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Kevin comments on Mapping Fun Theory onto the challenges of ethical foie gras - Less Wrong Discussion
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Well, there seems to be a real correlation with happy meat and taste quality, so that this farmer was decisively winning international foie gras taste competitions is probably real evidence that his geese were happier. Personally, I'd much rather be running around like mad worrying about the coming winter than being force fed. And in geese, the worry-based gorging is much more natural than the alternative of force feeding.
Visually pleasing food tastes better than visually unpleasing food; fragrant food tastes better than rank food; if ethical meant tastes better than unethical meat, it has nothing to do with the meat, and everything to do with the interconnected nature of the taster’s sensory network.
I have heard that too, but I fear it's just halo effect i.e. if you are kind to animals they will automatically taste better.
Shouldn't be too hard to test if the effect size is large enough. Next time you find yourself hosting a dinner for n meat-eating people, have an accomplice buy n/2 factory-farmed portions of meat and another n/2 ethically farmed portions and label them 1 through n at random, secretly keeping track of which is which. Then cook them all yourself, serve, and give out a survey about the quality of the food. Compare notes afterwards. If your guests protest, tell them they're eating science. Better yet, conspire with a restaurant owner if you happen to know one.
Actually, someone's probably already done this -- although most of the people with an incentive to do so in an unbiased way would also have an incentive to keep the results secret.
This would clearly come down in favor of ethical meat tasting better, but that's because ethical meat is given better food. You'd have to give the cage confined higher quality feed for the comparison to be proper.
Yes that would be interesting. What would a representative number of dinner guests be?
But it might be that people actually find ethical meat generally tastier when presented as ethical meat i.e. placebo. (I do understand that the study you suggest would be blinded).
My main message though was to draw attention to the halo effect in diet and medicine, I have encountered people for example that take for granted that antibiotic-resistant bacteria are generally stronger than it's non-antibiotic-resistant counterpart.
I think that n would need to be a lot larger than the number of people which fit in your house or a restaurant for the results not to be swamped by random noise.
ETA: A way to get more useful data from the same number of people would be asking each person to taste both kinds of meat (without telling them which is which, of course), and asking them which one tastes better.