How Snobbery Helped Take The Spice Out Of European Cooking
Taste bridges personal choice (identity), societal standards (culture), and the pursuit of validation (attention).
Anu Atluru • Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley.
Since in India, more than in any other part of the world, food has been invested with meaning as a marker of identity. The corollary of “You are what you eat” is “You eat what you are”
Buddhists, Jains, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and those adhering to other religions have their own food prescriptions and proscriptions. Feasts to celebrate festivals and
... See morewok-frying remains the basic Chinese cooking technique, a cuisine born of fuel poverty. Every meal had to be founded on frugal calculations about how to extract the maximum taste from the minimum input of energy. ‘Les Rosbifs’ had no such worries. The roast beef of England reflected our densely wooded landscape, and the fact that we had plenty of g
... See moreBee Wilson • Consider the Fork
Rozin and Schiller argue that the human conversion to chili—which is not seen in other omnivores, such as rats—represents a “hedonic shift.” Around the age of five, children start to season their own food. They see older siblings and parents reaching for the salsa on the table and start to copy them. Maybe the first bite makes them cry with pain, b
... See moreBee Wilson • First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
Taste is about preference. When someone has "good taste" they have well-refined preferences. Taste sounds like a snotty term that a sommelier uses, but we all have tastes, even if we're not talking about taste in full-bodied reds from Northern Italy. We have taste in music, taste in design, and taste in literature (even if your literature is banger... See more