Connoisseur or Consumer? Butter and Margarine

“If we butter up the boss, maybe we’ll get a raise.”  “One of the great marketing ploys was to label turkey a ‘butterball.’” “Some people, not happy with what is owed them, want their bread buttered on both sides.” Butter, metaphorical butter at least, has a good rap. For real butter, the story has not always been the same. During the “avoid cholesterol,” “avoid animal fats" era of the 1980s butter became a public health target.  Longing to savor a “buttery” croissant? Stock 1980s advice: Don’t do it.

The millennium brought about a change. Things began to shift  toward natural products: real animal fats, as opposed to trans fats, and sugar as the new health threat. Butter sales began climbing once again.

Some obvious lessons have been drawn from this.  There was a time when the butter-alternative, margarine, was touted both for reasons of health and a general fascination with progress. One French margarine brand actually called itself l’Avenir, the future.  As Margaret Visser explains, margarine is a “wonderful

mirror of certain images of ourselves.” At least this was the case at one era.  It represented modernity, the triumph of science over nature, convenience and thrift.

The only downside: a taste that was bland and predictable.  It’s color, white, was also unappetizing, but this was easily remedied by artificial coloring. The taste issue proved less of a problem than might at first have seemed. This was because humans had shifted from "connoisseurs" to “consumers.” Central to being defined as a “consumer” is a two-fold move. First, relativism looms large.  All taste is believed to be just subjective. Second,there is an encouragement of de-skilling, the dismantling of abilities to

cook. Qualitative distinctions, especially those based on conditions operative apart from humans, begin to disappear. Humans become like little gods. Whatever they pronounce as good becomes, thereby, good.  It’s a bonanza for advertisers.

They fill the “it’s all subjective” anyway void. Relativism and de-skilling present advertisers with great opportunities. Critical, evaluative faculties are weakened. Heritage and tradition-associated tastes lose their hold. Some results: mass appeal comes to dominate over qualitative taste; “No surprises” comes to be considered a determinative factor in choice.

The new millennium brought important changes. One beneficiary: butter.  Its sales grew as those of margarine shrank. The “we are essentially consumers” model continued to be strong but some chipping away was evident. Human beings began to recapture their biological label Homo Sapiens, "man the taster." “Connoisseur,” one who judges based on knowledge, one concerned with quality, could be revived as a label to contrast with “consumer.”

The altered framework shakes up the consumer-centered value system.  The consumer framework prizes certain ideals: convenience, efficiency, and predictability are chief among them.  The “connoisseur” framework tends to highlight taste, health, and naturalness. Philosophically, there was also a move against relativism. As a medieval adage once put it, our judgments, at their best, have a  fundamentum in re, a basis in reality.  Of course the individual is doing the judging. But it’s not arbitrary and solely subjective.  There is interaction with conditions operative apart from ourselves. “Opinions,” may be matters of arbitrary predilection.  “Judgments” are not. They are distinguished by their awareness of some fundamentum in re.  

The challenge to relativism is also a challenge to consumerism.  The flattening, trivializing and levelling of taste is almost a necessity for a consumer culture. Real discrimination is disastrous for mass sales. Products like beers that are not really “beer” (made with rice instead of barley, for example) can be mass-marketed and become widely popular. The consumer is, on one hand flattered, treated like a little-god whose preferences are the final evaluative word. On the other hand, the consumer is de-skilled to the degree that powers of

discrimination are lost. The resultant void opens the door for the manipulations of advertising.  

The recent rise in sales of butter over margarine are indicative of the newer attitude. So is the penchant of millenials to favor real cheese over factory produced simulacra.

Judgments, for intelligent creatures, should indeed have a fundamentum in re, be based on conditions actually operative apart from us. The temptation to be God-like is ever present.  Its most recent variation: “consumers as little gods deciding, simply by their subjective preferences, what is good or bad.” This represents the latest version of the “thee shall be like gods” temptation.  It appears that, although their parents might have succumbed, millenials are somewhat resistant. They understand themselves more as “connoisseurs” than as “consumers.”

All You Can Eat

“All you can eat.”  “Ice cold beer.”  Signs meant to attract when they should repel.  What is it about us which finds attractive an appeal to food for bulk; to a liquid so chilled that subtleties of taste have disappeared?  Naturally, as readers of this blog realize, it all goes back to philosophy.  

For a long time, evaluation, determining what is most worthy of selection, was dominated by familiar themes: moderation, limit, balance.  Take the ancient Greek exhortations: “Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess.”  

These are closely related.  By knowing ourselves, (1) we realize the importance of  achieving moderation, the right mean between extremes.   In turn, moderation makes little sense without (2) an appreciation for limits, and (3) a sense of multiple variables that have to be kept in balance.  The food world offers ready-made examples: salt, sugar, fat.  Each of these is good, in moderation, within limits, as part of a balanced diet.

The “nothing in excess” philosophy held sway for a long time.  Like any position, it could be pushed to excesses of its own.  “Limits” morph into rigid social structures and oppressive moral codes.    So the Modern, post-Renaissance, world  was inaugurated by a challenge to limits. The Modern era

was liberationist. Freedom, i.e. rejecting limits, constraints and restraints, became the highest good.  

One positive result was the establishment of democratic republics.  Once again, though, the “nothing in excess” rule came to be violated.  Not just violated, but the very rule was put into question.  Limits became inherently bad. They all needed to be transgressed, subverted, overcome.    We have here an oft-repeated pattern: overreaction.  Proper attempts at reform come to be dominated by simplification and short-cuts.

Nothing offers a more convenient short-cut  than quantitative measures. Such a move also helps encourage another human temptation: evading responsibility. Instead of responsibility, we seek neat algorithms, easy formulas to follow.

The “nothing in excess” position made evading responsibility difficult.  “Moderation, by its nature, is an elusive target.  Success depends on many factors: Individual circumstances, the right cluster of ideals, tradition, experience,  evidence from experts. This mix hardly provides a clear-cut, knock-down, "just follow this" algorithm. In other words, uncertainty and anxiety are built in to the “nothing in excess” model.

How circumvent uncertainty?  Minimize anxiety? Reduce responsibility?  Simple: abandon the “nothing in excess” philosophy and adopt a “challenge limits/seek quantitative  measures” approach.  “Good” can now come to mean (a) ignoring limits by seeking always to overcome them, (b) ignoring balance by  maximizing one outcome,  and (c) ignoring moderation by taking guidance from quantitative measures.

Daniel Yankelovich, the public opinion analyst, well described this last strategy:

 "The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide."

Step three is where “all you can eat” and “ice cold beer” fit in.  The simplification/short cut is clear: the best food “deal”  provides the most bulk for the price; the best beer is chilled to the max.  Both standards are measurable.  Both isolate a single factor.  Each rejects limits.  Neither aims for the right mean between extremes.  Both, indeed, identify good with a rejection of moderation.

So, why are we drawn by such invitations? We have bought into a “know thyself” attitude that is quite different from the “nothing in excess” one.   The self we know today is a bundle of desires seeking satisfaction.  The “good” life is one which maximizes satisfaction of desires, breaks boundaries, and finds comfort in quantitative standards.

In short, today’s response to ‘know thyself” is “I am a consumer.”  The "citizen" of ancient and modern republics has given way to the "consumer."  “All you can eat” turns out to be a siren song. It’s a feel-good, don’t-let- others-limit-you, kind of call.  In the end, though, Nemesis, the Greek goddess of comeuppance, returns.  Subversion of food limits comes with an inevitable non-monetary cost:  weight and health suffer.  Our value system is badly distorted. Signs like “All you can eat” and “ice cold beer”  should send a clear signal: stay away.