? How does it compare to Cape Cod Tortilla Chips? Do they need to add, say, a bit more salt? Civille and Heylmun are the people they send their chips to.
Having lunch with professional food tasters, of course, is a tricky proposition. After much thought I decided on a restaurant called Le Madri, in downtown Manhattan, which is the kind of place where it takes five minutes to recite the list of daily specials. When I arrived, Heylmun and Civille were seated, two stylish professional women in business suits. They had already spoken to the waiter. Civille told me the specials from memory. A great deal of thought obviously went into the lunch choices. Heylmun settled on pasta preceded by roasted-pumpkin chowder with a sprinkling of celery and onion, finished with crème fraоche and bacon-braised cranberry beans garnished with diced pumpkin, fried sage, and toasted pumpkin seeds. Civille had a salad, followed by risotto with Prince Edward Island mussels and Manila clams, finished with squid ink. (At Le Madri, rare is the dish that is not “finished” in some way or adorned with some kind of “reduction.”) After we ordered, the waiter brought Heylmun a spoon for her soup. Civille held up her hand for another. “We share everything,” she informed him.
“You should see us when we go out with a group of Sensory people,” Heylmun said. “We take our bread plates and pass them around. What you get back is half your meal and a little bit of everyone else’s.”
The soup came. The two of them dug in. “Oh, it’s fabulous,” Civille said and cast her eyes heavenward. She handed me her spoon. “Taste it.” Heylmun and Civille both ate with small, quick bites, and as they ate they talked, interrupting each other like old friends, jumping from topic to topic. They were very fu
The waiter came offering dessert: crème brûlée, mango and chocolate sorbet, or strawberry saffron and sweet-corn vanilla gelato. Heylmun had the vanilla gelato and the mango sorbet but not before she thought hard about the crème brûlée. “Crème brûlée is the test of any restaurant,” she said. “It comes down to the quality of the vanilla. I don’t like my crème brûlée adulterated, because then you can’t taste through to the quality of the ingredients.” An espresso came for Civille. As she took her first sip, an almost imperceptible wince crossed her face. “It’s good, not great,” she said. “It’s missing the whole winey texture. It’s a little too woody.”
Heylmun then started talking about “rework,” which is the practice in some food factories of recycling leftover or rejected ingredients from one product batch into another product batch. “Give me some cookies and crackers,” she said, “and I can tell you not only what factory they came from but what rework they were using.” Civille jumped in. Just the previous night, she said, she had eaten two cookies—and here she named two prominent brands. “I could taste the rework,” she said and made another face. “We’ve spent years and years developing these skills,” she went on. “Twenty years. It’s like medical training. You do your internship, and then you become a resident. And you do it and do it until you can look at something and say in a very objective way how sweet it is, how bitter it is, how caramelized it is, how much citrus character there is—and in terms of the citrus, this much lemon, this much lime, this much grapefruit, this much orange.”
Heylmun and Civille, in other words, are experts. Would they get fooled by the Pepsi Challenge? Of course not. Nor would they be led astray by the packaging for Christian Brothers, or be as easily confused by the difference between something they truly don’t like and something they simply find unusual. The gift of their expertise is that it allows them to have a much better understanding of what goes on behind the locked door of their unconscious. This is the last and most important lesson of the Ke
Jonathan Schooler—whom I introduced in the previous chapter—once did an experiment with Timothy Wilson that beautifully illustrates this difference. It involved strawberry jam. Consumer Reports put together a panel of food experts and had them rank forty-four different brands of strawberry jam from top to bottom according to very specific measures of texture and taste. Wilson and Schooler took the first-, eleventh-, twenty-fourth-, thirty-second-, and forty-fourth-ranking jams—Knott’s Berry Farm, Alpha Beta, Featherweight, Acme, and Sorrell Ridge—and gave them to a group of college students. Their question was, how close would the students’ rankings come to the experts? The answer is, pretty close. The students put Knott’s Berry Farm second and Alpha Beta first (reversing the order of the first two jams). The experts and the students both agreed that Featherweight was number three. And, like the experts, the students thought that Acme and Sorrell Ridge were markedly inferior to the others, although the experts thought Sorrell Ridge was worse than Acme, while the students had the order the other way around. Scientists use something called a correlation to measure how closely one factor predicts another, and overall, the students’ ratings correlated with the experts’ ratings by .55, which is quite a high correlation. What this says, in other words, is that our jam reactions are quite good: even those of us who aren’t jam experts know good jam when we taste it.
But what would happen if I were to give you a questio