When I publicly broke up with Mutti tinned tomatoes, it was like I’d entered a church and said God isn’t real | Australian food and drink

In my taste test of Australian tinned tomatoes this week, I claimed it doesn’t matter what brand you buy – almost all of them can make a good sauce. The article led with a picture of me chugging pulped tomato from a tin (this isn’t how I ran the actual taste test) and a headline that said “The results ‘end my long-term relationship with Mutti.’”

Within 24 hours, hundreds of people who read the article – or saw a social media post about it – let me know what they thought. It was like I’d entered a church and told the members God isn’t real. Only this congregation worships a different deity – Mutti.

“Mutti for life”

“Mutti or bust”

“This taste test is rubbish”

“The most recent Guardian food test has destroyed the writer’s brain”

“I still will always buy mutti”

I spent hours laughing, grimacing and responding to the comments. I loved it, but I was also shocked by the sheer ferocity of them all. Two weeks ago, before I tasted 26 different tins of tomato, I was in the same congregation. Maybe I didn’t cross my heart and pay my Sunday dues with the same loyalty as others, but my pantry almost always had several tins of Mutti Solo Pomodoro Polpa. But I have no idea why. It’s not an inherited preference – I couldn’t tell you what tomatoes my parents used. Maybe it’s inherited by class or community. I’ve seen Mutti in the pantries of many of friends, particularly those with Alison Roman cookbooks, Broadsheet subscriptions, and an intimate knowledge of their local specialty coffee options.

When we have access to so many options, tinned tomatoes and beyond, what we choose says a lot about who we are. And it’s hard to suggest you’re cultured and considered with a supermarket home brand. You need something with a bit more storytelling oomph, and Mutti, a product emblazoned with Italian writing and claims about ingredient purity, is as good as it gets. Fill your pantry with unhomogenised peanut butter, Australian extra-virgin olive oil and a pasta shape that is neither long nor penne, and you’ve got a culinary identification system for the Australian middle class.

Without ever investigating further, I’d subconsciously associated Mutti with quality – quality is what I choose, that’s who I am. This is why, as soon as the taste test finished, I checked what scores the team of six reviewers had given Mutti – they ranged wildly from 3 to 7 out of 10.

I didn’t feel right, but there were the facts. Like the other 25 tinned tomatoes, we’d blind-tasted Mutti straight out of the can and cooked into a sauce, prepared exactly the same as every other product. And there was no evidence to say it stood out, at all. None of the tins did. We may as well have been reviewing white paint shades, I could tell they were different, but are any noticeably better than one another?

I’ve done more than 40 of these taste tests: if I’m practised at anything, it’s tasting supermarket products and identifying how they’re different. But I was still so rocked by the result, I did another test with several varieties of Mutti tinned products – diced, whole, San Marzano and cherry tomatoes – and the same results came out. Mutti is neither better or different enough to make it worth buying.

Knowing that is both incredible and horrific. Incredible because I’ll save money never buying a Mutti tin again – Mutti polpa is $2.30, more than double the price of a supermarket home brand I’d also be happy to use. But horrific because it doesn’t at all fit in my understanding of the universe. Ingredients, restaurants, pieces of art – everything we consume and use, however directly or not to define ourselves – maybe they don’t make much difference either?

I think back to the time I tested peanut butter and ended up liking Skippy Super Chunk Peanut Butter the most. It took me months to come to terms with the fact I prefer peanut butter with added sugar – a wildly unpopular opinion among people who avoid penne. Now I have to come to terms with this.

This is why I think so many commenters were so upset. When evidence doesn’t match how you understand the world or how you shape your identity, you don’t want to believe it.