Lobster and Love? Think Again

Last month, PR Newswire announced the results of a Harris Interactive poll, which showed that "men and women believe that a lobster dinner is the most romantic meal." Being from New England, arguably home to the most famous lobsters in the world, I was inclined to accept the findings until I discovered the amazing coincidence that the sponsor of the poll was no less than the Red Lobster restaurant chain itself. As the PR Newswire story went:

"'Lobster is the most romantic of all foods," said Red Lobster President Kim Lopdrup, who himself proposed marriage to his wife Cathy over a lobster dinner. "There's just something about breaking open the shell and enjoying that succulent taste and texture. Sharing lobster on Valentine's Day is twice as romantic.'"

I wondered if perchance Burger King had sponsored a similar poll, we would be reading that the way to a woman's/man's heart is a 1,500+-calorie meal of a "Double Whopper" and a king-size fry, and that the president of the fast food chain had found true love while imbibing an ICEE.

Not that Harris Interactive did a "bad" poll. It is a highly reputable organization, and when they say it was a representative sample of more than 1,000 adults across the country, I believe them. But as we all know, what we are asked can greatly influence what we answer. And so I was particularly interested in what question was used to measure people's perceptions about romantic food.

Denise Wilson, a public relations analyst with Red Lobster, was kind enough to discuss the survey and provide me with the question wording. It turns out, as I suspected, that the question was not an open-ended one, which would allow the individual to identify whatever food comes to mind. Instead, several specific foods were identified.

Asked of men:
If you were to propose marriage to someone over dinner, which of the following meals would be most romantic?

Asked of women:
If someone were to propose marriage to you over dinner, which of the following meals would be most romantic?

[Responses presented in random order.]

If people had been asked to identify the "most romantic" meal with no prompting, the responses would no doubt have been all over the culinary map -- chocolate candy, champagne, peanut butter (if I had been a respondent, anyway), and so on -- with any one item, like lobster, garnering only a very small percentage. That would not have been very compelling reading for a news release and, besides, there would have been no guarantee (even with good pre-testing to see how the results might come out) of a clear winner.

To avoid such an ambiguous outcome, the polling organization asked the closed-ended question above. Lobster did well in this group, I suspect, because it is the most unusual among the other generic (read "dull") items (well, except for sushi, but downing raw fish is more likely to give people that queasy-rather-than-romantic feeling, so it was safe to include).

But are these choices the only ones that come to mind when someone in love is thinking about a dinner to pop the question? If that were his or her limited perspective, one can only hope the intended spouse would decline for that reason alone. What about chateaubriand for two, or -- if one must have "chicken" -- what about chicken cordon bleu? Or noisettes de veau? The French names alone should be enough to overwhelm the "lobstah" fans, even if the lovebirds don't know exactly what they're eating. And there are many other dishes and foods with exotic-sounding names and impossible-to-make recipes that would create the appropriate atmosphere for true love.

The polling lesson (yes, this is a column about public opinion polling, in case it's not obvious) is that polls done for organizations that want a certain outcome to be released to the public will almost surely find what the sponsoring company wants. Even good polls, done with the highest scientific standards of sampling, don't necessarily tell the whole truth.