The marketing of food

We had an excellent dish (Pasta Rarus) served up in Hollywood the other evening. It was a great meal that my family talked about for days. I managed to get the ingredients….here they are (make sure you read them carefully) :

Pasta Rarus

1 - bag (16 oz) of fresh capellini pasta
3 - elephant garlic cloves
1 - medium yellow onion bulb with sprout
2 - vine ripe tomatoes with core and peel
1 - organic spinach and feta sausage
8 - shitake mushrooms (rolled and aged)
4 oz extra rich cream
3 oz Belgium beer (hand made by monks)
.3 oz of capers
essence of garlic green
ground sea salt
fresh cracked black and red pepper
fresh oregano

Reader: Let me interject a few quick questions…Does that sound good to you after reading through the ingredients? How much would you pay? For the record, I paid about 25 clams for mine. Is that worth it to you?Keep in mind that the level of marketing diction as it pertains to food has reached new heights in this new millennium. The restaurant menu has become so much more than a list of what’s being served. It has become a key marking tool for many. Some menus take the opportunity to provide a little history about the brand, while others go into great detail around what goes into each dish. We have heard garlic a million times, but when you hear about the ‘essence of garlic green’ that sounds special and even a bit exotic.

Reader: a quick tip – essence is a GREAT word for your marketing toolkit. While we are being exposed to detailed descriptions of food, our brains register the qualities associated with that imagery and instruct the saliva glands underneath our tongue to kick in…hence the phrase ‘mouth watering’. Because this is a subconscious reaction, food does not need to be present for this to happen. Reading and hearing about the dish cause similar results - an effect that is Pavlovian at its core…the only difference being that the bell has been replaced with words, and it is our mouth, instead of a dog’s, that waters. That’s the power of words…if composed correctly they can lead the mind down a path that appears much grander that it actually is. Reader: as you can imagine, this effect can also be achieved with visuals and smells. The idea being…conduct an individual’s senses with the right set of stimuli, and they will open their pocket books with a smile on their face.

Back to the recipe. Do you remember how you felt while reading through it? Were your taste buds break dancing in celebration, or did you just skip the reading all together and question what a recipe was doing in this blog? Would you have paid as much as I did? Are you thinking of making the dish? If you are as excited as I was, print out the recipe, stop reading and start the cooking right now.If you are a little curious…let me fill you in on a bit more of the back story of how the dish was really put together…

My daughter, Leonie, and I arrived home late from the museum and we needed to eat something quickly. Leonie said that she wanted pasta, so I searched for whatever was left in the refrigerator (which wasn’t much). I found a leftover cooked sausage from two nights before, some old garlic and onions, capers, a half carton of cream, some tomatoes, and a package of shitake mushrooms that had to go. I was lucky that we still had some pasta tucked away – capellini and lasagna…I thought capellini would work better. We sat down to eat the dish soon after, and to our surprise the food turned out to be fantastic! While eating dinner, I thought about how the dish would be presented if served in a restaurant, and from there the idea for this post was born.Now let’s translate some of the marketing speak I used while building the life of Pasta. Let’s start with that name. Rarus is Latin for ‘rare’. If something is rare and hard to find, we have implied quality to help create demand…it also helps to throw in a foreign name which adds intrigue. Yellow onion bulb with sprout is just a clever way of saying an old onion that is starting to flower. Rolled and aged shitake mushrooms are another way of saying old packaged mushrooms that I found upside down in the back of the refrigerator. Belgium beer handmade by monks – that is the marketing speak I took from the side of a Chimay beer bottle I was drinking from at the time. Essence of garlic green is simply the diced green sprouts that were shooting out of the old garlic. You might be asking where the $28 came from…that was my best guess at how much I spent for the grocery items…which by the way was enough to server 4 people, bringing the price per dish to $7.Whether this is a $28 dish served in a fancy restaurant or an at-home dish made with leftovers, the fact of the matter is that it tasted fantastic regardless of its presentation. So…tie up your apron and explore your refrigerator, or tie a scarf around your neck and start losing yourself in the many stories that menus have to offer. Bon Appétit!!