someone else’s subjective experience to guide our chosen experiences. Orgasms and eating are two of the great pleasures in life, whether you live in Tokyo, Toronto, Toulouse, Tehran or Timbuktu? I doubt any healthy human adult would debate this. What can be debated is what counts as the ultimate orgasm or food experience. It can be debated both among friends and inside our own minds, influenced by personal experience and our knowledge of what else is available, or might be. Consider potato chips. As a snack, potato chips generate a revenue in the United States of about $6-7 billion dollars each year, relying on the slicing and frying of about 2 billion pounds of potatoes. These facts make clear that most Americans love potato chips, and are motivated to consume them. Like other salty snacks, it is hard to eat just one. The American psychologist Carey Morewedge and his collaborators ran an experiment to find out how much people love potato chips, and whether their anticipated fondness for this delicious crisp changes in the face of other options. Subjects sat at a table in front of a bowl of potato chips and an alternative food that was visible, but out of reach. The alternative was either a highly undesirable snack such as sardines, or a highly desirable one such as Godiva chocolate. After subjects contemplated what it would be like to eat each of these foods, they then rated how much they would enjoy them. This is like the study I described in the pleasure section where subjects rated how much they would enjoy different vacation destinations, but without the comparison between one clearly good and one clearly bad spot. Both focus on the anticipation of a pleasurable experience. Subjects’ ratings of potato chip deliciousness soared when sardines were on offer, and plummeted in the presence of chocolate. Context matters. What is clearly delicious when there is nothing else on the table, loses or gains in deliciousness when the table fills up with other delectable