Cooking things that are quick and easy are my specialties in life. I decided to test a meal that I would make on a regular basis, pasta with meat sauce. Simple. Elegant. The first meal would be Albertson's store-brand whole wheat penne pasta with Ragú pasta sauce. The second would be Bella Terra organic whole wheat spaghetti with Alessi 100% Organic chunky style pasta sauce. Would anyone be able to tell the difference? Is the taste of organic really worth making that extra room in my budget? And the most important part, would I be able to cook it? I would test it out on my captive group of subjects.

I decided to cook each meal on two separate days, mostly because it would be a lot of food to eat and it could make my experiment less flawed. Meal A, the brand name pasta, was first. Cooking ended up being no trouble at all, considering all I really did was heat up some water, sauce, and brown some meat. During the cooking nothing either way was said about the food, other than jokes about my abilities to boil water and having pasta sauce in my beard persisted.

I served the food to all four of my test subjects and took some for myself. The reaction to Meal A wasn't very robust. All thanked me for making the food, and I took my poll. Three of the four guys said that the food was store bought, one said it was the organic. After asking why they believed it was not organic, one of the guys said: "it tasted like pasta to me. Nothing special. Nothing to make me think organic." After the meal I did not tell them the answer, waiting for the next day when I tested Meal B, the organic pasta. But this is where the experiment went wrong.

On day two I began cooking the organic pasta. Immediately the four guys huddling around me, still making fun of my cooking, knew that this meal was the organic meal. The incredible smell of the pasta was overwhelming. My four test subjects all starting telling me they knew for sure, without tasting the food, that this was the organic. Even the one guy that voted Meal A as organic said he wanted to change his vote.

This is not what I was planning on. The organic spaghetti was so much better, so much more flavorful that there was no real contest even before I was finished cooking. Now the guys hurried me to finish the pasta so we could try it, and the taste lived up to the aroma. The organic pasta was amazing. The spaghetti had more flavor than any other spaghetti I had bought from the store. I was sold on the taste, and my experiment had gone so wrong that all the guys picked the organic because there was no contest. Now when I am at the grocery store debating whether to spend those few extra dollars for the organic food versus the normal food, I'll be more inclined to go for the organic.