RELATIVISM, YOLO, FOOD

Swans, YUM!  Squirrels YUM! Dolphins YUM!  Well “yum” is kind of an imaginative stretch, at least for some of us today. At other times and other places  “yum” made/makes sense.

Can we generalize from this?   Should we, to adopt a philosophical label, embrace “relativism?”  After all, food practices seem to indicate the “yum” reaction has no foothold apart from contingent, changeable cultural conventions.

What might give pause is the radical relativism embraced by the early 21st century “You Only Live Once,” fad. YOLO was (1) encouraged by philosophical

relativism (better and worse are just social constructions) and (2) accompanied by a particular ethic: experience all you can.  The ramifications were problematic: YOLO, so get drunk and drive wildly; YOLO, so, go ahead, urinate and defecate wherever and whenever. Soon came the realization “YOLO is dumb.”

When it comes to food, YOLO can find both defenders and opponents. On the support side: “YOLO, so eat some dolphin ( squirrel, swan).” On the negative side: YOLO, so I’ll just chow down on some fugu, even though the chef is not properly trained.”

A stalemate? Not quite.  A more fine-grained analysis suggests the need for a paradigm shift.  First, eating is interactive. Second, food ingestion exists along a continuum: inedible, somewhat inedible, somewhat edible, culturally approved edible, edible in desperate situations, commonly eaten.   

The relativist position need not adopt the simplistic YOLO pattern.  A better defense is entitled “Morality is a Culturally Conditioned Response.” Despite the nuanced, and thus adequate, title, the article goes on to defend a rather strong relativism.  Here is where interaction and continuum make a difference. One thing even refined relativism assumes: a bi-level backdrop. Humans here; world there. Values here; neutrality there. Reason is neutral/Evaluations are non-rational.

These bifurcations are challenged by stressing interaction and continua. In terms of the food continuum, there is, at one end, the biologically inedible (e.g. soap); then, “inedible” in the “it can kill you sense” (emperor Claudius).

“Inedible” could also mean, it’s ok physiologically, but hard to stomach (see disgust museum).   Then, there is the “inedible now in this form” (cashews which are toxic before being heat treated). We could add   “inedible because of allergies;” and the well known “inedible for cultural/religious reasons.” At any point on the continuum a judgment has been made.  The judgment does not result from bi-level (culture here/nature there) opposition. It results from interaction. Intelligent agents try to to figure out clues and indications.

A medieval phrase is helpful here. It’s  cum fundamento

in re, “with a basis  in reality.” Plants and animals do not come with placards that say “tasty but deadly,”  “healthy and nutritious,” “disgusting in odor, but good in taste.” Nor does the absence of such placards mean that all valuations are subjective constructions.  Humans, as hungry creatures, seek to establish which entities are edible and which not. The resulting judgments emerge from a collaboration between inquiring intelligence and properties operative in the world ( cum fundamento in re).

Living in a post-Medieval era, we could add a partner phrase, one sensitive to  cultural pluralism: judgments cum fundamento in tribu.  Interaction would still rule, but in these cases it would signal the the interplay  of intelligence and the practices of a community (or “tribe,” tribus).  

Even here, though, we move too hastily if we apply the relativist label.  Differences are culturally conditioned. This is not the same as being merely subjective. The fundamento dimension (there are clues) remains. Judgments are recognized and welcomed. They just depend on more than clues from nature. Religious judgments build their warrant by including intangible factors. Food regulations, for example, can encourage solidarity via shared behaviors, equality, since the practices impact everyone, and self-improvement, fostered by discipline.  

The paradigm shift that highlights interaction and continua helps draw attention to concrete practices. The totalizing labels “absolutism” or “relativism” offer a bifurcation that is neat. Lived experience is intricate and complex.  Humans are active participants, involved, willy nilly, in interactions. Judgments neither simply read off what is there, nor impose structures. They pay attention to operative factors, aim at properly reading indications, and hope the resulting assessments are accurate.

This (a) leaves plenty of leeway for variation. Variation is not the same as relativist subjectivism. It also (b) allows for intelligent discussion. But, such discussion, technically, for the relativist (recall the non disputandum, in de gustibus non disputandum est) should represent nothing more than an empty exercise. E.g. Gratitude and greed, why bother discussing their relative merits/defects? Non disputandum rules.

Thinking about food can serve as a good source of examples for an epistemology of cum fundamento. How? First by replacing bifurcation with a continuum. Second, by emphasizing how eating is inherently interactive.  Both of those factors help overcome the great human temptation toward the hasty generalization: it’s all objective or it’s all subjective.

WHEN SWILL IS SWELL

“Swell” and “swill.” One letter separates them. But what a meaning difference it makes.  

“Swill,” I remember as a term of my youth. It was common when people lived on farms.  There, the family’s pigs received, as feed, the “swill,” what was leftover from the kitchen. Naturally, a negative connotation followed. After all “swill’ was that which was rejected.  

“Swell,” by contrast, carries a positive connotation.   Initially it was a neutral term, it indicated a natural formation, something like a hill, or a gentle ocean wave. Today, the term’s more common use is in line with expressions of satisfaction and affirmation.  Two examples: the expression “that’s swell;” the 1937 song “Gee, but you’re swell.” In Easter Parade, Judy Garland

and Fred Astaire, dressed as hobos, got ironic mileage with their song “A bunch of swells.”

Could hobos be “swells”?  No and yes. If to be a “swell” meant well-dressed, then hobos would never fit the bill.  If, though, “swell” meant lovable, as in the song “Gee, but you’re swell,” then character would supersede clothing. Hobos could indeed be “swells.”

“Swill” is more uniformly derisive. Some of what accompanies the preparation of a meal is excluded, set apart, tossed out.  It is appropriately named “refuse.” Yet, even “swill” can undergo a valuational shift.

Take potato peelings. At one time, they fell into the category of that- which-is-to-be-discarded, i.e. “swill.” Today, we are

advised, for health reasons, to to eat our potatoes with their peels. What was once swill is now swell.  

It would be hard to find a human community that did not distinguish swell from swill, better from worse.  There is a lingering temptation, though, to reify the distinction. This results in the creation of an irrevocable, non-revisable, two-column list.  One side is labelled “good,” the other “bad.” We here come face to face with a lingering temptation: create a neat, oppositional, good/evil list. The temptation even has an official, historically-informed, name: Manichaeism.  This was a movement, based on a 3d century Babylonian prophet named Mani. It taught that creation had two sources, two ultimate powers, one good, the other evil. The two- value, double column list was little more than the practical application of this cosmic battleground.  

Any neat division equipped with  unquestionable valuations is bound to occasion a backlash (especially among the groups who fall on the negative side of things).  That reaction, quite understandable, can, nonetheless, be overdone. The excess lies in a proclamation that appraisals are nothing more than subjective impositions. Rather than leave neat bifurcations behind, this position simply creates another one: subjective vs objective. The Manichean assumes that existing value judgments are rooted in objective data.  The subjectivist claims that all evaluations are arbitrary, historically conditioned, contrivances. Either/or is not overcome. It is just reformulated.

“Swell” and “swill” help draw us into a more nuanced, more genuinely human, position.   “He’s a swell” was a way of identifying a spiffy dresser. Objective conditions, the kind of clothing worn, were readily identifiable. Then, as with “you’re swell,” the positive valuation was extended to character.

At this point the evaluation becomes a bit trickier. Without the obvious markers of expensive, stylish clothing,  mistakes are possible. Still the value determination is not just “subjective.” It’s a judgment. This means that although it has a subjective dimension (someone is doing the judging), it also has an objective one (the assessment is based on evidence, behavior, indications of character).

Similarly, what we judge to be “swill” can be up for for revision.  Potato peels, as mentioned above, can move from “swill” to “fit for our diet.”  This is not a purely subjective construction. It arises from information about the nutritional properties of potato skins and the physiological needs of mammals like ourselves.

Could we be wrong? Sure, that’s always a possibility. Future research may once again move potato skins from

“swell for humans” to “swill for pigs” The possibility of error is telling. It’s a sign of human inquiry.  Absolutists and relativists seek an escape from human limitations. One proclaims a perfect, already established, vision of truth. The other dismisses the human struggle to discover more fully accurate truths. Humans, it says, do not establish what is the case, but rather impose values.

For ordinary humans, though, enhanced intelligent awareness can mean that “swill” becomes “swell” and vice versa.

Ethics as Educated Taste

It would be hard to find a culture which did not distinguish better from worse. There are differences, of course, in how to construe better and worse. One culture might place commercial values at the center. Another might make respect for the elderly a centerpiece. Some may deal with the dead via burial, others via cremation.

What strikes outsiders immediately are the differences.  They are, after all, real. So real that people often overlook the

similarities.  

Donald Brown, an anthropologist, did as much as anyone to explore either outright similarities or overlapping and analogous patterns across cultures. Some of what he identified: communication via language, joke telling, crying; the presence of rituals, song, dance, jealousy, feasting, cosmetics; copulation taking place in private, privileged ways of caring for children, cooking.

Indeed cooking can serve as a kind of model. Actual cuisines, it is true, vary widely (differences are real).  At the same time, cooking along with its accompaniments (efforts made toward good taste, predictable meal times, manners). In other words, similarities are also real.

Differences and Overlaps.  General patterns and plenty of flexibility within them.  Hanging on to both is a challenge. People prefer a nice neat either/or: either ONE and only one correct way, or, admit that standards of better and worse simply cannot be discussed apart from what each culture has established.  

The neat either-or opposition works well when dealing with conceptual abstractions.  

Rigid either-or thinking depends on staying within conceptual purity (i.e. the idea "black" and the idea "white") while disregarding the more varied, and, yes, murky components of lived experience.

The dilemma-driven approach although satisfying for those who like neatness, is disastrous for thinking. After all, one side accepts that the proper answers are already there. The other thinks that whatever local groups decide should be the final word.  In either case, we are relieved from the hard work associated with intelligence: thinking seriously about ways to make things better in our own communities. With cooking as our paradigm we could rephrase this as thinking seriously about how to educate our tastes.

To be human is to be, as Linnaeus labelled us, homo sapiens, “man the taster.”  Okay, Linnaeus may have thought he was saying “man the wise one.”  

Still the term he chose, sapiens, from the Latin verb sapere, definitely connotes tasting, savoring. In addition, the tasting/wisdom overlap is considerable. Wisdom suggests the proper orientation in living. Another way of saying this: the proper arrangement and prioritization of tastes.

Those who think that it’s all subjective, don’t put much stock in the educability of taste. Why bother? There are no standards beyond individual predilections.   It is true that there are some strange combinations that will be embraced by somebody somewhere. Take the donut burger, AKA the Luther Vandross burger: patties of meat, cheese, bacon, and, here is the unique dimension, buns made from a doughnut, usually from Krispy Kreme. There is enough of a demand for these that Walmart sells a frozen version. Maybe somewhere, someone loves grapes dunked in

ketchup, or rhubarb soaked in vinegar.  Despite such outliers, certain patterns of acceptability emerge when it comes to tastes. Thinking in terms of ranges is probably a better way to go. Tastes will never converge toward a single pole. But this does not mean that, in general, anything goes.  “Thinking” should begin from this combination.

As a general rule there should be a few guidelines associated with thinking: avoid oversimplification, avoid short-cuts. Thinking aims at coming up with formulations that articulate the concrete situation in which we find ourselves. This aim can be frustrated by an ever present simplification which becomes a short-cut to avoid thinking, the two bin approach: either “there is only one objective model” or “it’s all subjective.”   

If de gustibus non disputandum were common practice, rather than a popular

slogan, then the two-bin approach might actually make sense. In fact, tastes can be and often are disputed. Picture two friends discussing the merits of various beers.  Tastes can also be educated. My first taste of lobster went badly (and I’m from Maine). As a youngster I much preferred a hamburger and fries. (Not the Luther Vandross burger, although previously frozen fries were just fine--always doused with plenty of ketchup.)

In general, thinking in terms of ranges rather than fixed alternatives allows a better take on what it means to differentiate in terms of values.  Most importantly, don’t buy into simplifications that encourage the avoidance of thinking. Most prominent excuse-making techniques to avoid: (1) the answer is already objectively there; (2) there are no real answers, it’s all up to the individual.

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.”

Appetite-Taste/Nature-Culture

Immanuel Kant once disparaged an Iroquois visitor to Paris for appreciating nothing other than “the eating houses.”  Kant wished to sort out humans guided by appetite from others guided by superior tastes.    A recent article in Aeon magazine deals with food metaphors relative to reading. It charts the trajectory from appetite to taste, suggesting how “In the 18th century, writers began to distinguish between appetite (the connection between reading and the body) and taste (connection between reading and the mind).”

“Appetite” is immediate and indiscriminate.  “Taste,” is selective, refined and mediated.  Appetite and taste may, in ordinary minds, be intermingled.  This would not do for Kant. Aided by free-standing substantives like “body” and “mind” his ideal was not proper integration of the bodily and the mental. It was the segregation of body and mind.  Physiological taste relating to food was suspicious because it remained intertwined with mere appetite.    The more elevated tastes would have little to do with food.  

The pattern here is familiar: (a)  a need to sort out better and worse; (b) mapping better and worse isomorphically with mind and body; (c) thinking that humanity, as the  Aeon writer put it, represents little more than a  “cesspit of ungoverned appetite;” and (d) subsequently, celebrating a power of domination, self-control, as the only hope for keeping appetites in check.

On the other side, there have always been philosophers championing  “natural” tendencies. They warned against substituting impositions of artificiality and convention.  The Stoics and Epicureans moved in this direction.  Their “follow nature” mantra was resurrected by a thinker like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by Romanticism, and by various communal living experiments in the 1960s.

Both tendencies, the superior-taste crowd and the follow-nature crowd, share one commonality: they are autoreferential. This allows them an escape from risk and responsibility. The superior-taste position says says it’s all about the cultural conventions we have imposed.  End of story. The follow-nature school says, I am just following my own true nature. End of story.

What is absent? Risk and responsibility. These emerge with dependence,  hetero-referentiality. The latter asks of us that we respond to signs and signals coming from outside of us.   

The appetite/taste contrast is one version of the wider nature/culture opposition.  Are there ways to rethink this opposition? To break with autoreferentiality?  To embrace, rather than escape, vulnerability and dependence?  To emphasize the unending need for exploration, questioning, dialogue?  

The answer is yes, but the approach may be surprising--taking taste, this time actual physiological taste, seriously.   Such a taste is unavoidably hetero-referential.  It involves responsiveness, i.e. responding to signs and signals coming from outside of us. Some results: natural appetite and taste are not two contrasting forces. They are correlative.  Second, the “taste” that fosters well-being is neither a “construction,” an artificial, merely subjective imposition, nor is it merely hardwired. It is appetite cultivated, channelled,  informed by experience, experiment and tradition.   

“Taste” serves as a good model for hetero-referential responsibility because it cannot use either culture or nature as a final determining factor. Rather than calling on a single foundation, it always involves election among alternatives. This election, in turn, emerges from clues, indications, signs that are present in a world we have not made but on which we depend.   Taste  not only depends on factors apart from us, but is also, as scientists put it, “multi-modal” involving, as it does, taste buds, smell, tactility, family and cultural practices, visual clues, temperature and even sounds.

What does all this mean?  First of all, we have to reintegrate appetite and taste (also nature/culture).   Appetite requires taste, and by nature we require culture.  Second, when using “taste” metaphorically, we should not stray too far from its physiological, food-related associations.  Wanting to get beyond responsibility defined as election among alternatives, we tend to ignore the irreducibility of the multiple and seek some single criterion. This criterion then is utilized as a simple, straightforward guide which mandates a particular behavior.

When, by contrast, we remain close to the multi-modal understanding of taste, we are always (i) dealing with a multiplicity of factors, (ii) many of those factors involve an inseparable blend of nature/culture, (iii) our response is a melange which seeks a proper balance of factors, (iv) we must always take an active role in adjusting the balance, revising  and polishing it, engaging in an experimental back and forth that moves from worse to better, (v) all the while realizing that a perfect unity or un-revisable blend will never be achieved.  

Kant was right to emphasize, taste, just not in the way he envisioned it.