Food Puzzle

[liriodendron]

I was out driving today and listening to WNYC. The guest on The Brian Lehrer Show was a professor from the University of Michigan who has written a book on how diversity creates better groups. They invited callers to offer individual solutions to a puzzle and then tried to have a group of callers work together on a solution. Their experiment was not particularly successful, but the puzzle has been weighing on my mind all day and I thought I'd see if our group could come up with a solution.

Name three foods or beverages, any two of which go well together, but which are virtually inedible when all three are mixed together. He gave two examples.

Chicken with pineapple. Chicken with mole sauce (chocolate). Pineapple with chocolate.

Beer with 7 Up (shandy). Beer with whiskey (boilermaker). Whiskey with 7 Up (7 & 7). (Personally, I can't imagine mixing beer with either 7 Up or whiskey, but maybe that's just me.)

Any other possibilities?

[slb2]

But the experiment seems to point out that diversity is not good. That while a couple of disimilar items are fine, adding three different products makes it bad.

Huh?

[liriodendron]

I think the idea was to show that a varied group could come up with a better solution than each individual working alone. Perhaps our group is too homogenous? I've been wracking my brain all night and I can't come up with three foods that work.

[liriodendron]

Oh, he also talked about how Nobel Prize-winning scientists used to be individuals working alone, but that the prize is now won by groups of scientists.