by Dwight Furrow
Is there such a thing as tasting expertise that, if mastered, would help us enjoy a dish or a meal? It isn’t obvious such expertise has been identified.
The most prominent model of tasting expertise is derived from the practice of wine tasting and has been extended to the assessment of cheese, coffee, chocolate, beer, spirits, and a variety of other products. These products are notably complex and exhibit flavors and aromas that are difficult to detect yet important to the quality of the product. The aim of expert tasters is to break the taste object into its component flavors, aromas, and textures so each element can be clearly identified and named with the help of flavor wheels that sort these flavors into categories. The expertise required for such analytic tasting is one of discernment—identifying hidden aromas or flavors that untrained tasters might miss. Analytic tasting is useful for assessing products, identifying the origin of a product, or training one’s ability to discern flavors. However, analytic tasting pays only cursory attention to how flavors and textures are then knit together to form a coherent whole.
By contrast, typical diners when enjoying a dish or meal are less interested in identifying hidden aromas or flavors and more interested in whether the elements fit together coherently. The enjoyment of complex dishes, as well as several dishes served as part of a meal, involves tasting relations between multiple taste objects rather than discrete, individual taste objects. But what kind of relations are we tasting? Part/whole relations would be the obvious type. For a dish or meal to be aesthetically successful, ingredients and flavors must be perceived as being fully integrated parts of a coherent whole.
In aesthetics, this relationship between whole and parts has traditionally been understood in terms of organic unity. For instance, John Dewey, drawing on romantic traditions in the arts, spoke of a work of art as an “organism” so “unified” that its “different elements and specific qualities . . . blend and fuse in a way which physical things cannot emulate.”
Although appeals to unity in the arts have fallen on hard times in the wake of deconstructive and postmodern critiques, it is evident that aesthetic objects must have some sort of unity. There are different kinds of wholes after all. A pile of rocks is a whole, but it is just a loose assortment with no internal relations holding it together. One would hope your meals are not like that. An animal or plant, on the other hand, has parts that are so tightly integrated that the whole could not function without them, and each part exists only to serve the whole. A heart apart from a body would be useless—hence the term “organic” to describe this kind of unity.
Similarly, a work of art is a collection of lines, brush strokes, and patches of color. But these parts don’t affect us as isolated entities. We perceive their qualities in the context of all the other elements of the painting and how they are related. The features and qualities of the whole are a product of the inter-relations between the parts but the whole modifies and controls how we perceive these parts. For proponents of organic unity in the arts, this synthetic grasp of the whole is essential in the appreciation and evaluation of the work. In fact, Dewey argued that the parts take on the quality of the whole so each part is reflective of the overall unity of the work and our experience of it.
Do successful dishes and meals, especially when they aspire to be works of art, have this kind of unity?
Organic unity is a species of holism which can be defined as follows: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts and the parts get their meaning and significance from their participation in the whole. The first part of the definition is aesthetically important and in broad outline uncontroversial. Organic unities have emergent properties that are of considerable aesthetic interest. Emergent properties are properties of a whole that its parts do not have in isolation and would not have collectively in the absence of the structuring relations between them. Aesthetic objects including dishes and meals have emergent properties such as balance, elegance, delicacy, or dynamism that the parts considered separately do not possess.
The second part of the definition is more controversial because it suggests the parts have aesthetic value only in relation to the whole of which they are a part. The parts are subordinate to and under control of the whole, so those properties possessed above and beyond the parts have priority and perform an organizing function. The issue in the debate about organic unities is whether the parts have more independence and separate value than the theory allows.
No doubt some dishes can best be understood as organic unities. A carrot soup made with onions, ginger, an apple, and cumin all blended together with a bit of cream is such a unity. Whatever qualities the parts have separately, after cooking and blending they now exist only as facets within a homogeneous mixture. The pure carrot flavor having taken on aspects of cumin, ginger, and apple is no longer discernible as such. The whole has properties that the parts prior to their integration lack, and the parts have aesthetic value, and can be discerned, only as part of the whole.
But consider a dish such as roast lamb over a bed of lentils. The lamb and lentils don’t form a mixture. They remain distinct ingredients even after cooking. We might, by combining some lamb and lentils in a single mouthful, taste them simultaneously but they nevertheless remain distinct flavor and texture experiences. The dish constitutes a whole and has emergent properties that are the result of the interaction of its parts, but the flavor profile and aesthetic value of the lentils and the lamb each have a degree of autonomy not compatible with organic unity.
This relative autonomy that some of the parts of a dish or meal have is essential to our enjoyment. We seldom taste all elements of a dish simultaneously, and if a meal includes many plates or side dishes, we taste them in a series which is sometimes intentional but sometimes arbitrarily determined. It’s essential to our enjoyment that each part be enjoyed separately even as they contribute to an overall holistic experience. The aesthetic value of the parts is not wholly a product of the enjoyment of the whole; we often focus intently on the parts, the components of a dish, as relatively autonomous aesthetic objects. In fact, our attention shifts back and forth between the components considered as parts of a whole and the components considered as relatively autonomous.
A similar analysis is necessary for an account of the aesthetic value of a meal. A meal is a complex aesthetic object involving several dishes, various courses, the elements of the service, the atmosphere and context in which we eat, including the people we eat with and the ensuing conversation. We want all these factors to collaborate as a whole but they will not be mere reflections of the whole. They will have features that can be considered and enjoyed separately. A meal in which the components had no distinct, separate value would be unpleasant since the necessary sampling of parts would lack any distinctive value of their own. Many critics have argued that organic unity is a criterion of aesthetic value. Aesthetic objects that display organic unity are held to be of greater value than works that lack that tightly integrated relation between parts and whole. But this view doesn’t capture the nature of a dish or meal as an aesthetic object. The relative autonomy of the parts is crucial to our aesthetic appreciation of dishes or meals.
What kind of unity do dishes or meals have if not organic unity? Conformity to norms will tend to give dishes and meals a sense of unity. A dish will have unity if it is familiar and skillfully prepared according to the norms that govern the preparation of that kind of dish. And meals will have unity if the constitutive dishes are typically found together, appropriate for the occasion, and other elements of the service and occasion also conform to extant norms. This is similar to the kind of unity art objects and literary works have when they conform to genre conventions and the conventions of the tradition to which they belong. In human affairs habit is the great unifier.
However, this appeal to normative standards has limited explanatory power both in the arts and cuisine. Works of art as well as some culinary preparations are the product of creative activities that push the boundaries of what is normative. Heston Blumenthal’s “parsnip cereal” followed by “smoked bacon and egg ice cream with tomato jam and tea jelly” (pictured above) comes to mind. The unity of aesthetic objects that display substantial creativity must be generated without the crutch of convention, and thus will depend on the unique particulars of each object. There can be no general answer to the question of what kind of unity such non-standard objects exhibit.
Perhaps adventurous eaters do possess a kind of expertise–creative tasting, discovering unity in disparity, an ability to find pleasure in the unfamiliar. An acquired taste, to be sure.