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.

Green Bean Casserole:Friend or Foe?

Green bean casserole.  Source of major disagreement. Side A: this is one of the great  inventions of the American kitchen. Side B: this recipe represents American cuisine at  its worst.

Why bring up green bean casserole? Well, Thanksgiving's coming up, and green bean casserole is a popular Thanksgiving side dish. Also, Dorcas Reilly, the woman who oversaw its development at the Campbell Soup Company has just died.

“The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a star.” This, at least, was how the

gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin saw it.  Examples reinforce the claim: the discovery of a new star has little impact on life; but, pizza, hamburgers, mac ‘n cheese, hot fudge sundae--now those make a big difference.

What’s the controversy over green bean casserole?  One the positive side, the recipe offers great possibilities for tinkering and customizing.  It need not remain “pour factory-produced cans into a casserole.” Fresh beans can be used, ditto with  mushrooms, and onions. The sauce can be a “bechamel” (French names are always a plus for epicures).

On the negative side, and it is a big one, the recipe encourages “assembling” over “cooking,.”  The word “cooking” now means a lot more (and a lot less) than it used to. Michael Pollan made the point most clearly in  Cooked,

a point well summarized in an interview.

The upshot: a lot of activities we call  “cooking” are really “assembling.”

If humans, as the anthropologist Richard Wrangham has asserted, are the “cooking

animals,” then our humanity, to an important degree, depends on keeping up the artistry of cooking. This needn’t mean fancy, complicated dishes. One of my own favorite recipes is for Carbonade Flamande whose ingredients are beef, onions, flour, salt, pepper, thyme and beer.  

If what defines us is the physical activity of cooking, the more we move away from it, the further we remove ourselves from our humanity.   The move from cooking is part of a wider trend: the desire to secure results without old-fashioned effort. If I’m sitting at a piano bench, with a sheet of music in front of me, I can only play the music if I have undertaken lots of preliminary toil and training.  The satisfaction of successful playing comes from the combination of effort-and-result. The preliminary efforts of time, practice and concentration are also important in revealing and shaping character. In our “short-cut, it’s only the results that matter” world, character development suffers, as does the satisfaction of achievement that results from struggle. “Combine the contents of three cans” may get us a quick result, but at an important price: chipping away at what makes for the fullness or wholeness (“holiness” in religious terms) of a life.    

Cooking does not just impact the aesthetic possibilities associated with life (cultivating talent, working in a way that leads to  satisfactory culminations). It is also related to another important constituent of full humanity: liberty. Someone who can cook is actually free, i.e. really able to engage in the activity of preparing meals.   “Assemblers,” and, even more, “microwavers” have

subjugated themselves, made themselves subservient. It might not be the kind of dependency that goes by the name “addiction.” Still, the constant requirement for products from a factory means positioning oneself at the indentured extreme of the  independency-dependency continuum.

So, green bean casserole. Should it be loved or loathed? Once again a continuum has to be considered. At one end: fresh green beans, real mushrooms, cream, onions, lovingly (even if not with epicurean finesse) handled by someone who does real cooking.   At the other end: mere assemblage: empty the contents of three cans into a casserole. The latter, not surprisingly, in diminishing our capacities marks us ever more as indentured.

Why? (1) The emancipatory effects, i.e. the liberation of capacities tied to effort, are marginalized, if not abandoned outright.  (2) Once this shift has occurred, freedom is diminished. The use of factory products becomes more a necessity than a free choice. Creating a dependency that is almost like an addiction represents  a real limit on freedom. Assemblers are simply less free than cooks. This increase in dependency and decrease in freedom is, of course, what the good folks at Campbell’s sought in the first place.

Loss of Appetite

Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger features a scene in which a character, despite it being lunchtime, loses her appetite.   Her boyfriend, in the same circumstances, goes right back to chowing down.

Who are they? What are the circumstances? They are Meursault, the novel’s main character, and his girlfriend/fiancee Marie. Meursault, famously, does not play societal games. He does not pretend to be what he is not.  A neighbor, Raymond, has asked him for help writing a letter. The aim of the letter: entrap a young woman with whom Raymond had a relationship. On the day of the disrupted lunch, screams come from Raymond’s apartment. The  letter has worked. The young woman came by. Raymond beat her.

The ruckus causes neighbors to gather in the hallway. Marie, troubled by what she has witnessed, loses her appetite. Meursault remains unaffected.

Camus sought to write a novel featuring an “authentic” central character, one who would not take on roles expected of and assigned by society. What he skillfully depicted is someone completely detached from what goes on around him.  Meursault is indifference personified. He does not care that the letter he has cooperated in writing is part of a vengeful plan. He is not moved by the beating of a young woman. He lives in a self-enclosed world. Societal games might not be for him, but are all evaluative, sympathetic responses part of the false veneer of society?  Meursault does not just refuse hypocritical games. He goes so far as to numb his evaluative response to surrounding events. A young woman is being beaten next door? Duly noted. A mere piece of neutral data. Now, back to lunch.

Not Marie. She cannot remain detached.  The beating scene affects her. She loses her appetite.  Basic bodily needs are eclipsed as non-physiological concerns take center stage.

Abraham Maslow famously identified a “hierarchy of needs.”  It offered a neat framework which ranked the needs in a particular way: the lower needs had to be fulfilled before higher ones could be realized.

It offered a clear-cut system of “axiology”--concern with value and its ranking.  Marie’s loss of appetite suggests how Maslow’s hierarchy was a bit too neat. There are times when the tug of ideals, the commitment to key values, are more important than the demands of physiology. Marie, revulsed by the appalling scene of a young woman being beaten, offers one example.  The injustice, unfairness, general evil of the scene comes to supersede her physiological craving for food.

The same can be said for more well-known scenarios: suffragettes on a hunger strike;  Bobby Sands dying as a result of refusing nutrition; religiously induced fasts; starving artists, the Russian scientists charged with preserving a seed bank who starved rather than eat the seeds entrusted to them. There is also the pathology of anorexia where priorities have been upended and hunger is overridden.

Such scenarios suggest that the Maslow hierarchization needs to be tinkered with in two ways.  First, Self-actualization is not a good name for the highest level. Second, for humans, the hierarchy is flexible, what is higher on the pyramid can, under certain

circumstances, become more fundamental than what is at the base.

Against Self-Actualization.  Suffragettes, Bobby Sands, Russian seed bank scientists: What they held most dear was not actualizing the self. They sacrificed the self for a more communal cause, a cause they saw themselves as serving. One distinguishing  feature of humans is precisely this willingness to place a communal cause as a central ideal, even if it means loss of life.

For a flexible axiology. Humans manifest a cluster of aspirations, impulses, inclinations, wants. Living out the fullness of human life means not being limited by a hierarchy with pre-ordained, fixed levels.  It means being drawn as much by transcendent ideals as by physiological necessity. Both the physiological and the axiological can work together. At difficult times, in certain circumstances, people have to choose.  That the axiological can override the physiological is an indication of how complicated a creature we are.

Of course, humans can always, Meursault-style, numb themselves.  “It’s all the same to

me” they can say. In making such an utterance they situate themselves apart from ordinary human experience.  The position of complete detachment is a seriously artificial one. It requires a lot of work, either individual effort or culturally absorbed effort, to reach the point of neutering, treating as neutral data, the occurrences which make up part of our surroundings.  It is natural for us to hunger for food. It is also natural for us to hunger for fairness, justice, freedom, and respect. What characterizes us, as the special animal we are, is that the prioritization of these hungers is not rigidly fixed.

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.”

Grazing Overtakes Eating

“Three squares.” Even today, people can recognize this as identifying three wholesome meals following a pattern of eating in the morning, at midday and in the evening.  

The expression was first used in the 1860s.  The expression’s frequency peaked in 1920. It has been in decline ever since.  This makes sense since much of the 20th century was guided by ideals that tended to diminish the ritualistic pattern of three daily breaks for food. Certain values tended to fade away: personal interaction, tradition, sociability, leisure. They were replaced by values more conducive to a consumer society: efficiency, convenience, expediency. A recent survey laid out the results: fewer and fewer people follow the three-meals-a-day pattern.

The new way of eating was parodied in David Lodge’s Novel  Paradise News. The main character, a quiet British guy is visiting Hawaii.  What strikes him immediately is how everyone is carrying around food and snacking.  This isn’t eating, he thinks. It’s more like “grazing.” Twentieth-century folks might comment: Why not? Efficiency, convenience and expediency provide our guiding ideals.  Grazing, not having to bother with the inconvenience, time-intensive, cumbersome practice of sitting down to a meal is just how we live out our ideals. It’s also liberating.  Limits, restrictions,

constraints are bad. It is always good to break free of the heavy-handed, tyrannical, burdensome hold they have upon us. Grazing is a liberatory act. No one is telling us when it is ok to eat and when it is not.  

The centrality of efficiency and convenience indicate an important shift in our self-understanding.  Today, that understanding, in the advanced technological west at least, is highly individualistic, inclined toward iconoclasm, caught in a wild pendulum swing between sensualism and asceticism, and fascinated with authenticity.  What all of this means is that some traditional markers of the human condition are pushed to the periphery: the importance of community,

recognition of how inherited traditions are bearers of wisdom, a sense of incarnation which aims at a spiritual/sensual harmonization, and a commitment to goodness that defines it as more than immediate gratification of whatever aspirations happen to float through our beings.  The complex of conditions identifying our contemporary situation also plays itself out in practical nutritional terms. We know those well, especially obesity as a public health issue.

It’s quite possible that those who embrace convenience and efficiency, who reject the pattern of “three squares,” think of themselves as  emancipated from the tyranny of being forced into a particular pattern. They can envision themselves as being more free than those who continue to be constrained by the culturally approved pattern. Their days are defined by doing what they want , when they want, not by an externally imposed schema.

This sounds fine...until we start thinking about it.  Plato, a long time ago, had noticed a problem.

Those who say: “I do what I want whenever I want” are actually the least free of individuals. Yes,  counterintuitive as it may seem, this was Plato’s point. Such people are prisoners of their immediate impulses. They are controlled by every and any immediate inclination that courses through them.  They have little effective freedom, that is, the ability to chart a course, say engage in healthy eating, and actually achieve the envisioned outcome.

Even time, for them is, oppressive. For the patterned eater, the day is divided into spans, some for engaging in projects, some for shared time eating with friends and colleagues. Time is not separated from ongoing events. It is, in fact, marked by such events: work time, lunchtime. The day is parcelled out via the quality of ongoing events.  Time is not just a neutral ticking away of seconds. When people used to talk about “high noon” they

meant a particular portion of the day, the one in which the sun was at its highest point. Time and ongoing events were inseparable. Golf, tennis and baseball still embody this notion of time.

When abstract time, i.e. clock time completely separated from actual events, dominates, then the temptation for giving into immediate inclinations or impulses is harder to resist.  Every moment is potentially eating time. Grazing then makes sense. What also makes sense is indulging in fast food and processed food, the kind of edibles most congenial to grazing.

Skipping the “three squares” (or however else patterned eating has been parcelled out) has little to do with liberation from constraints.  It actually adds a new level of oppression: being imprisoned by immediate impulses and inclinations.

ADVERTISERS LOVE FREE WILL

“Data ‘R Us” could be the slogan for our era. It used to be that we, the inquirers, were on

one side, and data  were on the other. Scientists undertook their inquiries because they believed that, as a consequence, they would have a secure, fact-based story to tell.

Today the gap between data and us has been erased.  Algorithms, mining Facebook for example, aim “to gather sensitive personal information about sexual orientation, race, gender, even intelligence and childhood trauma.”  

What good is such data?  Follow the money. Scientists mine data because they want an accurate story to tell.  Marketers love the new data because they have something to sell.  

For marketers, “value” is defined as whatever will increase sales for whoever is paying them. Sometimes the admission is delivered deceptively: “The more data you collect from customers…the more value you can deliver to them.” It soon becomes clear that “value” does not means something that is independently good: “And the more value you can deliver to them…the more revenue you can generate.” Generating revenue via data-aided manipulation, i.e. interfering with freedom, is what it’s all about.

Within the world of food, the results of successful advertising are disastrous. When people eat what is best for the revenue of food companies, they are not eating what is

healthy for themselves. The results: a situation in which obesity and early onset diabetes are way more common than they need be.

Most people realize that marketing and advertising have a specific goal:  impacting our powers of adjudication, i.e. our ability to make free, well-informed choices. Why, then is advertising so often defended in the name of freedom rather than understood as the obstruction to freedom that it is?

Here is where philosophy plays a role.  It’s all about the meaning of “freedom.”  

We, inheritors of bad philosophy, continue to confuse freedom with “free will.”  There’s the rub. Freedom and “free will” are NOT the

same thing. Human freedom is the ability of reasonable beings to consider their circumstances intelligently and to elect among possibilities.  “Free will,” by contrast, suggests an inner faculty, completely unconditioned and unaffected by circumstances, one that provides a power at any and all times to make uninfluenced choices. “Free will” is attractive because it offers us a self-description  as somehow disincarnate. It is also dangerous. It encourages us to think in all-or-nothing terms. Either we possess free will or not. Forces shaping and influencing us are irrelevant. Defining freedom strictly in terms of free will impacts our thinking. It discourages concrete questions about what factors favor informed election among options. It encourages the all-or-nothing perspective which directs thought away from examining various ways in which freedom can be enhanced or minimized.

The flawed identification of freedom with ‘free will” provides plenty of cover for marketers. They can defend their work by saying that no matter how much money and expertise is marshalled to shape people’s selections, such individuals continue to have free will.  At the same time they can hire psychological

and data specialists for precisely one reason: to limit freedom. They can thus have it both ways: justifying their practices by saying that there is always “free will,” and adjusting those practices so that they become more and more effective in interfering with freedom.  At the same time they can block the efforts of public servants by claiming that it is they, the public servants rather than the advertisers, who seek to suppress freedom.

Freedom is a great good. It recognizes how we can chart paths for ourselves.  At its best it manifests itself in appraisals and evaluations that results in well-considered judgments. Those judgments, in traditional language, are verdicts, i.e. decisions based on truths. Ver-dict, truth saying, for

marketing, is beside the point, and, really, an obstacle.   The defenders of advertising are friends of free will but not friends of freedom. Adjudication on the basis of evidence is exactly what they seek to eliminate. They are savvy manipulators who construct scenarios, not because they have something important to tell, but because they have something to sell.