Taste as a Measure of Man.* Please No.

The use of taste to take the measure of others swung completely out of control on Twitter in the last couple of days. For those of you wise enough not to venture into the wild world of Twitter, with its wonderful openings to ideas you never knew about countered by items you flick through as fast as you can, someone called Jon Becker published the following tweet encouraging the sort of game that many on Twitter enjoy.

All too soon, this shifted from a game into an exchange of insults in which taste was used as a measure of worth whether of individuals or of whole cultures.

I can’t help but feel a little for Jon Becker who surely can’t have anticipated this. If you are a historian of food, though, you can see that this has been long in the making. Food writers and food groups can all to easily slip into equating taste with worth.

As it happened as the whole Becker affair escalated I had been thumbing through An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, the posthumous collection of essays by fabled English food writer, Elizabeth David. When I first encountered her work in the 1960s, I was enthralled. Her lyrical writing and clear vision about what was and was not worth eating were entirely new to me. I felt included in a coterie of readers who shared the secrets of good taste.

It was only later that this sense of a special coterie began to grate. Speaking of those who liked store-bought mayonnaise. “Like most tastes, that for olive oil and mayonnaise made with it is an acquired taste. Those of us who have acquired it, and hold that the original version of mayonnaise is th only true one, also feel that we should be entitled to accuse th caterer who offers us something totally different, under the same name, of fraudulent practice.” Or of gathering chanterelles in Scotland. “The schoolmaster’s wife stopped to look . . . ‘You’re never going to eat those dirty things?’ But she was a kindly woman, and the same evening invited us in for whisky.” Or of a London restaurateur, M. Pigeon and his restaurant. His “brown wallpaper and even the concierge-type blight cast by his wife are still rather more acceptable than the amateur theatricals of the ex-Eighth Army corporal down the road, whose eating establishment is got up to look like the inside of a saddler’s shop and where if you order an omelette as likely as not it will turn up inside a crust of puff pastry.”

Taken individually, these judgements are not so bad. Taken collectively, though, the confidence that good taste coincides with honesty, with intelligence, with discernment, and with class more generally becomes first wearisome, then irritating, then downright self-centered and unthinking.

I don’t think I am wrong, though, in seeing a clear connection between these essays sixty years ago and the kinds of comments that popped on on the Becker thread. It’s become one “natural” way to talk about food.

Whenever something seems natural and self-evident, it’s worth looking for the usually unrecognized assumptions underlying that natural self-evident-ness. Attitudes to food, just as much as attitudes to politics, are underpinned by beliefs, beliefs that I call a culinary ethos or culinary philosophy.

Underlying the belief that good taste in food is a measure of the whole person or group are two culinary philosophies. Aristocratic culinary philosophy long held that each stratum of living beings from humans down through plants had its own appropriate food and way of eating. Within humans, the ruling classes had foods that distinguished them from the lower classes, so that tastes were a quick read on social class. In romantic culinary philosophy, taste, although less class-based, was thought to mirror sensibility, revealing much of the individual’s character.

I’ve been thinking about all this over the past few months as I prepared an essay for The Hedgehog Review on “Toward a Culinary Ethos for the Twenty-first Century.”

Heretical as it sounds, I’m coming to believe that the current emphasis on taste in food is overplayed, and not just for reasons of physical health. Cookbooks that vie to offer the tastiest recipes, elite colleges that feel that students must have really tasty food, or corporations that labor to make their products as tasty as possible, however well-meaning their motives, play into a culture where taste all too often is used to discriminate and separate.

Sharing food, which has always been an important way to encourage sociability (although I know this is not always the case) means being willing to swallow food that you don’t find particularly tasty. Learning to do so used to be an important part of growing up. So down with taste.

Taste is not the measure of a man.*

_____________________________

Partly, but far from entirely, tongue in cheek.

*For man, read a person, a group, a culture, or a nation, because I’m borrowing from the quotation often and probably wrongly attributed to Samuel Johnson, “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”

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