Question

Hello Rabbi, I’ve seen in a few places discussions of various experiments that were done in order to determine whether today’s utensils release or absorb at all, and the experiments themselves actually measure the amount of substance absorbed/released, what percentage of the food it amounts to, and they try to clarify all sorts of other physical/chemical characteristics of one kind or another regarding the utensils.
 
My question is: wouldn’t it be simpler and more correct to do a statistical study on people? For example, give a large number of people a neutral dish to eat, once from a pot in which meat had previously been cooked (and which was then cleaned with water and soap, say), and once from a pot in which milk had been cooked, and do this with all the different kinds of utensils, and ask people to determine, if they can, what was cooked in a meat utensil and what was cooked in a dairy utensil. (I haven’t really thought through exactly how to conduct the study properly, with a control group and all those things, but I think the idea is clear.) Then if there is no statistical evidence that people can tell the difference, it would be clear that there is no real need to be strict about separating utensils, because the problem itself is not the very fact of absorption and release from the utensil—for of course the amount of food that was absorbed or released would be nullified in sixty after cleaning—but rather the taste that the released matter, after having been absorbed, can give to the new food being prepared, and that is what is forbidden to us. So why bother checking all those physical and chemical data???