Tag Archives: aesthetics of food

Disgusting or Just Unpleasant?

12 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture

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disgustFood culture writer Sara Davis asks an intriguing series of questions (i.e. intriguing if you like thinking about the pleasures of food)

Is there such a thing as a middle zone for taste? Is it possible to taste something that is not enjoyable without feeling something like disgust? When food is lacking in flavor or has a homogenous texture, the words we use to describe those sensations–bland, mealy, tepid, etc.–have negative associations; do those negative sensations define a disgusting experience, or is there some middle space between pleasant and unpleasant tastes?

My intuitive, initial response was of course. I don’t enjoy pasta with no sauce, butter, oil, or seasoning. It’s the very definition of bland. But I wouldn’t say it’s disgusting, and in fact I’m always sampling plain pasta when I cook to see if it’s done without experiencing disgust.

After thinking about it, I think the question involves a conceptual confusion. Disgust is not just a negative taste sensation, a bit of unpleasantness. Disgust is an emotion that consists, in part, of involuntary recoil and at least the beginning stages of nausea. Certainly a taste experience can be unpleasant without inducing the more powerful emotion of disgust. I know we sometimes say of food we don’t enjoy that it’s disgusting but that’s often a bit of hyperbole.

At any rate Sara’s inquisitive nature is commendable, surely beyond the call of duty:

Prison Food Weekend at Eastern State Penitentiary last summer offered an opportunity to explore these questions in an entirely unscientific and anecdotal way: I tasted a few samples of punishment loaf and observed others going through the same process.

Nutraloaf or punishment loaf is a food product used in some U.S. prisons as severe punishment, particularly for inmates who are in solitary confinement as a disciplinary measure. Punishment loaf is not standard cafeteria fare, it’s the modern-day replacement for bread-and-water rations in which most of the major food groups (proteins, starches, veggies) are blended together to meet daily nutritional requirements. The loaf is often served without utensils or a tray, so it must be eaten with the hands or out of a bag.

She describes the experience with the attention to detail of a NY Times food critic. So if you’re curious about what a loaf of nutrients stripped of flavor and context tastes like check out her post.

To be honest I find the fact someone finds it acceptable to deprive prisoners of the simple pleasure of a meal disgusting, and that’s not hyperbole.

But I do agree with her ultimate conclusion.

I don’t have an answer to my question–or if I do, it’s that tolerable blandness can become intolerable with only minor shifts in circumstances.

Foods that we find merely unpleasant can become disgusting. While I don’t find a few forkfuls of plain pasta disgusting, a plateful might be a different matter.

Is Haute Cuisine a False Prophet?

10 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Edible Art, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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innovative cuisineDaniel Duane’s story in the NY Times about haute cuisine in Silicon Valley identifies the central paradox of fine dining.

The fabulous, tech-driven wealth floating around the Bay Area drives chefs to produce increasingly elaborate, innovative food.

But this food is so expensive that most food lovers can’t afford it; and the people who can afford are more into IPO’s than heirloom tomatoes anyway.

Downmarket, where most food lovers reside,  the same expectation of innovative cooking doesn’t come with the same ability to charge exorbitant prices, and so mid-level restaurants struggle to survive and their poorly paid employees can’t afford to live within a reasonable commuting distance of their work.

As one restaurateur explained, “The food has never been better and the business climate has never been worse and so we are speeding toward a cliff.”

The community-forming dimension of the food revolution comes apart from the creative dimension and economics strangles art.

I’m not sure what the solution to this is. On the one hand, some of the expense of high end dining is stage setting and the trappings of luxury. As Duane writes:

Like any artisan whose trade depends upon expensive materials and endless work, every chef who plays that elite-level game must cultivate patrons. That means surrounding food with a choreographed theater of luxury in which every course requires a skilled server to set down fresh cutlery and then return with clean wine glasses. A midcareer professional sommelier then must fill those wine glasses and deliver a learned lecture about that next wine’s origin and flavor. Another person on a full-time salary with benefits must then set down art-piece ceramic plates that are perfectly selected to flatter the next two-mouthful course. Yet another midcareer professional must then explain the rare and expensive plants and proteins that have been combined through hours of time-consuming techniques to create the next exquisitely dense compression of value that each diner will devour in moments. Those empty plates and glasses must then be cleared to repeat this cycle again and again, hour after hour.

As enjoyable as all that fuss is, it is no doubt over-the-top and not really about flavor. Innovative food can be prepared without so much choreography but this is what their patrons demand.

On the other hand, innovative cuisine will always be expensive to produce. And because it must be consumed to be appreciated, unlike art, food cannot be preserved in venues for the ordinary public to enjoy.

But perhaps we’re thinking about edible art in the wrong way, in a way that is not really analogous to the art world. For all the rare, fantastically expensive art created by the masters that we find in art museums, there are countless modestly compensated artists, often nearly as skilled and creative as the masters, who toil in relative obscurity making art for their local community or their Internet community at some distance from the glitterati of the art world.

Genuine creativity and vision are not after all measured only by “wow factor”. Meaning often has a subtler appeal.

So perhaps Duane is right to point to Los Angeles as the new beacon of a genuine food culture:

Sang Yoon, the chef and owner of Lukshon in Culver City, sees it as a difference between hyper-glorification of the chef and the farm in Northern California and, in Los Angeles, celebration of middle-class immigrant culture. “Half the restaurants I go to, I don’t know who the chef is! It’s not so personality-driven,” he said. “In L.A., we can celebrate a cuisine and not rouge it up.

In contrast to the wealth driven luxury hounds of Silcon Valley, cooking for the middle class is more closely tied to culture, sustaining a cuisine that while innovative is less concerned with presentation. Perhaps we should look for creativity within the constraints of community not in tension with it.

Tension in the Art of Cooking

01 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in Art and Food, General Aesthetics, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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edible artThe art of cooking is peculiar. Cooking, because it supplies us with energy and  nutrition, must fit into the rhythms of daily life. It is constrained by practicalities of all sorts—money, time, personal preferences–that limit what can be done. Within those constraints of course there is ample opportunity for a cook to be creative by playing with ingredients, modifying recipes or trying new techniques all with the aim of making the food taste good.

But that’s not art; that’s life.

Art, by contrast, is the realm of consciously-developed form. Edible art, like any type of art, must have meaning, emotional resonance, and distinctive pattern. To make edible art it is not enough that the food taste good. The flavors must be organized into patterns that allow us to mentally grasp the work and understand it. Art isn’t the realm of pure freedom where creativity goes on a wild bender. Creativity is constrained by the demands or form just as for a novelist an elaborate, subtle plot limits the way characters can be developed.

So for the artistic chef, cooking is not just a matter of making food taste good but of giving the food significant form by displaying flavors in meaningful patterns that provoke a reaction. Art occupies the tensive border between ordinary life and something that transcends the ordinary, and if cooking is an art it too must embody that tension.

I think that is a challenge for cooks or chefs who are accustomed to providing only comfort.

The Year of Weird Ingredients

16 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by in Art and Food, Contemporary Food Culture

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weird foodAnneli Rufus has decided this is the year of weird ingredients.

Based on what I’ve seen these last few weeks at the Fancy Food Show, Good Food Awards Mercantile and Food Fete in San Francisco, plus what this city’s trendy restaurants are serving, food-makers are battling it out to see who can use the most obscure, incongruous, virtuous, freaky and/or allegedly life-saving components. I’ve seen Oreo Cookie-flavored popcorn. Coffee-leaf tea. Sriracha-brined salmon. Calendula-flower kraut. Energy bars made from spent beer grain. Toasted, sugar-coated, chile-lime and chocolate-covered mealworms (“farmed and raised with a natural diet of bran and carrots,” reads the maker’s website). Not one but two brands of chips made from ground-up crickets. Ghost-pepper chocolate. Seawater beer.

Mmmm. Cricket chips. She then asks several pertinent questions:

Is hot-cocoa mix containing “wildcrafted shilajit” — aka mineral pitch, which I have also tried — a pinnacle? Or is it desperation, difference for the sake of difference in a jaded, I’ve-tried-everything-already world?

I vote for desperation.

Regarding the “grilled-bone gelée, Dungeness crabshell gelée or duck-liver toffee crowned with bubbly foam” served at top San Francisco restaurants, she asks:

Is the new übermensch he or she who can speak of such foods straight-faced afterwards without a trace of shock?

No. That is a bit of a come down for übermenschen I would think, who are after all charged with standing athwart history resisting the tide of nihilism. (Is Hillary Clinton an übermensch?)

And then we get to the real pressing question:

…are culinary arts at last on par with painting, theater and dance, attaining unprecedented subjectivity? If so, is mealworm candy the equivalent of butoh?

I think the answer is yes, finally. The U.S. took flavor for granted for so long. Now that we’ve discovered how fascinatingly rich the world of flavor is, we are like the proverbial kid in the candy store shoving anything into our mouths we can imagine.

But there is one difference between the art world and the food world. The art world has had several centuries to make decisions about what counts as a good painting or masterful work of literature. The art world may seem chaotic, and indeed artists wildly experiment with new forms that seem bizarre to the uninitiated. But art movements come and go, the bad stuff is eventually ignored, the old masterpieces continue to inspire us for good reason,  the works that survive eventually yield standards of judgment that we use to bring some order to the process of canon formation.

The food world has yet to develop those standards. But I suspect we will in time. In any case, the rampant experimentation is better than the conventional orthodoxies that used to characterize fine dining in the U.S.

That is a world well lost.

The Taste of Umami

07 Monday Mar 2016

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umami-ingredientsUmami is a mysterious taste. Discovered by a Japanese chemist in 1908, it took Western scientists decades to confirm it is indeed a basic taste. And although it has been enhancing our food experiences for centuries, focused attention is necessary in order to discover its distinctive character. I explore this fascinating flavor at Mindful Eating 2.

The Essence of Oyster

22 Monday Feb 2016

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oystersI’m scrambling to get ready for a spate of radio interviews this week devoted to American Foodie. Many are at 5:00 A.M.—East Coast drive time. I’m seldom ready for an audience before 8:00 so this should be interesting.

At any rate, blogging may be light this week while I struggle to find ways of saying something  like this:

If you don’t love life you can’t enjoy an oyster; there is a shock of freshness to it and intimations of the ages of man, some piercing intuition of the sea and all its weeds and breezes. They shiver you for a split second. —Eleanor Clark

My son has been insisting that oysters on the half shell are nature’s finest gift to humanity. He has me persuaded.

Constant Craving

06 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by in Food Science, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Uncategorized

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food pornThere is fascinating new research on pleasure that has a bearing on how we understand taste.

Neuroscientist Dr. Kent Berridge has been arguing that the neurological systems governing desire are quite distinct from the system governing pleasure. This article in the Economist lays out the basic picture although you have to wade through paragraph after paragraph of fluffy, journalistic palaver to find out what his thesis is. (I swear journalism is tapping the ranks of Junior High School to find reporters, but don’t get me started on the press)

Anyway, I would summarize his thesis as follow

1. The neurotransmitter dopamine induces desire but does not induce pleasure.

2. Opioids and endocannabinoids induce pleasure from tiny distribution points in the brain all linked back to the nucleus accumbens. “This same entire circuit is activated for any pleasure, from food and sex to higher-order delights including monetary, musical and altruistic. The same gloss applied to very different events.”

3. Thus wanting and liking can come apart. We can want things we will not enjoy, a phenomenon common in addicts.

4. The desire system is “vast and powerful”; the pleasure circuit “anatomically tiny”, “fragile” and “hard to trigger”, which explains why intense pleasures are less frequent and less sustained than intense desires.

What does all this mean for taste and our experiences of food? To my mind it means that if we want to learn to control desires, suppressing pleasure is not the way to go. To the contrary, learning to gain more and sustained pleasure from less extreme desires is the route to self-control, which is an argument for taking the simple pleasures of the table more seriously. (A thesis for which I argue more thoroughly in my forthcoming book, American Foodie: Taste, Art and the Cultural Revolution) It also suggests that we don’t get pleasure from the anticipation of a meal—that is just desire which may make us feel more alive and attentive but is not pleasure. (So is food porn enjoyable or just anticipation?)

A couple other points struck me as interesting about this research. One of Berridge’s colleagues Morten Kringelbach gives a compelling description of the experience of eating:

“One of the key things in pleasure”, says Kringelbach, whose default timbre sits just above whisper level, “is that it comes in cycles.” Wanting and liking wax and wane like candle flames. The hungry, wanting state before a meal could be studded with moments of pleasure from a social encounter, or anticipation of good food.  Then, as we eat, pleasure dominates, but wanting still crops up – more salt, a drink of water, a second helping. Before long, the satiety system steps in to render each mouthful less delicious until we stop. If we switch to another food – dessert, cheese, petits fours – we can prolong the pleasure until we’re stuffed, although we may regret it.

This renders the experience of food in terms very much like our experience of music. Following music is a matter of following patterns of anticipations and releases, and one could argue that the art of music is a matter of how skillful and inventive one is at weaving them together to form a coherent whole. The art of cooking may be understood similarly. The most interesting dishes are those that evolve on the palate, that have a build up of energy and a release that feels like a culmination. (I will try to make more sense of that in a future post)

But just one quibble with Berriidge’s way of understanding pleasure.

From the evidence so far, it looks as though this same entire circuit is activated for any pleasure, from food and sex to higher-order delights including monetary, musical and altruistic. The same gloss applied to very different events.

He speaks as though we “paint on” a gloss of pleasure over experienced events. In an earlier paper he writes:

“sweetness tastes nice. It is one of the sensations most reliably able to cause pleasure in people. The pleasure of sweetness lies not in the intrinsic sensation itself, but in something done to it.”

But if it is not the intrinsic taste of sweetness that gives pleasure, what does? Yes, in know the release of oppoids but what triggers that release if not the intrinsic property of sweetness? Furthermore, he suggests that all pleasures are alike—a single gloss we paint on varied experiences. But pleasures are not all experienced as alike. The pleasure of listening to head-banging speed metal is different from enjoying a nice Osso Buco. The phenomenology is different even if the neurobiology is not. And to my mind if you can’t explain the phenomenology there is something missing from your account.

But, nevertheless, fascinating research that is worth thinking about.

Food Pairing Theory on the Ropes?

09 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Food Science, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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food pairing theoryFood pairing theory asserts that foods that share flavor molecules go well together. The more flavor molecules they have in common the more we like the pairing—mozzarella cheese, tomato sauce, and parmesan cheese share 4-methylpentanoic explaining why pizza is so much loved. Prosciutto and parmesan cheese also share a variety of compounds.

Food pairing pairing theory is attractive because it is a reductive explanation—one simple rule can guide the construction of recipes and new flavor combinations can be easily created by identifying ingredients that share flavor molecules. Although handy for creating recipes, I’ve always had some doubts about the theory. It appears to explain some classic pairings well but  I wonder how many exceptions there are, how many popular flavor combinations don’t fit the model. I’ve never seen a systematic study of this question.

But it turns out there is evidence that food pairing theory holds only for North American and Western European cuisines. The cuisines of Southern Europe and East Asia use ingredients that don’t share flavor molecules. And now we have more evidence from a recently published study by Jain et al—Indian food apparently also falls into the anti-pairing camp. From the abstract:

We study food pairing in recipes of Indian cuisine to show that, in contrast to positive food pairing reported in some Western cuisines, Indian cuisine has a strong signature of negative food pairing; more the extent of flavor sharing between any two ingredients, lesser their co-occurrence.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the simple reductionist theory of taste is just not going to explain taste preferences. The anti-pairing hypothesis suggests it is contrast that we seek but surely not any contrast will do. Perhaps there is no underlying system to flavor preferences at all.

But at any rate this research suggests it is Asian and Indian food we should look to in order to fully understand the complexity of flavor.