Photo: lilivanili and shawnzamYesterday I suggested that tastes may not be stable. And then last night, I had the chance to confront the data directly; my local restaurant was serving bacon ice cream.
Bacon: Delicious! Ice cream: My favorite! The combination of bacon and ice cream: a direct threat to my views of economics.
You see, every bite was awful. It wasn’t even really good bacon; it was cheap bacon bits scattered through the ice cream. But somehow, even though each mouthful was terrible, I couldn’t stop eating it.
It’s hard to match these repeatedly bad choices with our usual models of rational choice. You could say that my choices reveal a preference for bacon ice cream, but then that makes the theory of consumer choice a tautology.
My dinner colleague Tom Miles managed just one mouthful to satisfy his curiosity before reverting to his martini to wash away the bad taste. Yes, he’s a true Chicago economist, satisfying the usual axioms. (Tom did suggest that a side of chocolate ice cream with fried eggs might have yielded enough complementary flavors to make bacon ice cream work.)
Want to try this at home? Try this recipe. But my advice: Don’t.
I think red-beet ice cream sounds better.
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Maybe bad bacon was the real problem?
I’ve had a similar experience with something that I was told were “breakfast cookies”, i.e. bacon cookies. There was something not quite right about the combination of flavors, but yet I kept eating them. And then there are McGriddles from McDonalds: a combination of bacon(or sausage), eggs and pancakes. I don’t particularly like all of the flavors together in the same bite, yet I love them separately. Taste bud specialists of the world, help us!
I would imagine you kept eating it because it is a better investment to finish your dish, even if you don’t enjoy it, than it is to throw it out (bonus for the cultural cachet you gain in conversations about terrible or exotic foods).
On a culinary note, just because this bacon ice cream was terrible doesn’t mean ALL bacon ice cream is terrible. I have made ice creams using bacon before and it turned out pretty well, although the bacon was played down. I’ve also seen Avocado-bacon ice cream that looked like it worked marvelously, although I didn’t try it. And finally, I’ve had sea salt ice cream and it was delicious, and all it would take to elevate it to bacon ice cream would be a smokiness since bacon primarily tastes of smoke and salt.
There is a restaurant in Minneapolis called the Town Talk Diner that serves a Bacon Manhattan, made with a bacon infused whiskey. An interesting and VERY popular drink.
Heston Blumenthal serves bacon&egg ice cream as part of the tasting menu at his restaurant the Fat Duck. It is quite delicious, but then Blumenthal is a master of odd flavour combinations.
The snail porridge was good too.
I’m sorry that your bacon ice cream experience was not enjoyable. In fact, I’ve made the recipe that you link to in your article, and it was one of the best ice creams I’ve ever had. Oddly enough, I hate bacon, and generally refuse to eat the stuff. I made the ice cream as a treat for a worthy bacon enthusiast, and only was convinced to try it after good reviews from the recipient.
So, does my love of bacon ice cream resolve your concern that consumer choice is a tautology? Or was my bacon ice cream just unusually delicious?
since you’re in cooking mode, you could whip this miracle up for Jim and serve it with the cupcakes!! But on second thought …
XOX
You should come to Max & Mina’s on Main Street in Flushing, Queens. They have flavors like Lox, Custard, Horseradish… and they sell, too. (Also worth watching Dan Gilbert’s TED talk on Happiness where he discusses our ability to “preview” tastes and know whether we’ll like or not.)
Let me know when you’re coming, I’ll even join you!
What does this have to do with intertemporal choice? The relevant costs and (lack of) benefits are occurring in the same period. It’s a challenge to a Benthamite view of utility, though not to the stripped-of-all-interpretation-of-preferences ordinal utility theory, which is tautological.
I think the main threat here is to the atomistic view of choice, that all agents are defined by a single unified set of preferences. Clearly there are at least two types of preferences in conflict within the author–one of them saying that he should eat things that taste good, and the other one saying he should eat bacon ice cream. This anti-atomistic interpretation at least brings us back to intertemporal choice, which is one of the main contexts contexts for exploring “multiple selves” models in economics….