Apparently Stephen Colbert was amused by our paper investigating whether people could taste the difference between pâté and dog food.

His conclusion was pretty funny.

As reported by Jerry Hirsch in today’s LA Times, my latest research article, co-authored with John Bohannon (the “Gonzo Scientist”) of Harvard University and Alexis Herschkowitsch of Fearless Critic Media, discusses the results of a blind tasting that we conducted of five puréed meat-based products. Although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste (Newell and MacFarlane multiple comparison, P<0.05), subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food.

The article has just been posted as a working paper (pdf) with the American Association of Wine Economists.