260723: Notes on Taste
Metabolism meats politics... Power games among the primates: How can we form a taste-based alliance? Share food and live together? Towards a metaphor of taste as the basis for social coordination.
Taste names a rich, primal interface—half biology, half culture—between organism and environment: Attraction and aversion, selection and rejection. It is a theory of value in miniature: what is fit and unfit, safe and unsafe. What nourishes and what poisons.
Taste serves as a rich, “thick” replacement for thin moral theories of utility.
- The metaphor of utility has virtually no built-in conceptual affordances: All we can say about useful objects is that they help accomplish some goal or end. Whereas we can say a great deal about taste and its operation in the world.
The taste metaphor comes built-in with a set of useful properties and dynamics.
Taste is subject to frequency-dependent selection effects. Taste is not simply preference but proportion: the right amount, at the right time, in the right context. Organisms will tire of the same meal, and develop specific cravings in response to nutritional deficiencies.
- We are able to increase our awareness of, and sensitivity to, these signals of our bodily needs.
Taste logic has already been generalized and metaphorically extended to describe the social evaluation of persons, artifacts, environments.
In social domains, taste is strongly predicated on structures of association. Although some forms of taste-as-boundary-enforcement exist, it is often the case that individuals’ make judgments of taste based on connotations and associations. (E.g., if a purse is associated with a high-status individual, wearing that purse associates the two wearers. The higher-status individual, now associated with a lower-status imitator, may cease wearing the purse, leading to barberpole dynamics of fashion.)
- Taste is often preoccupied with questions of contamination or associative tainting.
Taste sorts attention and status, and helps direct social learning (see Richard McElreath’s work)
Individuals who display taste gain status, which increases the visibility of their taste for imitation.
Individuals are incentivized to develop and display their taste—that is, to make public information from past experiences—in order to obtain status.
Problem: Individuals with highly developed taste often have highly divergent preferences from the general population.
- Generically appealing, “entry-level” artifacts and consumables rarely appeal to these individuals, since they have already consumed such experiences in abundance.
Taste operates as a costly signal by testifying to private information.
Taste (or style, fashion, etc) are reliable costly signals due to the intense difficulty of faking an entire ensemble. See e.g. getting into Berghain, or pretending to be upperclass.
Individuals with esoteric taste testify to a wide breadth of experience, and thus a significant amount of private information. Collective decision-making is effectively only when a significant amount of private information is present & incorporated.
Culture as a training regime for inculcating taste: What to notice, what to savor, what to spit out.
Coordination does not require—but is greatly eased by—shared patterns of preference and discrimination. Groups must continually decide who and what to admit, exclude, praise, punish, repeat, and pass on.
Taste influences what is let through the semipermeable boundaries by which all life protects itself: The mouth; the city gates, the inner circle.
Taste thus fuels evolutionary cycles and cybernetic learning
Shared taste is a low-cost solution to recurrent collective action problems, allowing individuals to align with a minimum of explicit bargaining.
Innovators are involved in (and rewarded for) the continual search for novel appealing artifacts and consumables
Conventions, canons, and cultures enshrine patterns of common taste and preference for future appropriation.
Hunting and foodsharing among primates are foundational cases of social coordination.
- Even today, a huge percentage of etiquette rules revolve around eating, foodsharing, and turn-taking at the dinner table.
Hosting, table-setting, & hierarchy
Foodsharing is shaped around social hierarchy: Who serves, who waits, who eats first, who gets the best and worst cuts of meat.
Arrangement of individuals around the dinner table is deeply hierarchical. In many societies, heads of long tables are prized for their distinctiveness and visibility. Additionally, proximity to host is a proxy for status. Round tables are used explicitly for their egalitarianism.
The history of foodsharing is also a history of economic development and increasing individuation: Restaurants traditionally served a few meal options to all patrons; New York's Delmonico's innovated, in America, the custom of ordering custom dishes off menus, to be prepared on-the-spot. Today, gluten sensitivities, vegetarianism, allergies, and other dietary considerations have increasingly fragmented meals, such that in many American families today, the mother produces a different meal for each child.
Genericism
Generic artifacts are necessary for coordinating large groups. Shared preferences underlies mass collective action.
- Genericism may be a result of distillation (identifying universal aspects) or averaging (taking middle values in an array).
Elite individuals often signal by explicitly rejecting generic solutions.
Autism is notorious for picky eating. There seems to be a low threshold for disgust, and a low openness to certain forms of sensory experience and exploration.
- Allergies, autoimmune disorders
Critics (and nutritionists, philosophers, etc) have the role of (1) helping laymen discriminate in their diets (2) assisting in the process of digestion or assimilation, e.g. making difficult work accessible, or making superficially uninteresting (or repulsive!) work appealing
Gut cognition and computation
Even within an individual, taste is not monolithic. What the eyes accept, the mouth may reject; what the mouth accepts, the stomach may reject; what the stomach accepts, the intestine may reject. Acceptability and desirability are judged anew at each stage of the process.
There is no single sovereign judge called “taste”; there is a pipeline of partial acceptances, each with its own criteria.
Taste is not just gustatory but sexual: Similarly visceral feelings of attraction, and compulsions to consumption, devouring, boundary-crossing, and social association. Political alliances and kinship structures are downstream of sexual taste.
- Sexual taste is likewise linked to evolved discrimination of parasites, disease resistance, genetic compatibility. Bodies make quick, consequential bets under conditions of incomplete information.
- Sexual taste is likewise the basis of social coordination, that is, romantic partnering, reproduction, and co-parenting.
- Sexual taste in the modern world is similarly vulnerable to superstimuli and surrogation pitfalls. Cosmetics, plastic surgery, and other superficial (i.e. non-heritable) sculptings of beauty have a significant effect over judgments of sexual taste.
- Industrial modernity learns to hack the signal: sweetness without nourishment, beauty without fertility.
- Homo Sapien is usually translated to “wise man,” but the root sapere also means “taste,” in both a literal-gustatory as well as aesthetic-discernment sense. Man is a tasting animal.