Speaking of Taste

Coming back to teaching about wine and beer after having  spent a sabbatical with poetry, memoir and fiction, I found myself a lot less preachy than I was. I've lost a lot of my certainty about the relationship of pleasure and tradition, less enthralled with a canon of the good, the true and the delicious.  As a former student of anthropology, I wasn't surprised that America's taste has changed. I found myself wondering how it was possible that mine had.

Where is this taste of mine and ours? I mean that literally. Where does it hang out? On the tongue? In the nose? In memories of mother's milk and matzoh brei?

So I've been reading. Not so much to reduce my own confusion-I've been happily confused for a while now-but for the sake of being an honest idea broker to my students. Where's the pulpit from which you can preach the Good News of a revolution in beer and food? What do I tell the apprentice sommelier or Cellermaster* about what tastes good?

Here's what I've got so far: The experience of flavor comes from deeper in than we thought. It's not on the tongue or in the nose, it's in the brain. The processes the brain uses to recognize flavor turn out to be a lot like the processes it uses to recognize music or complex shapes (like faces). We're very good, us humans, at remembering music or picking a face out of a crowd or a lineup, but we're not very good at talking about it.

You can recognize your mom when you see her face on the post office wall, but you probably can't describe her to me all that well. You can pick out Ravel or the Rolling Stones after a few notes, but can you tell me how you did that?
With visual art, we have a deceptive fluency. You can probably tell me a lot about Girl with a Pearl Earring. You can describe her face, her clothes and pose. Maybe, if you're anthropologically inclined, you could talk about the relationship of servant girl to bourgeois master and the resultant slight look of apprehension on her face.

But when the image is not a simple narrative anymore, not even a complex and affecting one, you and I may find it harder to talk. What could I tell you about Matisse's Blue Nude that wasn't trivial?

And suppose representation is barely a concern. Imagine the artist is showing you how her hand works with some colored chalk and a mad case of the swirlies:

You can probably describe this fairly well, but would your description give a listener any sense of what the drawing was?

Let's take it even furnther. We may have some sense of what this next painting symbolizes, but when we try to describe it, we sound sort of silly:

When the intent is ironic, we're even more lost. What will you say about Duchamp's readymades like Fountain, which is simply a urinal mounted on the wall? How will you describe it after the joke fades and you're just looking at white, shiny curves mounted next to a little museum card?

And what if we suspect that we're being manipulated by an image in an ad or that the artist is having some fun with us? We can do a pretty good job of listing visual characteristics, but how much can we describe the truth about an image like this:

Or this:

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All of this is to say that we folks obsessed with food and drink aren't at more of a descriptive disadvantage than our friends the music and art lovers. Our perceptions are as profound and our descriptive powers just as strained. Next week, we'll talk about prying our way into this profoundly obvious and maddeningly non-verbal topic. 

In the meantime, look out for this shelf talker:

*for information on the Cellermaster Certificate, contact Dean Kelly McClay at the Academy of Culinary Arts: mcclay@atlantic.edu