A metaphor for judging whether a vision statement has real substance: like tasting a dish and being able to name specific ingredients (cinnamon, paprika) rather than just confirming that a meal was served. A vision that only produces a generic, inspirational-sounding summary — without anyone being able to point to the specific validated customer problems, strategy links, or revenue logic baked into it — has failed this test even if it 'sounds like' a vision.
This is a reviewer-facing companion to Three Core Vision Ingredients and Supplementary Vision Ingredients: those define what the ingredients are, while this metaphor is the test for whether you can actually detect them in the finished artifact. It's also consistent with the reasoning behind Inventory-as-Vision Anti-Pattern — a vision that's really just a feature list or a mood board tastes like nothing in particular because it has no real ingredients to name.
Apply: when reviewing a vision (yours or someone else's), try to name its specific ingredients out loud — which customer problems, which strategic bets, which revenue path. If you can only describe the overall flavor ('exciting', 'ambitious') and not the ingredients, the vision likely hasn't been built from real substance yet.