I rarely eat pizza anymore as it upsets my stomach an hour after I eat it and the pain is just not worth it. When I did, I always had to see it first. I wanted to know was it properly cooked or overcooked, was it thick, was it thin, did it have a lot of cheese or only a little cheese, thick crust, thin crust, or no crust? Just seeing the pizza would give me an idea of whether it suited my taste. But seeing it would tell me nothing about the sauce. I knew I wasn't going to get a sample so I had to gamble with appearance.

Most places we go we don't even see the food. We order, it comes out and either it looks good or it looks awful. Either it smells good or it smells awful. If it looks good, doesn't mean it tastes good. We have all had dishes that look great, smell great, but are tasteless.

I am now beginning to think about how we buy food when we are out and about and whether menus and signs really tell us anything about the food itself. It's no small wonder so many of us like to eat in corporate dining because the food is predictably the same whether we are ordering in Manhattan, NY, Baltimore, MD, Kalamazoo, Michigan, or Bloomington, Illinois. We already know what we're going to get.

When we order in small family owned restaurants or ethnic restaurants we take a gamble. That's why we go by friendly recommendations from people we know who we think have the same tastes (who usually don't) or go online and read restaurant reviews and even then, do the reviewers tastes agree with ours? Seems to me the data is pointing to a communication breakdown.