Oh, the Pretentiousness of It All ...

In high school, our class decided to organize an internal bake sale in order to raise money for an upcoming field trip. We would bring in some store-bought treats, repackage them nicely, and sell them at twice their purchase prices. Profiteering for the sake of education is justified, I was told.

The first several hours of the sale were painfully slow despite our best attempt to fake nice to and flirt shamelessly with the math/science students. The tactic surprisingly didn't yield results as spectacular as we'd hoped. This greatly puzzled us as usually these pimple-faced, lovelorn brainiacs would salivate at the mere sight of most of us (myself EXcluded, of course) on the liberal arts side who, under normal circumstances, would never give them a time of day. We didn't have any choice but to significantly increase the level of flirtatiousness.

If profiteering for the sake of education is acceptable, flirting for the sake of education is praiseworthy. The girls figured with sustained eye contacts and perfectly choreographed smiles, the guys would become putty in our hands. With a few encouraging words thrown in (delivered in coquettish, demure, and coy manner, of course), we figured they would quickly whip out their wallets. Suddenly, everyone, including Big Lin who weighed close to 200 pounds and once forced a tattoo on a male classmate who refused to let her copy his homework, started talking to passersby with the kind of abnormal, breathy voice of Marilyn Monroe's Happy Birthday Mr. President. Heavens know we tried everything. Anything short of blackmailing or physically coercing people into buying the goodies, we tried it.

Nothing worked.

Not having the physical attributes to contribute to the group marketing effort, i.e. the flirting, I decided to turn the dooming situation around through a different means. I gathered together a group of French majors and made them come up with French names for our goodies. We then took off the labels that were written in Thai and relabeled everything in French and upped the prices to four times the purchase prices.

Well, what do you know? It worked. We were left absolutely gobsmacked and tearing up with pride. The same peanut butter cookies that nobody cared for in the morning became Biscuits du Beurre d'Arachide that people couldn't get enough of in the afternoon. Simple open-faced apple tarts flew off the table once they reincarnated as Tartes aux Pommes à la Crème Pâtissière. I don't have a lot of brilliant moments in my lifetime. But when brilliance hits me, it hits me full force. We sold every single crumb, every single piece of every single thing we brought that day.

The most amusing thing for me is seeing how the customers oohed and aahed over how great the goodies tasted, not realizing they came from a bakery a block away from the school -- the same bakery everybody in the same blessed school bought from. Everything was just nicely repackaged and relabeled.

As it turned out, the bake sale was more educational than the field trip. We have learned that the francicization, or indeed any kind of nominal makeover, of baked goods leads to increased perceived values. The extent of our mischief didn't go beyond what I'd just told you. But, in retrospect, I'm willing to bet that if we had taken an ordinary Thai dessert, Banana in Coconut Milk, from the school cafeteria, relabeled it Bananes au Lait de Coco, and sold it at five times the purchase price, we would have gotten away with it. In the US, it would be similar to labeling mashed potatoes, Purée de Pommes de Terre, and jacking up the price to twice the market price.

Why is it that what something is called ends up influencing the way we perceive or react to it? Even if we honestly don't like the taste, there's something about the "sophisticated" French name that makes it far more likely for us to apply the adjective "tasteless" to ourselves instead of what we're eating. The fancy name is enough to make us question our inherent right to be our own arbiter of taste. Bad-mouth a lowly chocolate cupcake from a neighborhood bakery and nobody raises an eyebrow. Fail to show due appreciation for a lofty Petit Gâteau au Chocolat and the universe flabbergasts at you in disgust.

It seems people are willing to pay more and more readily for things they subconsciously don't believe they deserve or can afford.

Oh, the pretentiousness of it all. Oh, the folly of man.

I was reminded of that incident as I was labeling jars of "milk jam" I made for some friends a few weeks ago. I couldn't help laughing as I was deciding what to call the stuff which is actually nothing more than homemade sweetened condensed milk which has been concentrated and caramelized. Call it "Caramelized Condensed Milk" and I could see people giving me a blank stare. Call it "Milk Jam" and it sounds a bit ho-hum. If I was to sell a jar of "milk jam" at a farmers market, I would probably fetch a couple of bucks for it. I could up the level of exoticness by calling it Cajeta and maybe I'd get $4 a jar? What about Dulce de Leche? Hmm ... $5 a jar, maybe. But label it Confiture de Lait ... and ou-la-la ... $8 a jar at least ... easily.

They're all the same thing.