by Dwight Furrow
In a previous post, I began to articulate a conception of gastronomic pleasure loosely based on Aristotle’s view that pleasure is the natural culmination of unimpeded activity. I make use of such an ancient theory because it strikes me as true that when we exercise fundamental human capacities, and that activity proceeds without impediments or obstacles, we experience pleasure. When we don’t get pleasure from activities that engage basic human capacities, it’s because we’re not very good at them or some obstacle to completion was put in our way.
Eating, and its component activity tasting, is one such exercise of basic capacities that naturally aims at pleasure when the food is good, the company is right, and one’s sensory mechanisms are functioning properly. Tasting involves the basic skill of pattern recognition. When we eat, we build memory images of what various foods taste like and whether we like them or not. When the flavor/texture patterns in the food we are eating match, without impediment, the memory image of that food (which include hedonic responses), we experience pleasure.
One virtue of this conception of taste is that it accommodates a central feature of our enjoyment of food—familiarity is an important value. We are naturally reticent about taking something into our bodies that might be unpleasant or dangerous. Thus, we experience enjoyment when a present stimulus conforms to the familiar hedonic patterns of past experience. But of course, that memory image of what food should taste like is constantly being updated. We learn to taste new foods if only to avoid boredom since our sensory mechanisms are designed to experience repeated stimuli less intensely.
This account of gastronomic pleasure accounts for what we might call “everyday eating.” For people with the means and health to enjoy food, getting pleasure from eating is a low skill affair accomplished routinely several times per day. Familiar foods with just enough variation to avoid boredom satisfies many people. But the variations we find in the world of cuisine are far more extensive than what is necessary to avoid boredom, and for many people the pursuit of gastronomic pleasure is often anything but a simple, routine activity. Chefs strive for their Michelin stars and diners pay fantastic sums for the opportunity to taste their creations. Sommeliers intensely practice the identification of complex, hidden patterns in wine as do coffer cuppers, beer cicerones, and cheese professionals in their respective flavor worlds.
The culinary world today is a world of remarkable sophistication and rampant innovation, but it has always shown an interest in refinement, innovation, and complexity. After all, the Roman Empire had extensive spice trade routes that extended throughout much of Asia. Centuries later, Christopher Columbus set out to find a more direct route to satisfy the palates of European royalty. A casual glance at any food tradition reveals an amazing assortment of dishes that undergo continuous modification, a history that cannot be explained solely by our desire for familiarity. For many people, taste is an adventure and for some a refined skill. The pleasure we take in that kind of tasting activity appears to require a richer account than what I’ve offered thus far or what Aristotle’s initial formulation of the nature of pleasure can supply.
In fact, Aristotle provides more commentary on pleasure that casts some light on this more refined and extensive activity of taste. Aristotle wrote:
Every perceptual capacity is in relation to its perceptual object and perfectly active when it is in good condition in relation to the finest of its perceptual objects…. Hence, for each capacity the best activity is the activity of the subject in the best condition in relation to the best object of the capacity. This activity will be the most pleasant. (Nicomachean Ethics, 1174 b14)
Pleasure, according to this passage, is the result of our progress toward perfection. In the realm of taste, when one’s capacity to taste is in peak condition, and the object being tasted is of the highest quality we experience the most pleasure. If our tasting capacity is not in the best condition or the object being tasted is of lesser quality and thus does not allow the full exercise of one’s capacity, we experience less pleasure. This strongly suggests that the more complex the activity is, the more skill is required, the more perfect the pleasure we experience when the activity is completed successfully.
Aristotle’s more robust second definition of pleasure appears to explain the pleasure that committed culinarians enjoy when indulging in fine food and drink. Unfortunately, this account isn’t quite right. One implication of Aristotle’s view is that simple foods or foods that lack refinement are incapable of producing pleasure to the same degree as more refined and complex food. It isn’t obvious that this is the case. Many people who enjoy food don’t go in much for Michelin-star dining experiences, and even those who do thoroughly enjoy simple fare most of the time. Food writers often wax lyrical about the virtues of a simple Tuscan bean soup or perfectly cooked leg of lamb. It seems false that people with discerning palates don’t experience simple pleasures as intensely as the pleasure they take in fine cuisine. In what sense is complexity or the discovery of hidden flavors a higher pleasure? It may be that refined dishes create a different kind of pleasure—a pleasure more in keeping with our rational nature according to Aristotle. But it surely is not obvious that the perfection of our rational nature explains the kind of pleasure we experience in fine dining. No doubt culinarians get intellectual pleasure from studying the food they eat, but that ignores the fact that the enjoyment of food is largely although not exclusively sensory.
Part of the problem with Aristotle’s theory is that it is bound up with his views on human perfection, which are both ethically and metaphysically suspect. But if we avoid talk of perfection as the aim of human activity, we get a more plausible account of the kind of pleasure one gets from dining on refined, complex cuisine while maintaining the connection between the exercise of our capacities and pleasure. That updated reading of Aristotle might look like this:
When I enjoy an activity such as eating or tasting, this encourages me not only to continue to perform it but to do so with more enthusiasm and attention. The pleasure I experience as a result of the fit between the condition of my tasting capacity—the capacity for discernment and the availability of diverse memory images and hedonic judgments—and the quality and complexity of the food I’m eating causes me to become more focused and therefore more discerning which improves my capacity to taste. That improvement in capacity then enables me to discern more patterns in what I’m tasting thus improving my capacity once again. In other words, there is a virtuous feedback loop between the pleasure we take in tasting, improvements in our capacity to taste, and the quality of what we’re tasting. Ultimately, of course, one reaches a point where what is there in the food to be appreciated will be exhausted and it will lose its fascination.
However, it is reasonable to think that we will exhaust what is there to be appreciated more readily with simpler, less demanding dishes. Complex dishes have a much greater capacity to sustain this virtuous feedback loop, assuming of course that the flavors work well together and the dishes are integrated.
Thus, it isn’t that complex dishes provide more pleasure than simple dishes. Simple dishes can be enormously satisfying. But it does seem plausible that simple dishes don’t sustain this active searching for patterns and the change in sensibility that occurs when we encounter complexity. Complex dishes don’t provide more pleasure—I’m skeptical that pleasure can be quantified—it’s a different kind of pleasure. There is more opportunity for building a capacity when the patterns we apprehend are complex—there is more opportunity for experiencing synergies between flavors, depth, multiple contrasts, and ultimate consonance assuming that integration problems can be solved by the chef.
Furthermore, our sensory mechanisms are designed through evolution to attend to variation in our environment; failure to do so will get you killed. Our taste mechanisms are no exception. They adapt to repeated stimuli and therefore we experience them less intensely. To survive we can’t afford to waste attention on familiar stimuli. Our perceptual sensibilities are continuously changing, and assuming a stimulus isn’t painful, we take pleasure in the degree of variation from a background of normalcy. Complex dishes exercise this capacity to seek and make sense of variation more readily than do simple dishes, especially if the simple dishes are familiar. And for people inclined to pursue flavor as a project, the degree of variation from a background of normalcy is itself exhilarating.
This suggests that indeed the activity of tasting complex dishes culminates in a different sort of pleasure—the pleasure we take in sensory learning and creating habits with more facility and reach. What I want to suggest is that we experience joy in the development of our capacities in general and the development of our tasting capacities in particular and this is one source of the interest culinarians take in fine cuisine.
We routinely experience joy in the development of physical and intellectual skills—a sense of potency that comes from being able to negotiate one’s environment with facility. For a skilled practitioner of almost any activity, navigating a complex environment feels more invigorating than navigating an environment that poses no challenge. We take joy in the expansion and expression of our powers precisely because that expansion removes impediments to our activity as Aristotle argued. This applies to our capacities for sensory experience, as well, including taste.
What then is involved in this power or capacity to taste? What sort of skill is this? This is too large a topic to cover in this essay. However, it is worth noting that the most prominent model we use today to conceptualize the skills involved in tasting is likely not adequate to explain the apprehension of the complex patterns we discover in dishes and meals. That is the conception of taste developed in wine tasting that has now been extended to tasting a variety of other food and beverage products such as beer, cheese, coffee, and chocolate.
This model of tasting is best described as analytic in that the aim of expert tasters is to break a taste object—a particular wine or cheese for instance—into its component elements so each element can be clearly identified and named, with the help of flavor wheels that sort the elements into categories. Analytic tasting is useful for a variety of purposes such as identifying the origin of the product, its quality, or features of the production process. However, it tends to de-emphasize how these elements are then knit together to form a coherent whole. To be fair, professional wine tasters are not content to merely provide a list of aromas or textures they discover in a wine. They must also address whether the wine is balanced and the components well-integrated. However, the degree of attention devoted to these synthetic features of a wine is considerably less than the attention paid to the results of the analytic assessment and the standards of judgment are far less articulated.
But this model of taste expertise does not capture how we eat. When enjoying food, even committed culinarians devote little attention to detecting hidden flavors and aromas and pay far more attention to assessing how a dish or series of dishes hang together and whether the complex intersection and evolution of multiple flavors and aromas is enjoyable or not. This suggests that in order to understand the skills involved in gastronomic pleasure we need a more synthetic approach than current tasting models provide.