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Taste is a very curious thing. We understand that how we taste something is almost entirely subjective, that while it depends to some extent on the physical and chemical properties of the things we’re tasting, the sensation is overlaid with all sorts of cultural and personal memories. Unless you have access to all of those, there’s nothing you can say about my taste. Except, we do that all the time. We slip easily from taste being indisputable to good taste and bad taste and from there to making taste the basis of moral judgements. What’s more, this is nothing new.
These thoughts, and many more, were prompted by a new book: Food Fights: How History Matters to Contemporary Food Debates. It contains two chapters that cover taste directly (and a third that considers food choice from a slightly different point of view). In an effort to straighten myself out on the subject, I talked to the two chapter authors, and they’re going to be the guests in at least the next two episodes.
In the first instance, Margot Finn talked to me about the nature of taste and about how efforts to change people’s taste in food have often stemmed from a desire to change their behaviour.
Notes
- S. Margot Finn wrote Discriminating Taste: How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution. She is “inconsistently” on Twitter.
- Food Fights is published by University of North Carolina Press. Here’s one place to source a copy.
- There is a transcript.
- Harvard crew circa 1910 from the Library of Congress. Cover photo of cilantro by José Camba on Flickr
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David Kaplan calls himself a taste realist. That means he really does think that there’s something there, in food or drink, that enables us to agree on what it tastes like, if only we have the vocabulary. Kaplan is professor of philosophy at the University of North Texas, and aesthetics is only one of the areas of philosophy that he applies specifically to food in his book Food Philosophy: An Introduction. We talked about all of them in this episode.
Notes
Food Philosophy: An Introduction is published by Columbia University Press. David Kaplan directs The Philosophy of Food Project, which contains many more resources at its website.
In case you missed them, here’s a little mini-series I did on taste:
Disputations about taste
You are what you drink
Questions of Taste
In case you were wondering (I was, but I didn’t want to lose the thread) the Mount Rushmore of Existentialists would be Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heideger and Sartre.
Here’s the transcript.
Huffduff it
eatthispodcast.com/margot-finn/
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This is the third in a little mini-series on taste. First came Margot Finn discussing disputations about taste and then Chad Ludington explained how you are what you drink. Now they’re both back, along with a snippet from a long-ago episode with sommelier Marco Lori to round out the discussion. I can’t guarantee that I won’t return to the subject again in the future, not least because I find it endlessly fascinating.
The challenge, I think, is disentangling aspects of gustatory taste that are common to all human beings from those that are overlaid — or do I mean underpinned? — by personal experience or cultural context. So when we say sweet is pleasurable and bitter aversive, what does it mean to say that an adult has a sweet tooth? I freely admit to having a bit of a sweet tooth myself, but I also revel in bitter tastes. How did that happen?
Another puzzle is the memory of complex flavours and how we analyse, process, store and recall the memory. I’ve never put much effort into being able to discriminate among similar but different tastes; I can just about recognise certain wines, for example, but am in awe of people who can discern a particular maker or, even more so, a vintage. So I’m intrigued by Chad Ludington’s thought experiment, that a bunch of randomly selected people would, over time, converge on liking the same few examples of a particular food. Would they? I’d love to see the experiment tried.
Our conversation sent me back to consider some things I first read back in 2011, on the website of Seth Roberts. He was an extremely interesting psychologist and writer who was a great one for self-experimentation. Seth wrote that side-by-side comparisons provided the best opportunity to learn about differences and resulted in an almost instant connoisseurship, which he called the Willats Effect after a friend who pointed it out to him. And, as Seth explained, there’s a downside to this:
Starting with The Willat Effect: Side-by-Side Comparisons Create Connoisseurs and following the links from there you’ll see that although the results are sometimes confounded, it does seem to be the case that side-by-side comparisons very effectively show you what you like.
I’m ready to try that with chocolate. Or bitter liqueurs. You know where to find me.
Notes
Food Fights, the book that prompted this mini-series, is published by University of North Carolina Press.
Chad Ludington teaches history at North Carolina State University.
S. Margot Finn is “inconsistently” on Twitter.
Marco Lori’s website is Off the Vine
Banner photo from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Those barbels around its mouth are where it keeps its taste buds. Cover photo by Anne on Flickr. Twitter photo by Jason Lam from Flickr
Huffduff it
Jeremy, I was just looking at the Eat This Podcast siteEat This Podcast site and noticed that many of your webmentions actually come from Instagram. I did not think that Brid.gyBrid.gy?
The Stairway to Heaven of barley breeding for whiskey involves thinking about taste a bit more.
Taste comes into maize breeding too.
Jeremy talks taste with Margot Finn. Oh and there’s his latest newsletter.
Farmerama podcasts on cereals in small-scale farming in the UK and beyond.
Nothing small-scale about ancient farming in the Nile Valley.
Make ancient Roman bread during lockdown. Then compare and contrast with the Egyptian kind?
What did the Romans ever do for the rural economy of Britain anyway?
Course on communicating the value of biodiversity. Wasn’t all the above enough?
SFSI affiliate Margot Finn @smargot_finn discusses the nature of taste and how efforts to change people’s taste in food have often stemmed from a desire to change their behavior. Listen here: eatthispodcast.com/margot-finn/
Ha ha. I immediately thought of how noxious cilantro is and then you mentioned it. :-)
All this and more I am exploring in the first episode of a mini-series, in conversation with https://twitter.com/smargot_finn 6/6https://www.eatthispodcast.com/margot-finn/