Name That Foodstuff: Food Critic Bats .272

Can you name a dish on the basis of its ingredients alone?

It doesn’t sound hard. Tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, basil, olive oil: you’ve got a Caprese salad. Egg yolk, butter, lemon juice? I’ve seen the future and it’s drenched in Hollandaise.

But there’s food, and then there’s the stuff Michael Pollan would probably call “edible un-food”–which everyone else would just call “The American Diet.” We’re talking Twinkies and Cheetos, color-corrected ketchups, frozen, pre-packaged peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with more preservatives and shelf stabilizers than fruit or grains or nuts, and any food item that can be squirted out of a can. That stuff isn’t quite so easy to pick out of a lineup with only the information in its ingredient panel to go on.

And now, the folks over at Slate have posted an unsettling multiple-choice Ingredients Quiz, challenging you to identify ultra-processed snacks and beverages on the basis of their ingredients alone.  I scored 3 out of 11.  Which is about how you’d expect a monkey to perform, if the monkey were blind, tongueless, and took the challenge while Gordon Ramsey berated it for its incompetence.

Can you do better?

Slate Ingredients Quiz [Slate.com]