Making Sense of Taste, Food and Philosophy

"Despite the title, she does deal with all five of the senses. What she lays out very effectively and persuasively is the origins of our denigration of taste and smell and our celebration of the other senses. She traces the philosophical roots of our bias against these chemical senses. She fingers Plato and Aristotle as being the ones that started the whole thing. And the reasons for the denigration of the senses have changed over time. With the rise of Christianity, for example, there was also the idea that smells were savage and appealed to our baser instincts. This is also similar to the arguments offered by Plato. Plato describes our tastes and smells and appetites as the savage beast chained up with man. I will say that this book deals not only with taste, in the sensory sense, but also taste, in the aesthetic sense. On that topic, it also looks at how gustatory and olfactory experiences became incompatible with higher art and these spiritually elevating artistic experiences. So, what I found so powerful about her book was the way that it picks apart the origins of our ‘visualist’ nature and the origins of our biases against some of the senses. I found that very helpful because it holds a mirror up to ourselves. It illuminates biases of which we are not even aware, and suggests that there may be an alternate way of seeing the world that doesn’t put taste and smell at the bottom of the totem pole and that doesn’t suggest an aria or a painting is always more refined and elevating than a bite of food. That’s a very difficult question. It’s a question that’s hard to do justice to in just a brief moment. As one of my sommelier mentors said: There are wines that can make you feel small in the way that a piece of music or a painting does. I’ve been lucky enough to have some of those bottles. There are things like old champagne that have stopped me in my tracks and made me think a little bit differently about the universe and my place in it. And I have heard pieces of music that have done the same thing. So, it’s not impossible to find the Bach of wine. And I should say that I would love to be on that journey. If someone wants me to find the Bach or Mozart of wine, then I’m game."