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LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Title: “Good for You”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is something you might have done today in the kitchen.
Answer: BAKED A CAKE
Correct entries: 304

My first real clunker since MGWCC 582, although #599 and #616 were clunk-ish. Long story short: I was so enamored with the find that you can spell food-related BAKED A CAKE using just the six letters that represent vitamins, and using each of those six at least once, that I overrode my own apprehension about the vagueness of the extractions and solvers mostly hated it.

Ten theme entries were:

1-A: [Food found in a bunch (helps with metabolism)] = BANANA
19-A: [Dietary supplement consumed by the ancient Vikings (improves your vision)] = COD LIVER OIL
24-A: [Appetizer you might wash down with a glass of Kirin Ichiban (slows arterial blockage)] = EDAMAME
35-A: [Nut used in Toblerone (slows the aging process in your cells)] = ALMOND
46-A: [Fish getting devoured by a bear on Alaska’s state quarter (gives you strong bones)] = SALMON
50-A: [Bugs Bunny’s favorite food (promotes muscle growth)] = CARROT
57-A: [Fruit that may be from Florida (may help prevent colds)] = ORANGE
70-A: [Fruit whose two leading producers are Turkey and Uzbekistan (strengthens your immune system)]
77-A: [Item in a salad (helps wounds heal more quickly)] = SPINACH LEAF. Yeah, it’s weird that this is “spinach leaf” instead of just “spinach,” but I really needed COD LIVER OIL and therefore an 11-letter entry to offset it.
85-A: [Tapas restaurant supply (powerful antioxidant)] = OLIVES

So if you take the vitamin that each of these is highest in (Banana = vitamin B, Cod liver oil vitamin A, edamame vitamin K, etc.) the vitamins spell out contest answer BAKED A CAKE.

I was worried about this meta going in since many of the vitamins are ambiguous (foods are often high in two or more vitamins, not just one), and there was a significant amount of Googling required, but I overruled those concerns because a) a few of these 10 are obvious/clear, like C for ORANGE and K for EDAMAME; and b) there are only six choices for each one, so I figured with a little backsolving it would all fall into place.

And for a while it looked like it had; 304 is pretty much an ideal number of correct Week 3 solves, and 99 of the first 100 answers submitted were correct, and then 95 of the next hundred were correct as well. So I thought my intuition had been vindicated, but there was trouble under the surface: selection bias. Sure, a bunch of people got it, but an equal number found the Googling required so frustrating and annoying that they couldn’t get to BAKED A CAKE even when they had figured out the mechanism. This should not happen.

So my apologies to those (many) solvers who found this one frustrating and annoying. It certainly will not make it into the next anthology, and if I had to do it over again I wouldn’t have run it at all.

Moving right along…

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is a creature you’ve never seen.

NOTE: The deadline for this puzzle is noon ET on Wednesday, July 1st.

Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.