Episode 67 - Taste Transcript

David: 0:12

Welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:13

The podcast where we make all manner of phenomena interesting by showing how philosophy can shed light on them. David, do you remember shedding light was an original idea we had for our podcast name?

David: 0:26

I, I forgot, but yes. Uh, can you imagine if we've named ourselves that rather than Overthink?

Ellie: 0:32

Philosophy in the flesh was another terrible option.

David: 0:35

No, I love that one.

Ellie: 0:36

No, it's also bad, remember when we got to that delirious moment where we combined philosophy in the flesh and shedding light, and were cackling over the possibility of naming our podcast Fleshlight.

David: 0:49

Oh God, yes. Talk about names that should have never seen the light of day.

Ellie: 0:56

That one didn't see the light of day, but now we are shedding light on it I will say, um, we do have to still introduce ourselves for real though.

David: 1:03

Fair enough. Fair enough. Go for

Ellie: 1:05

I'm Professor Ellie Anderson.

David: 1:07

And I'm Professor David Peña-Guzmán.

Ellie: 1:10

David, how do you feel about corn?

David: 1:12

Well, I'm Mexican, so I love corn in all its forms. Um, corn tortillas, corn on the cob, children of the cob, uh, children of the corn.

Ellie: 1:23

Children of the cob.

David: 1:25

Children of— it's the sequel

Ellie: 1:28

That's actually our new podcast name is now Children of the Cob. Okay. Yeah, good call. I mean, I, I, I don't understand how you couldn't at least love the taste of corn. I know some people are, are sensitive to corn, like it's an allergen for them, but the taste is delicious. That said, I think there's also some, I don't know, debates about what highlights corn best. So in my family, there's a Californian versus Midwestern debate. My dad, who's from Minnesota, always puts a ton of butter on his corn. But my mom, who's from California says that you should put nothing on corn except for a little salt, because the corn should be so good that it has its own natural flavor, butter would mask.

David: 2:06

I am team mom, although, like I said, you know, as a Mexican, I think I have my third geographical possibility that is neither California nor the Midwest because I do think that elote, which is what we call corn, should be eaten either with salt, lemon, and chili powder, or with crema, queso, and lime, salt, and chili powder. So those are the two options.

Ellie: 2:31

Wait, you just said that elote is corn, but I always thought that elote was that, that last thing that you described, which is corn with, uh, crema, cotilla cheese, and chili powder on top, but elote just means corn?

David: 2:43

Yeah, elote just means corn and well corn, if it's raw, it's called maize.

Ellie: 2:50

Oh yes, of course.

David: 2:52

If it's cooked, it's called elote, but it just means the things themselves. And when we talk about it with other ingredients, like the cream and the cheese and the chili powder, then we call it elote preparado. And then you have to specify how it is prepared.

Ellie: 3:07

Okay, I feel like in a lot of California menus, it's just called elote and it has the crema and stuff on it.

David: 3:12

Yeah, we, we want to make it easy for you all to remember and know how to order it. Uh, but I love it with, uh, cream cheese and the salt, spices, and lemon.

Ellie: 3:24

Ugh. It's, it's so good. It's so good. I was eating corn over the summer and I was like trying to put some mayo on it and create my own, like pseudo elote. And then I dropped the entire mayo jar in the trash can of a restaurant very publicly, and it made a loud thud. And so I'm now remembering that with pain. Um, but there there was a reason that I mentioned corn as, uh, in addition to just like an opportunity for us to chat about our own passions for corn.

David: 3:52

Reminisce.

Ellie: 3:53

Um, or weird, embarrassing moments related to corn because David, there has been a recently a new major contender in the debates about whether corn tastes best when accompanied by other flavors. And this is a small boy from Brooklyn named Tariq.

David: 4:07

Oh my God, yes. The corn kid, the, the one that went viral with like, I love corn. It's the best.

Ellie: 4:13

It's corn. A big lump with knobs. It has the juice.

David: 4:18

It has the juice.

Ellie: 4:21

I could go on and continue singing the corn song, I will stop. Um, that also was not, you know, my, my strongest vocals. I'm always talking about how I like used to be a musical theater kid. And then on the rare occasions when I break in a song on the podcast, it's underwhelimg whereas David, have publicly spoken about your tone deafness and so you don't have any, any reputation to hold to.

David: 4:42

You're a musical performer in potentiality, not in actuality. I am a failure in actuality, and I'm proud of it.

Ellie: 4:50

Okay, so let's refresh ourselves on the video. Let's go ahead and play it.

Tariq: 4:56

For me, I really like corn.

Julian: 4:59

What do you like about corn?

Tariq: 5:00

Ever since I, I was told that corn is real, it tasted good.

Julian: 5:06

Did you think corn wasn't real?

Tariq: 5:07

But when I tried it with butter, everything changed. I love corn. Mmmm corn.

Julian: 5:15

Do you think everyone should be eating corn?

Tariq: 5:16

No. Not everyone has to like it to be the best.

Julian: 5:19

Yeah.

Tariq: 5:20

Just has to try it. Have a bite. I mean, then look at this then. I can't imagine a more beautiful thing. It's corn.

Julian: 5:30

It's corn.

Ellie: 5:32

I really like corn.

David: 5:32

My God, so cute. Tariq so charismatic and nerdy. Uh, and he's so precocious to us, a little kid talking about corn.

Ellie: 5:41

I can't tell you how obsessed I am with this video. I know by the time we release this episode, even by the time we're recording it, this video like had a little bit of a moment, but I think it deserves to be a permanent cultural touchstone, which is why we want to immortalize it on this episode. I think it sets up so many of the themes of the philosophy of taste, which by the way, this episode is our final installment in the five episode series we've been doing on the five senses. So to start us off, I will just say that Tariq is team my dad with the butter.

David: 6:12

Yes. Uh, what he says, when I tried with butter, everything changed. Such a a Midwestern kid in that regard.

Ellie: 6:19

Although he is from Brooklyn.

David: 6:20

I know, but in that regard.

Ellie: 6:22

Think that that notion of everything change speaks to the malleability of the sense of taste and all of the flavors that are involved. Right.

David: 6:29

So who knows, maybe Tariq in a past life was team California is currently team Midwest, but in the future will be team Mexican, elote. Today we are talking about taste.

Ellie: 6:44

Is taste merely a subjective experience or are there some things that objectively taste good?

David: 6:50

How does having good taste relate to the perceptual experience of taste?

Ellie: 6:56

And why is taste such a big part of community?

David: 7:04

You thought we were done with Tariq the corn kid. Well, no, because this video is a philosophical masterpiece, and the reason is because Tariq gives us a number of clues in his interview about corn, about the philosophical nature of taste.

Ellie: 7:21

I love it. I think this video really has so much philosophical content, aside from being absolutely adorable and entertaining. Uh, so where should we begin?

David: 7:30

Well, I want to begin in the middle of the interview actually, when Tariq is asked by the interviewer to talk about corn and describe it to somebody who has never had corn before. And you know, and just to be very clear about the importance of this moment. This is a central question in the philosophy of sensory perception, which is how do you convey an experience, especially one that is sensual in nature, to somebody who has never had an experience of the same kind in the flesh? Or can you? For example, can you describe the feeling of pain to, let's say, an alien who comes from a foreign planet and whose body just doesn't feel pain, or can you describe the color red to a person who has never seen color?

Ellie: 8:19

Yes, and so Tariq handles this problem by pointing out visual and tactile features of the corn rather than describing its taste. He says a big lump with knobs. It has the juice.

David: 8:32

Yes, it has a juice. Um, no, that's right. And the point that we should really focus on is that these are not just visual and tactile features of corn that are laid on top of taste. They may be part of the very act of tasting itself. So I think he is describing the shape and the texture of the corn in the context of its tasting. And this implication of taste with the other senses, like the tactile features, is something that the philosopher Carolyn Korsmeyer, whom we interview as part of our YouTube series on the senses, talks about in her book Making Sense of Taste. And she says that when we think about taste, we typically think of it as substances that are landing on the tongue. And that are getting processed by the taste receptors that we have on the tongue. So our conception of taste is extremely tongue centric, according to her. But really dive into the complexity of the act of tasting something, there is a lot more to taste than that. So to taste something, you have to hold it, you have to bite it, you have to chew it. And that means that you cannot really separate the texture and the movement of the tongue and the teeth and the jaw from the taste of it, because all those other things are what make the taste come alive. So think about, let's say a very slimy vegetable. I don't know what, what's like a, like okra or something like that.

Ellie: 10:03

Mm-hmm. Well, if you, if you cook it in a slimy fashion, I've never been able to figure out how to cook it any other way. So for me, it is slimy, but love a good crispy okra.

David: 10:12

Yes. I've been making, uh, Bindi Masala, okra dish and I have discovered the art of how to deslimify okra. But anyway, so if okra that Ellie prepares and that is slimy.

Ellie: 10:24

You have to teach me.

David: 10:26

The taste is a little bit weird. That weirdness, that tingliness, I don't know how to talk about the sliminess okra. It really has a lot to do with the physical texture and the stretchiness and the physical substance that is in your mouth that you cannot quite separate from the taste. So all these slimy vegetables, even if all the other properties are similar to other vegetables, the physical quality of the sliminess sets it apart.

Ellie: 10:55

Yeah. The limits of this tongue centric conception become evident when you take into account the intimate relationship between taste and smell. So these, it's kind of no coincidence that we have our, our taste episode coming right after smell. Because many of the things that we experience as flavors are actually functions of smell.

So in her book Smellosophy: 11:14

What the Nose Tells the Mind, Ann-Sophie Barwich talks about how taste and smell are tightly interconnected, such that they're even often treated philosophically as one. And this kind of makes sense since much of the flavor of things depends on their scent. And you can try this yourself by holding your breath and placing a very salty food on your tongue, like a cracker, you won't perceive its flavor. Uh, you know, it's kind of like full flavor profile. All you will perceive is its saltiness. And so you need your nose in order to perceive the flavors of, of the cracker, aside from the basic sense of salt. Basic sense of salt.

David: 11:56

The basic sense of salt as opposed to the complex salt that we otherwise get. Yeah. And you know, in that book A.S. Barwich also talks about different kinds of olfaction that play a role in the constitution of taste. So it's not just that, okay, you have to add smell to the picture in the same way that you have to add tactile sensations. Because specifically when you're talking about smell, there is a distinction between what is known as nasal and retronasal olfaction that has an impact on our experience of taste. So nasal olfaction, of course, is with the nose. It has to do with you smelling something before you put it in your mouth, or as you are putting it in your mouth. Whereas retronasal olfaction is via the inside of the throat because there is a connection between the throat and the nose. So it has to do with a different pathway to olfaction. So think about, just to make it a little bit concrete here. Think about coffee. Coffee smells delicious and kind of sweet in the front nasal pathway, but then when you drink it, it's retronasal features are usually bitter. That bitter after taste that does have to do with olfaction. Or conversely, think about stinky french cheese, like a blue cheese of sorts. That cheese is retro nasly, very yummy and tasty, and it smells good once the head and the throat, the head, like in your brain, So it's very delicious through retronasal olfaction, but when you first put it up to your mouth, it smells just absolutely foul. And you know, you see the distinction between these two pathways also when you're sick. So your taste buds function perfectly normal, but external and retronasal affection is obstructed, so everything tastes bland, which is the same thing that you talked about with the salt, right? If you hold your breath, you just can't taste anything other than the basic qualities of the cracker.

Ellie: 13:59

Yeah, and obviously Tariq is not talking about this, but his description of corn, he hasn't yet reached the age at which he can read these books that we're discussing, and Sophie Bar, which is Smellosophy namely, and Carolyn Korsmeyer's research. But his description of corn is precisely right because we cannot imagine the experience of tasting corn as separate from the experience of biting little knobs that have juice inside.

David: 14:26

Well, and in the case of corn, you know, he's talking about something that stands out for him. The, the juice in the corn, which you get when you pop the kernels. But the juice actually is a really key element here in thinking about the philosophy and the science of taste. And for a moment here, I want to transport us to the early 19th century. So a bit of a shift from Brooklyn 21st century, to France 1825 because this French guy named and just listen to this name. It's like the Frenchiest name I've ever heard Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. So we're going to call him just Jean or just JA for short. And so this guy JA wrote an amazing book on taste called The Physiology of Taste, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, which is a book about how hard it is to describe taste, but also about how important taste is to human life. And in this book, he also critiques the focus that most people who write about taste have placed on the function of the tongue. And one of his arguments is that, yes, taste requires the use of the tongue, but more specifically it requires the dissolution of the substance that we are tasting in some form of liquid or juice. You know, it has the juice.

Ellie: 15:47

Okay, okay, so quite literally.

David: 15:49

Very literally, the juice is an essential component here, and that juice can be some liquid in the food itself, like the water that the corn contains, or in cases when the food is dry, the liquid that the taster adds in the form of saliva. And so you cannot taste without having liquid involved in the picture. And beyond that, to really get the full taste profile of that substance, you also need to physically move the object around in your mouth. So you need a combination of the humidity brought about by the juice and also the motoric action of the mouth and the teeth and the tongue, and all of that.

Ellie: 16:32

David, you are really delivering on this, like, should we say the biological and physiological features of taste, which are a, a little bit like, I don't know why I'm getting grossed out. Cause in our episode of digust we talk about, you know, like some of the sociopolitical implications of, of disgust. Um.

David: 16:50

It's very fleshy, you know, and we're going to be called it Philosophy in the Flesh.

Ellie: 16:57

And it, it is, you know, quite juicy as it turns out. Um, moist. We might even say you, you the humidity, but you know, this makes me think of our discussion of the medium of different senses as organ, which we talked about back in our first episode of this series, which was on touch. And in this case, it seems like the medium is liquid, right? You, you said it's true that you can't taste without saliva. Is that right?

David: 17:21

Yes, that's what I said.

Ellie: 17:23

Mm. I mean, I guess it makes sense, but it also means, well, I mean it must make sense if it's like true. Kind of a weird epistemology and, and theory truth going on in what I just said. We can do a close reading of that like we're doing with Tariq's corn video, but I, I think you know, this means that the ontology of taste involves more than an object landing on the tongue. It's an object dissolving and getting picked up by the taste receptors, as well as by everything that smell adds to the equation.

David: 17:52

Yeah. But again, Tariq's central insight, philosophical insight here is that the juice is key. It, it not only has the juice, it must have the juice.

Ellie: 18:02

One thing you hear a lot is that taste is subjective. And this comment points to two prevalent ways of thinking about taste. One is the literal sense of taste perception as we've been talking about it with the juice. And the second is this other sense of taste, which is aesthetic, that is having good taste or bad taste.

David: 18:45

And as you know, I pride myself on having very bad taste in everything. No, just kidding. I have good taste, good taste.

Ellie: 18:54

I don't know, that shirt you're wearing right now might suggest that you're right. Um, whereas my style is impeccable.

David: 18:58

Yeah, you might be right because you just said it's all subjective.

Ellie: 19:04

So this is the question, and this is also where a lot of really interesting debates on tastes take off in his 1757 work, Of the Standard of Taste, the philosopher David Hume remarks that common sense recognizes that there are a variety of tastes we consider taste based on subjective assessments unrelated to what is actually in the object. And these are what Hume calls sentiments. So I won't bother arguing with someone who hates the taste of kombucha, to use example that our assistant for this episode, my student, Emilio Esquivel Marquez pointed out, because you can't reason your way into or out of a judgment of the taste of kombucha.

David: 19:42

Well, and I'm always going to bring this back to Tariq, the corn philosopher, child of the corn, uh, from Brooklyn.

Ellie: 19:50

Oh yeah. No, we're, we're, we're going for it. We're continuing.

David: 19:53

I'm not over. We're not over it. And the reason is because I feel like he underscores this subjective element. Because in the opening section of the video, he says, for me, I really like corn. So he's situating himself as a lover of corn, talking about his taste. But he's not making an objective judgment necessarily about corn.

Ellie: 20:20

Absolutely. But there's a tension that Hume points out that we also see in the corn video, and this is that even though we recognize the subjective nature of taste, we also nonetheless frequently make claims that suggest that we actually think taste is objective, or at least that there are standards of judgment for taste. So even though I can't try and convince somebody to like the taste of kombucha, I can say kombucha is good and that's a signal that it's not just a subjective judgment, but that I actually think that people should think that kombucha tastes good because is some objective property to it, or at least a judgment that should be a matter of consensus. And there's another line in this video that I think really gets at this Tariq says, of corn, not everyone has to like it to be the best. Everyone just has to try it, have a bite. And here we see a couple of things going. The first is the presumption that if they don't like it, okay, but he also says, and this is the second one, not everyone has to like it to be the best. And this suggests that he thinks corn is the best, not just for him. It is the best full stop. And this is an objective judgment. This is really similar to Hume who points out that there do seem to be things that are roughly universally recognized as in poor taste. That is Hume recognizes this bizarre paradox of not everyone has to like it, but it is the best.

David: 21:45

And this recognition of this tension is why Hume says that it's possible for each person to train their taste, whether we're talking about taste in the perceptual sensory sense, or in the aesthetic sense of having good taste, let's say, in works of art. Hume thinks that we can refine our taste and the principles of taste themselves are, as you said, Ellie, universal. And in order to identify them, we just need to develop, practice and delicacy among other things. You know, have a bite.

Ellie: 22:20

Yeah, you might think about the expert on tasting coffee that we interviewed in our YouTube series. And by the way, some of what we're talking about now is articulated in the work of Carolyn Korsmeyer, who is one of the first philosophers to draw attention to the fact that aesthetic taste isn't just used metaphorically, but also relates to the perceptual sense of taste, the gustatory.

David: 22:42

Well, and to stay with Korsmeyer for a hot second here, she thinks that Hume is kind of wrong about taste because Hume says that the act of tasting is basically a subjective experience that is centralized and localized to the mouth, right? So maybe even to the tongue. But taste is a lot more than that according to Korsmeyer, as we've seen. And she says that if anything, Hume reduces taste to the mouth and then uses gustatory experience only as an analogy for this richer sense of taste, which is the aesthetic sense, when in reality there's that closer connection between them. Much closer than Hume realized because gustatory experience itself already involves a kind of aesthetic judgment.

Ellie: 23:31

And this is such an interesting point because Hume is one of the most famous philosophers on taste. Like we said, he has this whole 1757 book about it that's really influential in aesthetics. But you're right, and Korsmeyer is right for, for getting on this point that Hume fails to recognize that taste itself can be kind of a subject of aesthetic experience by limiting it, as you said, David, to that analogy. And there's also a story that Coors Meer traces about how later aesthetic thinkers, such as con thought that Hume's view of aesthetic judgment was too rooted in the subjective thanks to its reliance on the analogy of taste. And so perhaps actually there remained some traces of the gustatory in his view, even though he tried to create that strong analogy. But this is closely linked to constant integration of smell, which we discussed a little bit in our last episode. While we're on the topic of whether taste is objective or subjective, I also want to throw in the mix of you from the ancient Confucian philosopher Mengzi. Mengzi says that, and this is a quote from his text, which is also called Mengzi, classic like Ancient Confucian move, the text named after the person. Mengzi says "there is a commonality in what is enjoyed as flavorful to the palate. The master chef Yi Ya was first in realizing what is enjoyable to our tastes. If flavor was by nature particular to each person, just as dogs and horses are different from humans and kind, then why does everyone in the world enjoy the flavors of Yi Ya? Since the whole world strives to be like Ya in achieving flavor, the palates of the world must be similar to each other.”

David: 25:08

So basically, Yi Ya was the celebrity chef of, of the what, what period is this?

Ellie: 25:13

Fourth century BCE.

David: 25:15

Fourth century. Um, okay. And so because everyone loves Yi Ya's food, we have to recognize that there is some element of the universal or the objective when it comes to taste.

Ellie: 25:26

Yeah. And it doesn't necessarily have to be like, we can separate universal and objective. We can say, for instance, like this is what Kant does to some extent, he thinks that aesthetic judgment is not objective, but it should be, or it is ideally universal. But yeah, I think at the end of the day, whether or not we want to say it's universal or objective or both, I think we can agree that everyone would rather eat at a David Chang restaurant than have cream of mushroom casserole from a can. Or if not that they, that want to do that, because that sounds like very classist, but that they should, which maybe is also classist, but I also think prevalent view in our society. Right.

David: 26:06

You moved from the descriptive to normative as an example of less classist, want to eat at a fancy restaurant that universally recognized as good, but is maybe not objectively good because right. Universal has to do with just the distribution in the population. So like everybody has it. Whereas objective, I think of it as being rooted in external state of affairs of sort. So it has to do, objective, has to do with the world, whereas universally it has to do with all of the people.

Ellie: 26:39

Yeah, but from an aesthetic perspective, that would potentially be a false binary because there's another option, which is not that universal means that everyone actually ascents to the fact that David Chang's food is better than cream of mushroom soup from a can. But that according to the human faculty is that we all share like our faculties of reason and imagination and perception, we should ascent to the fact that the David Chang food is better than the cream of mushroom soup from a can. And I think that takes us back the, the training of taste that you mentioned with Hume, which is this notion that, you know, we, we do recognize that taste should be trained, and this is whether, whether it's coffee or wine or fine dining.

David: 27:21

Or slimy okra that you cannot master.

Ellie: 27:25

Uh, yeah, I, I think, I think there is a sense that, um, there are tastes that you need to be taught to appreciate, and I think that very notion also speaks to this tension that we've been describing between common senses, acceptance that there is subjective character to taste, and also common senses acceptance that there are some flavors that are more "refined" or even better than others.

David: 27:49

Yeah, and one way in which I would think about this is that most of us have a common intuition that it is important to develop and to refine and to cultivate taste, even if we don't quite agree in what direction that goes. Because if I meet somebody that I think has tried to cultivate their taste, I'm here going to talk primarily in the gustatory sense. Somebody who tries new things is open to new flavors, even if they end up telling me that they don't like them. I kind of respect that more than somebody who likes everything that they've tasted, but it's unwilling to expand their palate into new terrains. And so again, it, it has to do with the journey rather than the destination when it comes to the value of cultivation for me.

Ellie: 28:35

Yeah, and and I think that also points to the fact that this cultivation of taste doesn't necessarily have to be this classist idea. There's a classic Mary Kate and Ashley movie. You know, I have mentioned Mary Kate and Ashley on the podcast before.

David: 28:52

You love them like they are your alter egos. Both of them somehow.

Ellie: 28:59

Well, yeah, if you, if you want more info on that, listen back to our paradox episode, but Mary Kate and Ashley's nineties movie, Passport to Paris involves them as two young American girls going to Paris to stay with their diplomat grandfather. And there's a super snooty French chef who feeds frog legs and escargo and all the kind of typical fine dining in France. And Mary Kate and Ashley have a really hard time getting used to that food because they're American. And then, uh, there's this, there's this climactic moment in which they end up feeding the French snooty chef McDonald's burgers and fries. And loves them so much. It's absolutely délicieux.

David: 29:43

Délicieux, c'est manifique, but that's really also a good example for connecting this to the Tariq discussion about the texture and the more than just savory qualities or gustatory qualities of taste. Because if that snooty French chef had been unwilling to get his hands dirty in the gustatory experience, that is eating a burger. I would also see that as a failure in the cultivation of taste. This is actually a struggle that I deal with every time I go to France, which is that people there always eat their burger with fork and knife. They are unwilling to, to to try a new way of eating and tasting. And I think it's kind of similar to the way in which they see Americans who are unwilling to try like the escargo and the frog legs and, and it's narrow mindedness a little.

Ellie: 30:39

Yeah, good luck with the elote preparado folks.

David: 30:44

Yeah.

Ellie: 30:44

The French snooty chef is like, I have to put my hand on this cheese.

David: 30:49

On this corn covered with cream and just like, what does Tariq call them? Like knobs?

Ellie: 30:55

Knobs. Yeah. David, is there an example of a food or drink, like gustatory experience we might say, that you might have had to train yourself to enjoy? Like do you buy this refinement of taste? Do you have a, do you have an example for us?

David: 31:10

One example that comes to mind right away is wasabi. The first time that ate wasabi, it was explained to me as a spicy paste, which it is. As a Mexican, I had only ever been exposed to tongue heavy forms of spice where you feel the burning mouth rather than nasal. And when I ate wasabi for the first time, I was expecting the same experience and I hated the way it burnt in between your eyes in the back of the nose. And I just had no category through which to understand it. And after a couple of times, I, I came to really love it. And initially I also really disliked tofu because of the texture. It was foreign and indescribable. But again, over time I've come to appreciate the subtleties of good versus bad tofu.

Ellie: 32:00

And would you say that has to do with objective qualities in the tofu?

David: 32:04

I, objective, I don't know. Um, because sometimes I do feel like a really soggy, it depends on what it is accompanied by.

Ellie: 32:13

Well, but like, is it an objective? Is it objectively better? Is it better, let's say that, is it better to appreciate the tofu or do you feel like it's just kind of an arbitrary. Now, I enjoy tofu. I didn't before, but I don't think my taste has refined. You see what I mean?

David: 32:25

No, I think the refinement comes through the experience of trying new things. So even again, this is why I said, even if somebody told me I tried tofu, but I actually hated it, it's not for me, the ultimate judgment of the quality is insignificant to me. It's the exploratory willingness that, for me, marks the value of the cultivation. I don't know if that's answering your question.

Ellie: 32:48

Yeah, no, it is, but I feel like I, I could offer potentially a counter example to that in my own experience, which is that I used to be a total sugar fiend. I had the biggest sweet tooth through much of my young life. And then when I was maybe in my late twenties, I, I would eat like a pint of ice cream maybe once a week or, or twice a week even. And I really enjoyed it.

David: 33:09

Be honest, it was more than that.

Ellie: 33:11

No, no, I, I, I would totally be honest if it were more than that, but what happened is that I, I would get frequent headaches as well, and I finally figured out that the headaches were linked to how much sugar I was eating, and so I drastically cut down my sugar intake. And now if I were to try and go back, I mean, I'm also lactose intolerant, which is its own thing, which I think I've mentioned that on the show before too. So there were multiple reasons why the ice cream was not doing me so well. But now when I try and eat things that are really sweet, I can only have like one or two bites. And about my maximum level of sweetness is, say a mango. Even a banana is almost too sweet for me. And so that's a sense in which I feel I no longer have that exploratory willingness, and I'm, I'm don't think that's necessarily worse. Like it might just be kind of, I don't know, like neutral.

David: 33:59

Yeah, but this example is complicated by the fact that it has a history of associating the taste with the experience of sickness, which means

Ellie: 34:08

A headache. Yeah.

David: 34:10

Yeah, which in psychology is known as the Garcia Effect, which is a bad food and maybe you vomit or it just makes you feel terrible, and then forever after you, you quite really enjoy that food very much.

Ellie: 34:21

My God, David, I've never heard of that, but I totally have that with the Hamburger Hamlet Hamburgers, which is like an old, very hip nineties restaurant in LA that we, my parents used to take me to when I was a kid. I threw up a Hamburger Hamlet burger and don't know why it was just specifically Hamburger Hamlet, but after that, I couldn't eat Hamburger Hamlet Hamburgers anymore.

David: 34:41

You're like, every time I see the logo, I just vomit right away. If you're enjoying, Overthink, please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent self-supporting podcast, and as a subscriber, you can help us cover our key production costs, gain access to our exclusive digital library of bonus content, and more. Because I love time travel. Let's go back for a moment to that 1825 book by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. By the way, I didn't mention this before, but this book is where we get the phrase, you are what you eat. He's the one that said that first.

Ellie: 35:34

Really?

David: 35:35

Yeah. And the reason is because of whole theory of absorption. Nowadays when we talk about that phrase, you are what you eat, we use it almost metaphorically or very loosely. You know, if you eat crappy food, you're going to feel crappy. Uh.

Ellie: 35:50

Yeah. If I eat sugar, I'm going to get headaches, which does happen to be true. But anyway.

David: 35:55

Yes. Um, but as if there is some kind of reflection between what you eat and maybe like your personality traits. But JA, I keep struggling over the name every time. I just get anxious.

Ellie: 36:07

Dude, go with Jean, Jean was fine.

David: 36:09

Yes, Jean, but Jean actually means this quite literally because he argues that what differentiates taste from the other senses is that we absorb the substances that we take in. And not just that, it's not just that we absorb them, but they actually become part of the very essence of who and what we are. So we incorporate them as nutrients and fold them into our body so that they sustain our our life activity. He says that one of the main functions of taste, therefore, is what he calls reparation, which is a, I think, a really interesting concept to think about. Yeah, reparation a repair. It repairs the losses that we suffer by virtue of being alive. He talks about life as a kind of constant evaporation of your body. You're constantly losing energy. Energy just evaporates, and you need to eat in order to repair or replenish the body. And this means that life is simply just very expensive from a biological point of view. And taste and eating are how we fend off death.

Ellie: 37:21

Woo. That's beautiful. And this is maybe one way to think about the distinction between smell and taste, which we said earlier are really overlapping in a lot of ways. But smell itself doesn't lead to this kind of incorporation. Smells penetrate our bodies, but we don't incorporate them into our living activity and they don't replenish life itself. And I suppose you could say that neither does taste, because taste just has to do with the sensory, you know, perception of the thing in our mouth. Whereas eating is, is in principle, different, but there's at minimum a much closer link between elementation and taste than between smell and elementation.

David: 38:02

Yeah. And he, he points to this actually, Ellie, you, you say, you know, taste is just the sensation than necessarily eating. because you know, wine tasters for example, they will do a wine tasting and they will spit it out so they don't absorb it or incorporate it. And uh, Jean says, this is a big difficulty with my theory, the fact that taste and eating need not be confused. But 99% of the time they go together and we cannot overlook that. So he just goes for the statistical point that most of the time they go together and therefore we need to think about the evolution and emergence of taste in connection to eating. Otherwise, it's incoherent.

Ellie: 38:37

Okay. That universal in the first sense that we were talking about, which is just like statistically speaking, like always the case, or in this case almost always. Yeah, I learned the hard way. Uh, why wine tasters spit the wine out after, you know, one too many wine tastings in the Central Valley in California, central on the Central Coast. But I think we also commune with the world through taste, we incorporate the world into us, following what Jean is saying, and this is taking in a slightly different direction, but in thinking about taste, I can't help but think that there's a weird paradox whereby we think of taste as particularly subjective. And yet in another sense, it's also the most communal sense because so many holidays and other human rituals, center on taste. Pumpkin at Thanksgiving. Watermelon on 4th of July. Manischewitz at Passover.

David: 39:35

Well, I, yeah, and I don't know if you remember Ellie when we did the episode on nostalgia, I talked about how eating street tacos for me. At the time I was still eating meat, so it was Al pastor tacos has not only a ritualistic dimension, but also a very clearly defined communal one because it evokes memories of childhood, of family, friends. And all of this is triggered honestly, not by the act of eating per se, but by certain tastes in action, right? The, the act of going to a particular place and performing certain actions that bring about a certain taste to my mouth.

Ellie: 40:16

Yeah, no, I remember that example so vividly, David, from one of our earliest episodes. I feel like it's a very iconic, Overthink moment.

David: 40:22

Yeah, it's when we established that I am the new, uh, Marcel Proust the Mexican Marcel, because my middle name is Marcello. Remember? Didn't we talk about that? Did I forget?

Ellie: 40:31

I don't, I don't know. It's been a while.

David: 40:33

I didn't forget. I, I just pretended like, oh, did I forget? But we about that.

Ellie: 40:37

In the nostalgia episode, you are nostalgic. We're nostalgic for that episode now, apparently.

David: 40:42

What are you nostalgic for?

Ellie: 40:44

Well, you mean in terms of taste, I presume this is the taste up, not the nostalgia episode. For me, it's the birthday cake that my mom would always make for my sister and me as kids. Frosting with yellow cake. It is so good. It's like the taste of my childhood. It was always served at parties.

David: 41:00

Mm. And flavors really have this power to bring us together, and I think also about how important flavors are for familiarizing yourself with a new culture. Also as a new way of forming social bonds. The tastes of another culture are such an important way for getting to know the culture, to the point that be suspicious of somebody who claims to have knowledge of a culture without having. An appreciation for the tastes.

Ellie: 41:28

No, I, I think that's right. And I still dream about this pineapple curry that I had in Thailand, and at Pun Pun in Chiang Mai for those who have been there. Oh my.

David: 41:39

For those who have been there.

Ellie: 41:41

Well, yeah, we, we met have some Thai listeners or folks who've traveled to Thailand. Being invited to eat in the home of someone from another culture, I also think is a really wonderful way of getting to know not only them as an individual, but also their culture. And I think in that sense, you know, taste is paradigmatically communal.

David: 41:59

Well, and the communality or the communal paradigm may even be a requirement, I would say, for our experience of particular flavors. So it's not as if flavors are just there waiting to be discovered. We have to establish what those flavors are going to be by talking about the tastes that we experience. While we eat linguistically with other people, in other words, we, we talk about food, we share our experience of food, and in the act of sharing, we come to name and appreciate the flavors that we're actually experiencing.

Ellie: 42:38

Yeah. This reminds me of something that our expert on coffee tasting, Ken Lieberman talked about in the YouTube interview with us, where he says that coffee tasting is in a professional context, you know, for like people who are actually creating, tasting and producing the coffee, a communal experience because the coffee tasters have to get together and talk about what they're tasting and arrive at a consensus about what the coffee tastes like. You wouldn't know, a, a package of coffee that describes the taste where it would just have been a single coffee taster who detected the notes of Apricot and peach or whatever it is, like it would need to have been decided upon in a group.

David: 43:19

Yeah, and again, writing in the early 19th century, uh, Jean Anthelme makes a very similar argument about

Ellie: 43:25

Now he's Jean Anthelme?

David: 43:28

I'm going to end at the end with calling him Savarin.

Ellie: 43:31

You, you are trying every iteration of Jean's name.

David: 43:35

My, my Franco anxieties are oozing out every pour right now. But, but in that book, the Physiology of Taste or Notes on a Transcendental Gastronomy, amazing title, he says that the complexity of taste, the fact that we have to think about it, maybe even talk about it, share it with others, is from an anthropological perspective, one way to define the human over and against all the other animals. And this is connected to the history of cooking because he says he points out that humans are the only species that cooks, which seems roughly correct. And this means two things for him.

Ellie: 44:16

No, it is. It is correct.

David: 44:18

There is a little bit of ambiguity with some birds that start wild fires in order to, like they steal fire from humans and then they go and like start a fire to drive out prey or burn prey and then they eat the burned bodies, would be a form of cooking. Yeah. It's kind of wild.

Ellie: 44:35

Yeah. Well they stole the fire from us humans.

David: 44:37

Yeah. So they don't make fire. That is true.

Ellie: 44:39

Yeah. Birds. Your cooking is derivative

David: 44:43

You are like Prometheus only.

Ellie: 44:46

No, that is, that is actually super interesting.

David: 44:48

Yeah. Anyway, so, but the fact that in general, I think it's hard to say that humans are the, the ones who cook. It means that we're the only ones that taste what Jean Anthelme calls compound flavors, which is the mixture of different kinds of things, like, I don't know, like broccoli and rice together. Whereas animals might eat rice or they might eat broccoli, but they wouldn't combine them in the same gustatory experience.

Ellie: 45:15

So those people who eat each dish of their plate completely separately not properly human. Okay. Just, just just verifying.

David: 45:25

But it also means the fact that we cook, because think about what cooking is, typically, it's a communal activity around a fire, which already presupposes a tribal structure.

Ellie: 45:35

Yeah. Yeah.

David: 45:36

It means that humans are the only ones that have social norms around eating according to him, because eating is tied to manners, to developing certain. Yeah, I mean, what's another word for manners? Um, certain

Ellie: 45:50

Politesse.

David: 45:51

Yeah.

Ellie: 45:51

Etiquette. Etiquette or decorum, perhaps.

David: 45:54

Great. A little Ms. Thesaurus over here. Yeah. So we have manners, we have etiquette, and in fact, his book is all about etiquette and the sociology of eating. And the importance of eating for forming cultural bonds, because it's what drives us to interact in the first place. And there's, I just want to share this because it really stood out for me. There is a point in his book, which by the way, is kind of long, where he says that eating and taste is so important for human life, that even Adam must have been created by God as already hungry. Because that's what drives him and Eve to be motivated to taste the forbidden fruit, right? If they didn't have hunger, they wouldn't have had that curiosity. To refer back to our curiosity episode where we talked about the creation story.

Ellie: 46:47

Fascinating. And even today, most first dates are at restaurants, or at least at cocktail bars, where there's a shared sense of taste.

David: 46:59

Yeah, so romance and love Jean Anthelme says that when we think about romantic relationships. We give way too much power to sex. When we think about the strength of the bond that unites the lovers, when in reality we should focus more on their shared experience of taste, because taste is just as important as sex in the formation of romantic bonds, he has this wonderful little quote where he says, and this one I'm, I'm reading because I don't want to get it wrong. "Even those who sleep apart, dine together."

Ellie: 47:36

Mm.

David: 47:37

It's adorable.

Ellie: 47:39

That is so interesting. I mean, I don't know how much they're enjoying the dinner necessarily. You know, like some, some couples might have a depressing ass silent dinner together in hostility. Not that you need to sleep together in order to to be happy. I have quite expansive views on how can, be in romantic relationships. So I don't mean to imply that if you're not sleeping together, then you're not dining together happily. So I wouldn't necessarily, at the same time though, say that dining together is a marker of the happy couple. But at the very least, Jean's point seems to me that it is something that ties them together.

David: 48:14

But I mean, I want to come to, I want to come to the defense of my boy, uh, JA here, because if we think about a couple that, as you said, has horrible dining experiences where can't be together, they can't share in communal bond, that's a pretty good indicator that they're a rough couple, that they're having a rough time as a couple. Whereas we could say that somebody that has maybe not a great sex life for whatever reason, maybe age or just interest diverge, he says it's not as much as a of a red flag as people who can't stand their company.

Ellie: 48:47

Yeah, I feel like I kind of slipped between two different points there. One was the point that you don't have to sleep together in order to be a happy couple, do think the other is that if you dine together, unhappily, then you still might be a happy couple. And those are two very different points and, and you're right that the latter one is not one that I want to hold to. I think if having a pretty crappy time while dining with a partner, that's maybe a signal that your relationship is not going that great.

David: 49:12

Yeah. Well, and I wonder how comfortable we would be expanding this insight that dining together forms a good social bond to the idea that cooking together can also contribute to that because. I have over the last just couple of years started cooking, especially during the pandemic, actually started cooking with my partner in a much more intentional and regular way. And I have to say, even though we're both terrible cooks, he's much better than me. The experience of attending to what you're going to absorb and incorporate as part of your body and living activity to hone a new meaning when you do it in connection with people that you.

Ellie: 49:55

Yeah. Well, and I also think, so I saw you two cooking together last summer when we were in France.

David: 50:02

And it was adorable

Ellie: 50:03

It was adorable. It totally was. It was. But it was also a closed experience between the two of you. And I could really sense that because when we were all renting a house together, you were the two vegetarians. And so you had different dietary restrictions than say like the other eight of us or so that were at this house in France together. And so you two were sort of in a, in a closed space of tasting the same dishes and cooking together during that time, whereas the rest of us were all eating other same things. And I, I think, I mean, it wasn't like it was super awkward at dinner or anything. We still had a wonderful time, but I think there was a little bit of a separation there that indicates just the communal experience of taste, of not really being able to share conversation around the dishes that we're tasting or what we're tasting while we're sitting at the same table.

David: 50:50

Yeah, the flavor building, collective consensus or conferencing just there in the same way by virtue of having different plates.

Ellie: 51:00

David, we are about out of time. Shall we close out?

David: 51:04

Let's do it.

Ellie: 51:05

Thank you all for listening.

David: 51:07

I hope you have a corn-tastic day!

Tariq: 51:14

I hope you very have a corn-tastic day.

Julian: 51:17

A corn-tastic day.

Tariq: 51:19

What? It's just a pun about corn.

David: 51:28

We hope you enjoy today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 51:35

You can subscribe to our Patreon for exclusive access to bonus videos, Live Q and As, and more.

David: 51:41

To reach out to us and find episode info, go to overthinkpodcast.com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram @overthink_pod

Ellie: 51:50

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Clare A'Hearn, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.

David: 51:58

And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.