Certain race issues are highly sensitive ... such as: who likes yellow cheese and who likes white? Marc Abrahams explains

Because race is an uncomfortable topic for many people, certain questions simply do not get discussed. It is now nearly 20 years since the publication of Beth A Scanlon's blockbuster report Race Differences in Selection of Cheese Colour. In all that time, the report has received nary a mention in public forums.

I have found no mention of Scanlon's report in any political speech, anywhere. This is not surprising. No skilled politician likes to venture near a potentially divisive topic on which public sentiment is still unclear.

Scholars, on the other hand, sometimes love to stake out an early position on a controversial issue. It's a simple way to make a name for oneself in the professional community. But the academic world has been virtually silent on the topic of race differences in selection of cheese colour.

Only one other published academic paper pays any attention to the Scanlon race/cheese colour report. And the paper, published in the Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, does it glancingly, in a curious sentence that begins: "In some cases, subjects are encumbered with: red eye-goggles (DuBose et al 1980), blindfolds (Hyman 1983; Scanlon 1985), red lights (Hall 1958; DuBose et al 1980) or red glass (Duncker 1939) to mask colour; funnels and jugs for spitting (Looy, Callaghan & Weingarten 1992) ... "

The emphasis in that little mention, obviously, is on blindfolds. But blindfolds are a mere detail of Scanlon's experiment. Her quest - to explore race differences in selection of cheese colour - is overlooked.

The Scanlon report itself is brief - just one page long. And it is blunt. "White and yellow American cheese was presented to 155 individuals from three ethnic groups," Scanlon writes. One group is black, one white, the other Hispanic. "In a supermarket, a display table was set with two plates of American cheese, one yellow, one white. As the individuals selected a piece of cheese, the grouping and the colour of the chosen cheese was recorded."

Scanlon also offered the cheese to an extra, so-called "control" group of people, each of whom was blindfolded. The blindfolded cheese-samplers, she says, "reported no significant difference in flavour of the cheeses".

And the overall results of the experiment? Scanlon concludes that "the preferences for one of two colours of American cheese are dissimilar for different races of respondents".

As far as I could determine, this is the only research report Beth A Scanlon has ever published. She was - though is no longer - based at Central Connecticut State University. What was her intent in exploring race differences in selection of cheese colour? Why did no one pick up on and continue her line of research? Why did Scanlon herself drop the question, and what has she done with her time instead? These remain mysteries.

· Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly magazine Annals of Improbable Research (www.improbable.com), and organiser of the Ig Nobel Prize