The desperate quest to make people love vegetables is reaching absurd heights.

I love Brian Wansink's book Mindless Eating- Why We Eat More than We Think We Do, so I was disappointed to read about his advice about how to gull people into eating more vegetables. "While serving your holiday dinner, don't just plop the green beans on the table. Take a cue from successful high-end restaurant menus and describe them as "succulent, spring-picked green beans." The image enhancement should encourage your family and dinner guests to eat more of them."

Oh pull the other one Dr. Wansink. Eaters aren't dumb. Perhaps yonks ago they fell for succuleet and spring picked on the shiny chain resto menu, where such "image enhancement" is still extant, but once they'd eaten the jaded veg they knew enough never to fall again.

I'm not even convinced by the games played by Dr. Wansink on those eaters in the Cornell Food and Brand Lab cafeteria.

" For example, one day we'd offer simple red beans and rice. Two weeks later, it would reappear on the menu as "Traditional Cajun Red Beans with Rice." One week you could buy the "Succulent Italian Seafood Filet" for $2.90; the next week the generic-sounding seafood filet was available at the same price.

They were the exact same items — the only difference was the addition of one or two descriptive words.

When diners were finished eating they were given a short survey asking them to rate the food. Foods with the fancy descriptive names were rated as more appealing and tastier than the identical foods with the less-enticing labels. The people eating the descriptive foods tended to think the dishes were “fantastic” or “great menu items.”

Consider two pieces of day-old chocolate cake. If one is named “chocolate cake,” and the other is named “Belgian Black Forest Double Chocolate Cake,” people will buy the second. What is especially interesting is that after trying it, people will rate the Belgian cake as tasting better than an identical piece of plain old cake. "

I find this depressing. Ok so the participants can read but I think its the death of good food if they can't taste...