well, since taste is subjective and you’re looking for an objective measure, I’m just going to judge on other grounds! I suspect that the vanilla industry is less bad for the environment and has a better track record with labor violations, so vanilla is better.
Now, I didn’t research that first, and I could definitely be wrong… but at least it’s something one can actually be wrong about.
It’s a silly question that’s impossible to answer. For subjective preferences like flavors, none are “objectively better”. They also could have posted this in “no stupid questions” which at least invites questions that are apparently dumb, but they didn’t.
I didn’t downvote it personally, but why it got downvoted certainly isn’t a mystery.
True, though I took the “objectively” part as a humorous hyperbole. I don’t know if nostupidquestions would’ve accepted the question (they tend to reject questions aimed at viewer experience) but the Lemmy site has had many of us improvising with where we post because a side effect of being federated are having the site not work in random places at any given time.
I don’t know if nostupidquestions would’ve accepted the question (they tend to reject questions aimed at viewer experience)
Some might take the fact that it’s too stupid for nostupidquestions as a sign. :)
Humorous hyperbole or not, it’s still an unanswerable question. How can you interpret it? “Which do you personally prefer?” - who really cares whether some random person prefers chocolate over vanilla and if you want to know what’s common it’s easy to find surveys. “If you prefer one, why?” - uhh, “it tastes better to me”. What else can one really say?
At least something like “If you had to prove chocolate is better than vanilla or vanilla is better than chocolate, is there a food or recipe you’d use?” I didn’t take the time to make it sound like a decent title, but at least that general approach might encourage interesting discussion, sharing foods people not have been aware of already, recipes, etc. There’s nowhere really to go with this post though.
Hear me out: While I don’t know about chocolate candies and the like, all chocilate baking recipies I’ve ever used call for vanilla. I’ve accidentally forgotten the vanilla before and the resulting flavor profile was really flat, bland, and rather unenjoyable.
Vanilla is an incredibly important base flavor for a lot of things, and helps balance out cacao. For that reason alone I’d say vanilla is objectively better because even chocolate wouldn’t really chocolate in a lot of - if not all - circumstances without it.
Comparison of excellent quality vanilla vs excellent quality chocolate should leave you with the takeaway that both are excellent. you may have a preference for one over the other but that’s hardly objective
My personal preference shifts based on mood and (more so) based on quality. Excellent chocolate bar vs budget ice cream that uses vanillin instead of actual vanilla beans? Probably the chocolate unless I’m searching for that nostalgic artificial vanilla flavor. A shitty chocolate snack cake with like 2% actual chocolate and 98% palm oil vs a well made panna cotta? Going vanilla.
When you say objectively, do you mean closer to the platonic ideal of ice cream? Closer to THE ice cream, by which all other ice cream is known?
In that case consider: what of what makes ice cream ice cream is present in vanilla and chocolate versions? Moose tracks is a great ice cream, and it shares it’s base with vanilla. But rocky road is also stellar, and it has a chocolate base. But in general, more ice cream types share the base with vanilla than chocolate. That would indicate vanilla is closer to the shared idea of all ice cream.
Further more, chocolate is a separate ideal of itself. No one desires the ideal vanilla extract, it is nothing on its own. So the ideal ice cream, totally disconnected from the material world and other ideals, would be closer to the blank slate vanilla than the specialized chocolate. Vanilla the word is even short hand for unaltered.
So in conclusion, from a deep examination of the platonic forms and ideals of ice cream, vanilla is objectively superior.
That being said, in my opinion chocolate is objectively superior in every way.
So this leaves a lot of interpretation what kind of objective rating we should apply. For example if it’s about the underlying material used (vanilla beans vs cocoa beans) we could also be looking at economics and availability.
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