Tag Archives: Philosophy of food and wine

Coming Down Off the Perfect Meal

08 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Philosophy

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Food and wine have not been taken seriously as forms of art throughout history in part because of the belief that vision and hearing are the only senses that lend themselves to the intellectual explorations we associate with art. This ideology, called the “sense hierarchy”, and masterfully traced by Carolyn Korsmeyer in Making Sense of Taste, treats taste and smell as thoroughly functional sources of brute pleasure, too primitive and instinctual to be worthy of genuine aesthetic discrimination.

This ideology is ancient. 2500 years ago, Plato argued that vision and sound give us information about the world that engages the intellect, while tastes and smells only encourage the appetite which he likened to a ravenous beast that overcomes our rational faculties. (I suppose Plato can be forgiven for not knowing about the porn industry or trivial pop melodies that suck you in each time you hear them.)

…the gods made what is called the lower belly, to be a receptacle for the superfluous meat and drink and formed the convolution of the bowels, so that the food might be prevented from passing quickly through and compelling the body to require more food, thus producing insatiable gluttony and making the whole race an enemy to philosophy and culture, and rebellious against the divinest element within us.

One wonders what was in Plato’s kitchen that threatened to sap his self-control. But Plato’s assertion rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of how appetite works. Appetite has its own internal control mechanisms.

This point was brought home to me as I read Jay Rayner’s book The Man Who Ate the World. Rayner, a British food critic, often on the judges’ panel for Top Chef, set out on a worldwide quest to discover the perfect meal. With perfection being an impossible standard, his quest involves more disappointments than successes. But the penultimate failures could be attributed to the fact that his ambling about the world was avoiding the one place where such perfection is alleged to be routine—Paris, where he endeavors to eat 7 meals in 7 days at the finest restaurants.

The regrets begin on Day Two, and by Day Six:

Oh, god, I don’t know. Another Parisian three-star. Doormen in peaked caps.Claw-foot chairs. Side tables for the ladies to put their handbags on. The food was standard three-star stuff: langoustines on sticks wrapped in sea-water foam, beetroot meringues, yeast ice cream decorated with silver leaf. You know the score by now.

Rayner’s weary lamentation shows that appetite is not quite a ravenous, insatiable beast. It’s not that the food wasn’t good. Most of it met his expectations. But the adage “too much of a good thing” applies even to the finest cuisine. In the absence of compulsive disorders, pleasures aim at their own extinction. (There is probably an evolutionary explanation for this. Organisms that are never satisfied will ignore everything else to their obvious detriment)

Many philosophers have noticed this tendency of pleasures to be satiated but argue that the desire for pleasure always returns in a never ending cycle of debilitating craving. But, again, Rayner’s experience shows that this is not necessarily the case.

But the wonderful thing about perfection is that it is, of course,unobtainable. That didn’t stop me searching for it. That hasn’t stopped me wondering about it. All I need is the appetite. There is only one problem. I’m no longer sure I have one.

Having experienced the best cuisine in the world, the post-quest prospect of the many failed meals that await the restaurant critic no longer appeals to him. Once one develops aesthetic standards and acquires an ability to discriminate, fewer pleasures seem attractive.  Critical awareness enhances self-control. The motivation to seek pleasure can be tamed by the very intellect that Plato thought would be overwhelmed.

There is no reason to think there is something peculiarly “brute” or instinctual about taste—it can be refined and disciplined just like any other sensation.

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Food, Wine and the Future of Work

20 Wednesday Apr 2016

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

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This chart from Pew Research tells you why the U.S. desperately needs a vibrant food and wine culture:

blog_work_hard_get_ahead

 

73% of Americans say its very important to work hard to get ahead in life. Only a quarter of the French think hard work is important for getting ahead. Even the hard-working Germans tally only 49 percent.

What does this have to do with food and wine?

As I argue in American Foodie, the culture of the table teaches us to slow down, savor the moment, put pleasure before production and care before commerce. That is the essence of the food revolution in the U.S.—a rejection of the production paradigm that values only efficiency and profit.

And when the robots come to take our jobs, which culture will best adapt to a world in which none of us are really needed any longer? Probably not the U.S.

It’s easy to joke about this but it is a serious matter. I tell my students this will be an issue in their lifetime.

Better learn to lift a glass or two, or three.

Why is it Important to Think about Food and Wine?

11 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Art and Food, Art and Wine, Contemporary Food Culture, Philosophy of Food and Wine, The Ethics of Eating, Wine Culture

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Photo by Todd Lapin Creative Commons license

There are lots of hard problems that require our thoughtful attention—poverty, climate change, quantum entanglement, or how to make a living, just for starters. But food and wine? Worthy of thought?

On the surface it looks like there are only three questions worth considering when it comes to food and wine: Do you have enough? Is it nutritious? And does it taste good? If you have the wherewithal to read this you probably have enough food. Questions of nutrition can be answered by consulting your doctor or favorite nutritionist. And surely it doesn’t take thought to figure out what tastes good.

But when we look at food a bit more deeply we find some important issues lurking beneath the surface. Some of the aforementioned “hard problems” have a lot to do with food. Our food distribution networks are anything but fair leaving many people without enough to eat; and our food production and consumption patterns are environmentally unsustainable in part because of their impact on climate change, as well as the disruption of water supplies caused by global warming. How we farm, what we eat, and how we cook have important social, political, and ethical ramifications—ramifications so important that we cannot think of these issues as purely private matters any longer.

But without minimizing the importance of these issues, I want to suggest that questions about what tastes good and why should occupy much more of our thoughtful attention than it does.

The aesthetics of taste are important because I don’t think one can live well in our world without taking an interest in the aesthetics of everyday life; and because food and wine are among the most accessible and satisfying everyday experiences, we should care about them much more than we do.

Why is the aesthetics of everyday life so important? This famous quote from the film Fight Club provides the experiential background:

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so

we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be

millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact.And we’re very, very pissed off.” (Taken from Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club.)

Most Americans live lives that are highly regulated and standardized, governed by norms of efficiency and profit that crowd out any other value; and these norms increasingly colonize our home life as well thanks to intrusive media technologies. We tend to work long hours at boring, repetitive jobs, that demand our full attention–in order to make someone else rich. That is, if your job is not outsourced to a machine.

Everyone needs a way to resist these demands, a place where beauty, pleasure and attention to things that have intrinsic value occupy our attention. Finding extraordinary meaning in simple things like a meal or a bottle of wine is the most accessible path to a good life in this damaged world. This is not a new thought—ancient sages from the Buddha to Epicurus had similar notions. But it is more relevant now than ever in human history,

Of course the character in Fight Club  creates a place where men get together and punch each other to feel better about their limited lives. I guess that is “aesthetics” of a sort—a sensory experience no doubt. But we can probably do better by seeking a form of beauty not tainted by violence.

Yet such a commitment means we must refuse to accept what is false and inauthentic, that we recognize and block the strategies of our corporate masters when they manipulate our desires. When we outsource our practical reasoning to marketers our desires are not our own. The only antidote to such outsourcing is critical thought and a mind sufficiently open to fully appreciate what is before us, as food and drink almost always is.

As Epicurus said “Not what we have but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.”

Cheers

Food and Wine that Makes You Cry

19 Tuesday Mar 2013

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

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From the NPR story Songs That Make You Weep

As I’ve noted many times, philosophers take a dim view of the capacity of food and wine to evoke emotion. Here is Elizabeth Telfer in her book Food for Thought:

“A cook can cook as an act of love, as we have seen, or out of the joy of living. But whereas in music the emotion is somehow expressed in the product itself—the music can be sad or joyful, angry or despairing—in food the emotion is only the motive behind the product.” (pp. 59-60)

And here is Frank Sibley:

Perfumes and flavours, natural or artificial, are necessarily limited: unlike the major arts, they have no expressive connections with emotions, love or hate, grief, joy, terror, suffering, yearning, pity or sorrow—or with plot or character development. (in “Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics”, p. 249)

You don’t have to be a philosopher to be cold to the charms of food and wine. Essayist William Deresivicz, writing in the NY Times, argues that food cannot express emotion because food does not exist as narrative:

But food, for all that, is not art. Both begin by addressing the senses, but that is where food stops. It is not narrative or representational, does not organize and express emotion. An apple is not a story, even if we can tell a story about it.

I think that Deresivicz is wrong that the flavors and textures of food and wine are not narratives. Traditions are narratives and food traditions are accessible via flavors. But let’s assume he is right about that for the sake of argument.

Where is it written that all art must rely on narrative? The main counter-example is music. Music expresses emotion even when there are no lyrics to provide narrative context.

It is a bit more complicated than this, but there are essentially two ways in which (non-narrative) music expresses emotion. Music can provide representations of emotion because we experience the tensions, releases, the rising and falling trajectory and intensity of music as analogous to similar patterns in various emotions. In that sense, music can, by analogy, be sad, joyful, angry, or despairing. But those emotions are not felt. I feel sad when listening to music only if the music is bad, despairing only if its really bad.

The second way in which music expresses emotion is to directly cause it in the listener. We can be startled, surprised, calmed, or excited by music. It influences our moods as well. The emotions we feel when listening to music are responses to sensations. I would argue, in fact, that sensuous beauty itself can provoke emotions such as wonder, intrigue, excitement, pensive meditation, joy, serenity, intensity, tenderness, etc.  not because beauty reminds us of these feelings, but because it directly causes them.

But then food and wine, if they also induce sensations of beauty, provoke similar emotions. Describing his visit to a Spanish “gastro-temple” Matt Goulding writes

The meal detonated an explosion of diverse emotions—
hushed reverence, brooding reflection, fits of wonder
and whimsy and piercing nostalgia—as only the very best
food can. In terms of a transcendent dining experience, dinner
for me at Can Roca lacked nothing. (Matt Goulding “Table for One” Gastronomica)

The perception of beauty in wine too evokes wonder, mystery, brooding reflection, whimsy along with joy, anticipation, confusion, amusement, a sense of loss and impermanence, etc.

True, the emotions we experience via food and wine are different than those we experience via a narrative. But why assign “art” only to the expression of anger, sadness, or fear. Why privilege narratively-expressed emotions over emotions that are induced via sensation?

I doubt there is a good answer to that question.

Kant, Imagination, and Molecular Gastronomy: Why Kant Was Wrong Part 2

26 Tuesday Feb 2013

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

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slow poached egg

Slow-poached egg, chorizo, pickled beets, and dried black olives from WD-50

One reason for denying that food and wine are proper objects of aesthetic attention comes from the German philosopher Kant who argued that food and wine provoke in us only an immediate hedonic response—I like it, or I don’t like it. We don’t contemplate, we just enjoy or not. By contrast, when appreciating genuine aesthetic objects, like works of art, we do more than that–we contemplate them, approach them from an impartial point of view, and they engage our imagination and understanding. The enjoyment comes not only from the sensuous engagement with the object but from the interplay of understanding and imagination.

So according to Kant, the pleasure we get from a work of art is fundamentally different from the pleasure we get from basking in the sun, enjoying a cold beer on a hot day, or setting down to a fine meal. These latter pleasures are based purely on desire satisfaction. But art is enjoyed because, in appreciating art, we are forced to engage in an interpretive project that disrupts our settled way of conceiving the world and requires that we experience reality differently. In artistic appreciation, we take pleasure in the play of our imagination and understanding.

I’ve argued in a previous blog post that Kant was mistaken in claiming we cannot contemplate food and wine and wrong that there is a disinterested point of view from which we properly experience works of art. But what is this “play of understanding and imagination” and does that apply to food and wine?

According to Kant, through experience the mind naturally builds up a collection of schemata—templates for various kinds of objects—that help us recognize a dog as a dog or table as a table. When we encounter an object, it is the imagination that selects and structures sensory data so that it matches these templates according to what is the best fit. New experiences of dogs and tables can thus be easily assimilated to our conceptual scheme.

But we are not born with all the templates we need for understanding reality—we have to create new ones when new objects are encountered that are vastly different from our templates. So the imagination also has the ability to sort through sensory experience and invent new templates. When doing so, it can’t simply apply the old templates since they don’t fit the new experience very well. But it can still make use of them if they are close enough to the new experience to be useful. This is what Kant means by the “free play” of the imagination and understanding. The imagination is searching for a concept to fit the new experience but to find a match it has to shape the sensory data to fit existing concepts as best it can, while also shaping existing concepts so they match the new sensory data.

In this exercise of the imagination, we may succeed or fail. There may not be a concept or schema adequate to the new experience. It may elude our understanding.

This is how we are able to make genuine aesthetic judgments.

In a genuine aesthetic judgment, rather than a mere sensuously enjoyable experience like basking in the sun, the imagination experiments with possible ways of restructuring the object. It is this searching activity that we find enjoyable, especially when that restructuring makes sense to us, when the understanding and the imagination harmonize despite the fact that the imagination is not being thoroughly directed by the fixed templates that normally govern our concepts. We see that the work has an order and unity to it without clearly deciding on a single judgment of what it is or what it does. There is no concept adequate to the experience but that indeterminacy is itself pleasurable. This is when we judge an object beautiful. It is intriguing, mysterious, not fully understood, yet at the same time balanced, harmonious, and well put together.

Thus, an aesthetic judgment is not based on the object, as much as it is based on our reaction to our reflection on the object.

I doubt that this account of aesthetic pleasure accounts for all genuine aesthetic judgments—it seems too remote from the sensuous experiences we typically associate with the appreciation of art. But it captures perhaps some of our aesthetic judgments. The question is whether the appreciation of food and wine ever takes this form.

And I think it clearly does. This kind of indeterminate play between our concept of what something is and an intriguing, sensual experience that we cannot quite place in any traditional category is precisely what molecular gastronomy aims for. The moments of uncertainty, surprise,  and deconstructive gestures of their dishes aim to provoke the kind of intellectual playfulness that Kant thought was the essence of aesthetic experience. When the flavors are genuinely delicious and we experience the harmony and unity of the flavor profile along with the intellectual pleasures of searching for indeterminate meaning, a judgment that the object is beautiful seems appropriate.

Caviar made from sodium alginate and calcium, burning sherbets, spaghetti made from vegetables produce precisely this kind of response. They challenge the intellect and force our imagination to restructure our conceptual framework just as Kant suggested.

Thus, Kant was right to point to this kind of experience as genuinely aesthetic but wrong in his judgment that food could not be the object of such an experience.

One wonders what the old professor, who never ventured more than 10 miles from his home in Königsberg, had on his plate for dinner.

 

Wine, Art, and the Value of Dirt and Sky

28 Thursday Jun 2012

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This has been a very active week for the philosophy of wine in the blogosphere. This paper by philosopher Barry Smith discussing the objectivity of wine flavors is interesting. I will comment on that when I get a chance.

But I was especially appreciative of Frederic Koeppel’s engaging and thoughtful post contemplating various definitions of wine.

It gives me a frisson when I see terms borrowed from philosophy in a discussion of wine–terms such as “objective correlative”, “aspirational signifier” and “paradigm”. These terms are themselves aspirational signifiers indicating that wine is more than a commercial product that tastes good and gets you drunk.

More importantly, Koeppel’s post brings out the symbolic dimension of wine, a dimension that is crucial to the idea that winemaking is an art.

That is, wine, especially at its greatest, is the perfect vehicle to fulfill the highest level of a grape’s possible achievement. In this perception, wine conveys a sense of inevitability that other beverages or agricultural products rarely contrive. One does not drink beer, for example, even in its best or most powerful manifestations, and think, “Ah, yes, this is the apotheosis of cereal grains.” The grape, however, is never far from one’s thoughts….

Striving for an aesthetic ideal and using material—paint, musical notes, or grapes—to symbolically refer to that ideal is surely one characteristic of art.

But Koeppel goes on to point to another symbolic dimension of wine:

A glass of wine, perhaps the one you’re holding in your hand now, serves — let me say should serve — as an emblem of a piece of earth, a stretch of vineyard, a swath of sky, a defined region where its grapes were nurtured and harvested. That sentence summarizes the notion of terroir, the French idea that wine is influenced by and reflects the nature of the vineyard where the grapes were grown.

Koeppel is right, as I have been arguing in the newsletter. The subject matter of a wine understood as an art object—what it refers to, what it is about—is a particular winemaking tradition that often depends on a terroir for its intelligibility. Winemakers are symbolically referring to traditions even when actively opposing the practices of the tradition in which they work.

There is, however, a tension between these two aspects of wine discussed by Koeppel. As an aside, he writes:

(A few winemakers in California try to assert that terroir includes whatever processes occur in the winery as well as the agency of the winemaker him- or herself. Any thoughtful person will see that this caprice is nonsense; too often the winemaker interferes with a wine and negates the effect of terroir.)

Perhaps, but it may be that winemakers, with their blending genius and winery wizardry, may “fullfill the highest level of a grape’s possible achievement” even while rendering obscure the residue of terroir in the glass.

Arguably, the first-growth wines of Bordeaux. which are generally acknowledged to be the best, are not terroir-driven. They are blends of more than one grape variety from various vineyards that are often not contiguous and may not share the same characteristics of terroir, especially after undergoing filtration, fining, and aging in oak. The result is not a pure expression of a vineyard, but a product of a winemaker’s vision of what those grapes can be.

Does that abort the artistic impulse? Are lovers of highly sculpted “winemaker wines” soulless philistines robbing wine of its real meaning?

I’m not convinced. It smacks a bit of the public’s initial negative reaction to abstract art, as if wines could only be what they were in the past.

I suppose, in the end, wine lovers will settle the issue.

The Meaning of Food or How to Read a Rutabaga

15 Tuesday May 2012

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rutabaga2 One of the big hurdles confronting the view that fine cuisine is a fine art is to say what fine cuisine is about. Paintings refer to something beyond the painting and thus a painting can have meaning and can be interpreted. What do dishes or menus refer to? Are they just flavor combinations that refer to nothing beyond the meal or do the flavors have meaning that can be decoded and elucidated, as a reader might grasp the symbols in a poem?

If fine food is about anything it is about food traditions, and dishes and menus have meaning to they extent they are expressions of a tradition. Chefs and their critics provide “readings” of a dish in light of past renderings of that dish and the sensibility that lies behind it.

So I read with great interest, New York Chef Sara Jenkins’ plea to American chefs to pay more attention to their own traditions instead of echoing the accomplishments of Europe.

American chefs, it seems, too often become enamored with the technique and forget the foundations of tradition, flavor, and sourcing that hold the best recipes together. As a result, we end up mixing together eight or nine different ingredients whose only commonality is the their trendiness. I do love the freedom that comes with America’s lack of cultural definition. In this country, chefs are not chained to making a regional food simply because that’s what their patrons grew up eating. But with freedom comes choices, and sometimes there can be too many choices to navigate. When chefs abandon all tradition, they often lose the integrity that makes the ingredients come together into something profoundly satisfying and alive.

Even the molecular concoctions of el Bulli (Spanish chef Ferran Aria’s home before it closed) were based on tradition. During her visit to el Bulli, Jenkins writes:

That night, the most memorable dish was a salty tomato sorbet with a crisp crouton on top filled with olive oil. Again, I admired the apparent simplicity of the dish, three ingredients paired perfectly together in an unexpected format. It wasn’t until the next morning, eating my standard Catalan breakfast of toasted baguette rubbed with a ripe tomato half and drenched in olive oil, that I realized what I’d eaten the night before had been a highly innovative reworking of something that the chef, Ferran Adrià, probably eats every morning for breakfast.

Genuine art is not merely an interesting collection of colors or shapes and edible arts are not just a collection of pleasant flavors. Aesthetic properties must connect to and resonate with something already present but latent in consciousness, tapping into a reservoir of meaning that makes them available to the emotions, the intellect, or sensibility. In the Edible arts, perhaps more than in other media, that reservoir is a food tradition.

Diners come to the table with a history of experiences that will shape what they taste. When chefs do not pay homage to that history, food lacks meaning. Flavors without context are like a pretty, yet pedestrian landscape painting. Pleasant enough to experience but without the deeper meanings that we expect from works of art.

Another Attack on Wine Expertise

10 Thursday May 2012

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The recent article by Hayes and Pickering in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture (behind a paywall) has gotten a lot of attention from the popular press, most of it undeserved.

The research by Hayes and Pickering purports to show that professional wine tasters have a greater ability to detect bitter flavors than non-experts. As reported by Penn State’s press release on the research:

Hayes said that the participants sampled an odorless chemical — propylthiouracil — that is used to measure a person’s reaction to bitter tastes. People with acute tasting ability will find the chemical — also referred to as PROP, or prope — extremely bitter, while people with normal tasting abilities say it has a slightly bitter taste, or is tasteless.

However, from this interesting bit of research, the authors draw a sweeping, entirely unsupported conclusion:

Hayes, who worked with Gary Pickering, professor of biological sciences and psychology/wine science, Brock University, Ontario, Canada, said that the acute taste of wine experts may mean that expert recommendations in wine magazines and journals may be too subtle for average wine drinkers to sense.

And the press has published an eyeball-snatching flurry of articles and blog posts telling consumers that they have no reason to listen to wine experts since the ordinary person cannot detect the flavors discerned by wine experts.

“Wine experts are more likely to have a very exquisite, acute sense of taste that the rest of us can’t sense,” said Hayes, one of the authors of the report, in a telephone interview. “Some of that is biology.”

The problem is that the research doesn’t warrant the conclusions the researchers draw from it.

First of all, there are hundreds of compounds in wine that account for its flavor and texture. A greater sensitivity to bitterness doesn’t entail a greater sensitivity to these other compounds.

Secondly, Propylthiouracil is the substance typically used to identify “supertasters” whose sensitivity to bitterness is explained by the larger number and greater concentration of papillae that make up their taste buds. But supertasters are also primarily women, and will tend to also dislike broccoli, bitter greens, chocolate, coffee, soy, sugar, and fat. Moreover supertasters tend to drink less alcohol than non-supertasters since they dislike its bitter flavor. I doubt that wine professionals tend to dislike alcohol! Or these other substances either. And they are not disproportionately women. At the very least, researchers should try to cross-reference these other characteristics before drawing sweeping conclusions.

In addition, Hayes is suggesting that the higher sensitivity to bitterness is explained by a genetic predisposition. But the tendency to identify and dislike bitterness among wine professionals may be a learned response. Bitterness in wine is an indicator of all sorts of quality-reducing characteristics of the wine-making process including, excess alcohol, excess tannin, poorly integrated oak,  and under-ripe grapes, which can make bitterness more apparent. It is likely that wine professionals have trained themselves to detect bitterness and to judge it unpleasant, even when presented with a single, bitter-tasting substance, as it typically indicates poorly made wine. But if it is a learned response, then consumers have more reason to listen to wine critics since their expertise can help consumers better evaluate the wine they purchase.

I have not read the original article that contains the research but, as far as I can tell from the reports, the research makes no attempt to distinguish biological influence from learned response. There is ample scientific evidence that taste is cognitively penetrable. That is to say, what we think about the wine will influence what we taste. Unless one knows what to look for and learns to discriminate between very subtle flavor components, many of the qualities of wine will be undetectable to the ordinary consumer—and their enjoyment will be less than what it could be with more knowledge.

It is no doubt true that our ability to taste is influenced by biology and that people differ with regard to their biological characteristics. It hardly follows from this fact that learning plays no role in determining taste. As with most of our characteristics, taste is a complex interaction between biology and environmental influence, i.e. learning. Yet, Hayes seems to deny that interaction when he concludes consumers should not listen to experts.

Scientists are good at science. They tend to be less competent when it comes to making normative judgments about the implications of their research, and often positively ham-handed in disseminating the meaning of their research to the public.

And publicity-seeking claims just get in the way. Had Hayes promoted his findings that wine professionals differ from non-professionals in their judgments about bitterness, only wine professionals would have paid attention. Adding the nonsense about what consumers should do got lots of eyeballs but it wasn’t science.

It just contributes to the strain of “anti-expertise” currently coursing through American society.

The Sounds of Sweetness

12 Thursday Apr 2012

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468px-IdaSweetAsAppleCover Studies investigating the effect of music on the taste of food and wine keep proliferating. In this recent report, test subjects, when asked to match food and wine with musical notes, assigned sweets to the high notes and savory flavors to the low notes. And in another study, a soundtrack with higher pitches made toffee taste sweeter than a soundtrack with lower pitches.

Researcher Charles Spence reports on a third study:

“We’ve shown that if you take something with competing flavors, something like bacon-and-egg ice cream, we were able to change people’s perception of the dominant flavor—is it bacon, or egg?—simply by playing sizzling bacon sounds or farmyard chicken noises.”

Bacon-and-egg ice cream—psych studies are getting quite exotic.   Spence has also shownthat subjects perceive potato chips as crisper and better-tasting when the crunch is amplified through headphones.

A few months ago I commented on a study in which the type of background music effects our perception of wine properties. Subjects in this study were given glasses of either Chilean Cab or a Chardonnay. Both wines were perceived to be heavier when listening to heavy metal music when compared to lighter musical fare.

So lighting, music and ambiance don’t just create atmosphere, they actually shape flavors.

We know that smell and taste is influenced by what we believe. These studies show that, in addition to that cognitive influence, the brain synthesizes various channels of information into a single impression well before we make those cognitive judgments about the sensory information we receive. All of this is happening independently of any conscious awareness.

It would be interesting to know whether trained winetasters can resist this influence.

Perhaps blind tastings should be silent tastings as well.

Who Do You Believe? The Wine Critic or Your Lyin’ Nose

03 Tuesday Apr 2012

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pinocchioDo wine critics matter? Isn’t taste subjective? Can there really be wine expertise in the same sense that doctors have expertise at diagnosing diseases and auto mechanics are good at fixing cars? Shouldn’t you just drink what you like?

Wine criticism comes under a lot of, well, criticism, and given the plethora of “studies” reported in the press about the unreliability of wine experts, it would appear to be a popular genre. Here is one example.

We are comfortable with music criticism, art criticism, and consumer-reports-style assessments of everything from mattresses to universities. But wine criticism, to some, seems unworthy of inclusion in this culturally salient practice of judging preferences. There are in fact good reasons for singling out wine and perhaps food evaluation as particularly suspect. Our abilities to taste and smell seem less finely tuned to detect subtle differences than our other senses, especially when the tastes and smells are blended together. This is in part because tastes and smells disappear quickly unlike the relatively fixed objects in visual space. Furthermore, there is much good evidence that our taste and smell perceptions are more easily influenced by price and reputation, environmental factors like the kind of music playing in the background, and the suggestions of other people around us. A companion loudly proclaiming to detect a “hint of cinnamon on the nose” will often mean, to an impressionable novice, that anything other than cinnamon will be undetectable. By contrast, our visual and auditory experiences seem much less susceptible to influence. Loud proclamations that the blue chair across the room is really red will not get far.

We also struggle to precisely remember tastes and smells. Try to remember exactly what that bottle of Saxum tasted like last night compared to your memory of a melody or the visual image of your pet poodle. The melody and the poodle will have a clarity that our taste and smell memories can never achieve. Even when an aroma does trigger a memory, finding the words to describe it is challenging at best. Although we can sometimes name an object that reminds us of an aroma—lemon, oak, blueberries, etc.—finding a precise description is another matter, especially when the aroma or flavor is unfamiliar or complex. These problems are compounded when wine critics use elaborate metaphors—majestic, masculine, charming, or sexy—to describe wines.

In a word, our taste and aroma mechanisms are untrustworthy. When people disagree about them, it seems reasonable to just chalk it up to there being, in fact, no right or wrong answer to questions about a wine’s character and quality. But if there is no right or wrong answer, the whole idea of expertise goes out the window. The reason why we trust a doctor or a mechanic to give us information is that they (or at least some of them) are in a position to report the truth. If there is no truth, there is no genuine expertise.

So is wine evaluation a mountain too high? Are critics, by trying to describe and evaluate wine, engaged in a noble but fruitless task? (Insert your favorite joke about noble fruit)

In fact, despite disagreements about wine quality, wine tasting is not as subjective as the skeptics would have us believe. Experienced wine lovers will agree, regardless of their preferences, that there is tremendous regional and varietal diversity among wines, and that weather, climate, and geography influence the final product. They will also agree that some wines are extraordinary and some are not, and in between there are many degrees of difference. They will agree that some winemakers, having studied the science of winemaking and having constantly tasted grapes and wine through each stage of the winemaking process, strive for a kind of excellence that conforms to genuine standards. Most winemakers believe that there is a right way, a wrong way, and their way; and they believe that these judgments presuppose standards that cannot be compromised in their pursuit of quality.

The skeptic about wine criticism must believe either that none of these differences exist in reality or that the human mind is incapable of tracking them. They must believe that the differences caused by weather, climate, and geography are undetectable to human observers, that there are no differences between Petrus and plonk, and that the intense striving for perfection that some winemakers exhibit is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing”.

None of these assumptions are remotely plausible. In fact, they would seem to require a conspiracy theory that would make the “black helicopter” crowd look reasonable.

Wine criticism is nothing more or less than an attempt to track and report on the qualitative differences between wines. It is extraordinarily difficult for the reasons listed above. For me, that difficulty is precisely what makes it interesting. Wine experts can be fooled, they can be influenced by the sorts of things that influence all human beings, and individual preferences undoubtedly exist, although training and experience can overcome preferences up to a point. But none of this entails there are no truths to be uncovered about the characteristics of wine.

If skeptics are simply pointing out the inherent difficulties in wine tasting, I have no argument with them. If they think the practice is fraudulent, they incur a heavy burden to show there is no real expertise, a burden which cannot be discharged by pointing out particular cases of critical failure.

If your nose is telling you there are no differences between wines, remember, the nose is an untrustworthy guide especially if it lacks training.