... But, stop the personal attacks! Feel free to discuss this civilly, but this type of attack is not going to be tolerated.
No worries, @Ron_L. (OP here)
I didn't understand @Burnt at Both Endz's post, asked for clarification, and got nothing. So, end of story.
I found @dirtydingus's post to mostly be funny. Apparently he has never been to a judging class. Of course, it's subjective (aka "personal likes and dislikes"). It can be nothing else and the class doesn't try to make it anything else. What the scoring system tries to do is to standardize the subjective impressions of the judges into scores:
"The scoring system is from 9 to 2; 9 is excellent, 8 very good, 7 above average, 6 average, 5 below average, 4 poor, 3 bad, and 2 inedible. "
Nothing in the class material is telling anyone what, objectively, any of these things means. What the class teaches is that, if a judge subjectively considers the sample to be average, then he should write down a "6." If he considers it to be "excellent" he should write down a "9."
One of my class notes on Taste, verbatim from the instructor is:
"Good Flavor = Memorable, want to repeat." What could be more subjective than that?
You want "objective?" Buy yourself a million dollar lab with machines to evaluate tenderness in milliNewtons and mass spectrometers to parse out the spice flavors and evaluate them against a standard profile. But even there you fail, because "Appearance" can't be quantified. Again from my notes:
"Appearance --- want to eat it."
Sorry, @dirtydingus, judging
is subjective. You can go to as many judging classes as you like and I don't think you'll be able to come to any other conclusion.
Again, thanks to all (well, most. :wink
, for contributing to my education.