by Dwight Furrow
It might strike you as odd, if not thoroughly antiquarian, to reach back to Aristotle to understand gastronomic pleasure. Haven’t we made progress on the nature of pleasure over the past 2500 years? Well, yes and no. The philosophical debate about the nature of pleasure, with its characteristic ambiguities and uncertainties, persists often along lines developed by the ancients. But we now have robust neurophysiological data about pleasure, which thus far has increased the number of hypotheses without settling the question of what exactly pleasure is.
Part of the problem is that we have this word “pleasure” that seems to apply to any positive affective state, and we therefore think there must be something common to all the diverse experiences designated by the word. But that unity may be an illusion. There is a vast experiential difference between the pleasures of basking in the sun and the pleasure one experiences from having run a marathon. I doubt that Aristotle’s theory can explain the former; the latter seems more amenable to his focus on activities which would include the pleasures of the table. And so I will set aside attempts to define pleasure in general and focus on the pleasure we take in our activities, specifically the activity of eating.
Aristotle’s first substantive discussion of pleasure defines it as the natural accompaniment of unimpeded activity brought to completion. When we exercise fundamental human capacities and that activity proceeds without impediments or obstacles, we experience pleasure. Since eating, tasting, and savoring are all activities that have pleasure as their natural culmination, Aristotle’s theory seems in the right direction.
In thinking about the pleasures of the table, we need to cast a very wide net. Although tasting is one activity included within the larger activity of eating, we also must include the social dimensions of eating, the role of the environment in influencing what we taste, the regulative role that eating plays in structuring everyday life and supplying nutritional needs, and the importance of eating as part of an occasion or celebration all of which contribute to the general topic of gastronomic pleasure. Taking all of this into consideration, then, according to Aristotle’s theory of pleasure, when the activity of consuming a meal proceeds without impediment, we will find it pleasurable.
There are many things that can impede the activity of eating. The food may not taste good, it may be inappropriate for the occasion, the people you’re eating with may be rude or disruptive, or the condition of your body may be an impediment to enjoyment. Enjoyment is the natural culmination of the process of eating when these impediments are absent, which of course will be a matter of degree since conditions are often not perfect.
Although eating is a multidimensional activity, arguably the most important constitutive activity is that of tasting. For eating to be enjoyed the food must meet some standard of quality although what that standard is will differ from person to person. (Conversation may be equally important as a mealtime activity but an analysis of conversation would take me too far afield.) Tasting is also an activity that gives us pleasure when unimpeded. When something tastes good it is because the activity of tasting proceeded without interruptions or obstacles. What sort of things impede the activity of tasting? One may have an aversion to the ingredients, the dish might be poorly prepared or otherwise doesn’t meet expectations. One might simply be bored with the flavors in the dish, be suffering from a cold, or be too emotionally distraught to appreciate the food. But in the absence of these obstacles, according to my reading of Aristotle, we experience pleasure when tasting.
There is an obvious objection to this application of Aristotle’s theory. One might argue that the impediments to tasting are not impediments to the activity of tasting; they are impediments to enjoyment. The fact that we complete the activity of tasting by fully apprehending the flavors and textures in a dish does not entail that we will like what was tasted. It would seem that we can fully exercise our capacity to taste but not get enjoyment from the food we’re eating. Tasting, like other sensory modalities, is a form of pattern recognition. But we can recognize a pattern without liking it. So it looks like Aristotle’s definition of pleasure can’t be right.
However, this objection involves a misunderstanding of the kinds of patterns we apprehend when eating. To see why we need to dig more deeply into the nature of gastronomic pleasure. As noted, tasting involves the basic skill of pattern recognition. Beginning at some point during gestation and accelerating after birth, we are continuously learning to detect patterns of flavors and textures from which we build memory images of what the various foods we eat taste like. And these memories are encoded with our hedonic responses—when we like a flavor we acquire a disposition to like that flavor when we encounter it in the future. It is crucial to understanding this memory image that it includes not just memories of a perceived quality but also dispositional tendencies to like or dislike those qualities. We almost always have an immediate hedonic response when we put something in our mouths. This is very likely explained by evolution. Our hedonic response is important for human well-being because it is through tasting and an immediate hedonic response that we determine whether something is safe and nutritious to eat. Put differently, our taste memories encode value and significance as well as qualities.
This is a vast oversimplification of a series of very complex brain functions but the relation between pattern recognition and pleasure is roughly as follows:
When we eat a familiar fruit such as an apple, we taste the ratio of sweetness and acidity, sense the presence of the aroma compounds responsible for the apple quality and their relations, the degree of crunch, and the degree of moisture as we bite into it. As we taste more and more apples, we build a taste/aroma/tactile image of those patterns (which in experienced tasters will be a range of variations) including implicit judgments about the degree to which we found them pleasing. When the flavor/texture/hedonic patterns exhibited by the apple one is currently eating match, without impediment, the memory image of what an apple should taste like we experience pleasure (assuming that we like apples, are not tired of them, or don’t have a cold, etc.) The apprehension of the unfolding pattern of relations that constitute the taste of apples is unimpeded.
If the apple is too dry or has a mealy texture, that is an impediment to the smooth application of the current stimuli to the memory image. If there is no alternative taste image available to which pattern recognition skills could be applied that would show the coherence of the dry, mealy apple, we will experience it as unpleasant. (For example, we could be tasting the apple as part of an experiment on apple dehydration in which case the hedonic value might not be relevant.)
Thus, in the context of a meal in which enjoyment is the main purpose, the patterns to be recognized include hedonic judgments and the activity of tasting is not complete unless it culminates in enjoyment. The activity of tasting is inherently enjoyable as long as there are no impediments to the activity.
For Aristotle, pleasure is not an add-on or the result of an activity; it is the culmination of the activity and an intrinsic part of it. Part of the strength of Aristotle’s theory of pleasure is that it captures the inherent joy we experience in expressing our basic capacities when they are allowed to unfold without obstacles. And this is especially appropriate for the activities surrounding eating. We are wired to enjoy eating. The pleasure response moves us to continue searching for food and to keep that search for adequate nutrition at the top of our agenda and Aristotle’s theory acknowledges the importance of pleasure to that activity.
Of course, gastronomic pleasure is more complicated than the above example of pattern recognition suggests. It is not always a simple matter of applying a current stimulus pattern to a memory image. Most people expand their food preferences as they grow up, so we learn to appreciate flavors coded as negative by the memory image. We often eat foods or flavor combinations that are unfamiliar and sometimes get pleasure from them despite lacking a precisely corresponding memory image. If pleasure is the product of the successful application of a current stimulus pattern to a memory image, how is pleasure generated in these cases of new flavors where there is no memory image or where expectations are violated?
The answer lies in the plasticity of habit including the habits we develop around food preferences. To explain the plasticity of habit we need to introduce two terms that are important in the literature on pattern recognition—top down and bottom-up processing. Top-down processing is driven by concepts—in this case what I’ve been calling the taste/aroma/texture memory image. In top-down processing, beliefs, memories, and expectations about what one is eating dominate the pattern recognition process. Someone who has developed a love for Neapolitan-style pizza, for instance, is expecting certain patterns in the pizza in which she is currently indulging, and she is focusing attention on finding tastes and textures consistent with that pattern. If the pizza she is currently eating is topped with ham and pineapple she may find the combination challenging, an impediment to completing the activity of tasting.
But our capacity for pattern recognition when it comes to taste is not only “top down.” In bottom-up processing, sensory information coming from what we’re currently tasting is continuously updating that memory image. The patterns our hypothetical pizza lover is currently sensing are compared to taste/texture memories including implicit hedonic judgments from a wide range of taste memories that are not necessarily restricted to pizza. Perhaps she has fond memories of the baked ham and pineapple dish her mother served for Sunday supper. Obviously, there is no guarantee that the familiarity with the ham/pineapple combination will shift her pizza sensibilities. Some preferences are more entrenched than others and changes may be gradual.
The point is that the relationship between coded memory and current stimulus pattern is non-linear involving continuously operating feedback loops. Even as our memory and expectations are evaluating what we put in our mouths, those memories and expectations are being constantly updated via bottom-up processing of the current stimulus pattern.
Whether we get pleasure from novel taste experiences, then, is dependent on how effortless this updating is and how entrenched and intransigent our habits are. The wider the range of positive hedonic experiences we have to draw on, the more likely this pattern matching will proceed without impediment. So pleasure is the culmination of a dynamic process, the subtle shifting of parameters in one’s capacity to taste that fit the flavor image of whatever one is tasting. For pleasure to happen, what one is tasting must conform to the memory image, but that memory image is also adapting to what one is tasting—they are mutually constituted.
Although this bottom-up, updating function is necessary to explain how our tastes change over time, it is continuously working against the importance of familiarity. Our well-being depends on not taking something into our bodies that might be dangerous and we’re hyper-conscious of “off” flavors that indicate danger. Thus, the lure of familiarity is always salient. Our food habits are deeply ingrained, and for many people, a diet sufficiently varied to avoid boredom is sufficient. Again, for evolutionary reasons, we are wired to enjoy our food since it is through eating that we gain nutrition, and for people fortunate enough to avoid poverty or disease, getting pleasure from the activity of eating is a relatively easy task, a low-skill affair accomplished routinely several times a day with little effort except for the cook whose toil and skill make eating an unimpeded activity.
However, a quick glance around the food world would show that many, many people are not satisfied with the simple pleasures of everyday eating. The world of gastronomy has always featured culinarians who enjoy marked, extensive variation, sumptuousness, complexity, refinement, discrimination and differentiation, vividness, and depth. Although the sort of dining characterized by these aesthetic properties is readily experienced in fine-dining restaurants in the modern world, and at the tables of royalty in the past, it seeps into the domain of home cooking at least in many households. The relatively simple model of gastronomic pleasure which requires only a match between current stimulus and memory image with some modest updating of hedonic responses constrained by the need for familiarity won’t account for the full range of gastronomic pleasures.
Happily, Aristotle has more to say about pleasure as the culmination of distinctive, skillful activity which I will cover in a subsequent post.