Real Men Don’t Eat Fiddly Foods! February 15, 2012
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Food and Drink, Philosophy of Food.Tags: John Mariani
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Cross-posted at Edible Arts
Esquire’s “Eat Like a Man” blog features John Mariani confidently contending that cooking is a craft, never an art.
Thus, imagination and creativity go into cooking, often at a very high level, at which point it is called haute cuisine. But there is nothing that rises to the level of true art in a craft whose very existence depends on the constant replication of a dish, night after night, week after week.
The occasion for Mariani’s diatribe against culinary art is a new book which consists mainly of pictures of:
…cooks’ hands putting the final touches on dishes — a periwinkle on tapioca, a dot of sauce on octopus, a blow torch used on cactus pads.
Given the venue, I suppose the subtext here is that real men don’t eat fiddly foods topped with periwinkles, when the carcasses of large-boned animals can be slathered with Q-sauce and washed down with a pitcher of Bud Light for a fraction of the price.
Subtext aside, Mariani’s arguments are interesting in much the same way a speech by Newt Gingrich is interesting—one shivers in anticipation of impending collapse when bluster is so perilously perched on non-sequitur. So it is worth unpacking the arguments if only for the spectacle.
With a healthy dose of charity, I can discern 5 arguments in Mariani’s piece:
(1) Cooking requires the constant replication of a dish and is thus inherently a reproduction; works of art are unique.
(2) Cooking is science-based and thus cannot be an art
(3) Art can be ugly, troubling, or repulsive; food by contrast cannot be deliberately distasteful.
(4) In cooking, form must follow function. Thus, cooks must make guests happy and this often requires simplicity and making things “taste like what they are”. In art, (by implication) form is not bound to function, simplicity is not a virtue, and art is essentially about creatively modifying the object being represented, not showing it as it is.
(5) What is typically called culinary art involves extravagant display or adding decorative flourishes to traditional ingredients. This is not art because (by implication) art is not about decoration or extravagance.
There is too much misunderstanding of both cooking and the arts to reply in one blog post. So I will take up these arguments in separate posts over the next week or so.
But his first argument that individual dishes are reproductions and thus cannot be original works is simple nonsense. Copies of paintings are indeed mere reproductions, not original works. A print of the Mona Lisa is not a work of art because painting is an autographic art—only the painter can directly cause the work to exist, and there can be only one legitimate instance of it. But many arts are allographic—copies of an original are genuine instances of the original. My copy of Hamlet is a work of art even though it is a duplication of the original. CD’s by Springsteen or performances of Beethoven are instances of works of art despite the fact they are reproductions.
Cooking is similarly allographic. Individual dishes are instances of a recipe just as a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is an instance of its score. So the fact that line cooks churn out 25 copies of a dish in no way shows that cooking is not an art–unless Mariani is prepared to claim Beethoven and Shakespeare are mere craftsmen.
The Synergy of Music and Wine (or how to waste time on the Internet) November 15, 2011
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Food and Drink.Tags: drinkify, food and wine aesthetics, music, synergy
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Synergy occurs when two or more things function together to produce a result that they cannot achieve independently.
Synergy is essential in the world of food and wine. Good food and wine pairings are an example of synergy. Adding salt or acidity to a dish often enhances other flavors—another example of synergy.
But what about synergy between music and drink? Are their natural affinities between music and particular consumables? A new website, called Drinkify, assumes so. Enter the name of an artist you want to listen to and a song by that artist starts playing and a drink recommendation pops up.
The idea was conjured at a recent meeting of Music Hack Day Boston, where tech geeks gather to meld software and music.
I usually ignore web-based gimmicks. But I couldn’t resist this. So I plugged in one of my favorite bands, Steely Dan, and received the recommendation to drink a bottle of red wine—topped with nutmeg? Now if you happen to like red wine and Steely Dan, I’m sure they will enhance each other, especially towards the bottom of the bottle. But is their some further connection here? The music of Steely Dan is sophisticated and complex, and some red wine is sophisticated and complex as well, but the last thing I’m going to do with a sophisticated, complex wine is sprinkle nutmeg on top! Nutmeg is a flavor note one often detects in pinot noir. I guess if all I had was a bottle of Two Buck Chuck, I could sprinkle a little nutmeg and pretend to be tasting Burgundy. But why bother?
I’m beginning to suspect this is nonsense.
But wait. Here’s another hypothesis. Steely Dan got their name from a William Burroughs reference to a dildo in Naked Lunch. And Burroughs killed his wife trying to shoot a wine glass off her head in a drunken game of William Tell. Ah. I guess that’s the connection.
I decided to go classical and plugged in Stravinsky. Their drink recommendation—Ogogoro, a Nigerian beverage distilled from the sap of palm trees. Well, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring featured primitive themes and syncopated rhythms inspired by African music. Not bad. A bit more precise than the Steely Dan reference.
How about some Coltrane? 4 oz of red wine with the instructions to serve neat and stir vigorously. Huh?
I’m beginning to suspect random associations.
Oh just one more. Elvis Costello. The recommendation–8 oz of fassionola, which is a red syrup used in bar drinks, 10 oz. water and 8 oz. of half-and-half.
That is just disgusting.
I can’t believe I just wasted 20 minutes on this.
x-posted at Edible Arts
Sound, Vision, Taste and the Fine Arts November 1, 2011
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Art and Music, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Food and Drink.Tags: fine arts, food and wine aesthetics, the sense hierarchy
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One traditional argument opposing the idea that the edible arts are genuine fine arts is that taste and smell are very limited sensory modalities. They are important only for pleasure and for their functional role in providing us with nutrition, but we get relatively little information or knowledge about the world via taste and smell, according to this argument.
Vision and hearing, by contrast, provide us with substantial world-directed information through which we establish a robust representation of reality. Vision and hearing give us an understanding of spatial location. Vision enables us to carve up the world into discreet objects that we can then view from multiple distances and many perspectives, thus enabling us to track movement and ascertain size and shape. It provides us with a simultaneous, comprehensive representation that need not unfold over time so we can size up a situation quickly. Via hearing, we process the spoken word and gain insight into emotional tone and resonance, key factors in our ability to navigate the social world.
This deluge of visual and auditory information is fodder for the artistic imagination which uses it to shape imaginative worlds that expand our perspectives and give us new ways of seeing and hearing reality.
There is no doubt that vision and hearing are the sense modalities that process the greatest volume of information. But that alone tells us little about what qualifies as a fine art. The quintessential fine arts—painting and instrumental music—are in fact rather limited in their capacity to represent anything via sensory experience itself, despite the fact they rely on information-rich sense modalities.
Painting can represent the look of whatever fits within its static, narrow frame. But to the extent painting tells us much about a complex, dynamic world, it piggybacks on the even more information-rich activity of narrative. But paintings tell stories not only in virtue of their visual information but because the visual information is embedded in the temporal and conceptual flow of memory and anticipation, with events linked via causation. Without narrative, paintings represent only the surface appearance of things. Paintings that do not rely on narrative—some abstract works for instance—seem not to be aiming at representations of the world at all. They are about their own surfaces, their materials, or other works of art. In other words, without narrative they are much like the flavors and textures we experience in the edible arts, if tastes and smells were implausibly considered to be merely sources of pleasure without narrative structure.
Music, shorn of the narratives expressed by lyrics or implied by vocalization, is even less representational than paintings. Although music sometimes expresses emotion, it seldom represents precise, particular emotions. Furthermore, much music seems to have little to do with emotion. Music, the most abstract of the arts, is often quite distant from anything we experience in the natural world. Yet that lack of representational content does not disqualify it from being a fine art.
Thus, works of fine art either lack world-directed informational richness or they get much of their informational richness from narrative. In any case, their seems little reason to privilege vision and sound as the only sensory modalities worthy of anchoring the fine arts.
This creates some conceptual room for the edible arts if it can be shown that the edible arts have world-directed informational richness. But that is a task for another day.
Coming Down Off the Perfect Meal October 18, 2011
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Food and Drink.Tags: Carolyn Korsmeyer, Jay Rayner, Philosophy of food and wine
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Food and Wine have not been taken seriously as forms of art in part because of the belief that vision and hearing are the only senses that lend themselves to the intellectual explorations we associate with art. This ideology, called the “sense hierarchy”, and masterfully traced by Carolyn Korsmeyer in Making Sense of Taste, treats taste and smell as thoroughly functional sources of brute pleasure, too primitive and instinctual to be worthy of genuine aesthetic discrimination.
This ideology is ancient. 2500 years ago, Plato argued that vision and sound give us information about the world that engages the intellect, while tastes and smells only encourage the appetite which he likened to a ravenous beast that overcomes our rational faculties. (I suppose Plato can be forgiven for not knowing about the porn industry or trivial pop melodies that suck you in each time you hear them.)
…the gods made what is called the lower belly, to be a receptacle for the superfluous meat and drink and formed the convolution of the bowels, so that the food might be prevented from passing quickly through and compelling the body to require more food, thus producing insatiable gluttony and making the whole race an enemy to philosophy and culture, and rebellious against the divinest element within us.
One wonders what was in Plato’s kitchen that threatened to sap his self-control. But Plato’s assertion rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of how appetite works. Appetite has its own internal control mechanisms.
This point was brought home to me as I read Jay Rayner’s book The Man Who Ate the World. Rayner, a British food critic, often on the judges’ panel for Top Chef, set out on a worldwide quest to discover the perfect meal. With perfection being an impossible standard, his quest involves more disappointments than successes. But the penultimate failures could be attributed to the fact that his ambling about the world was avoiding the one place where such perfection is alleged to be routine—Paris, where he endeavors to eat 7 meals in 7 days at the finest restaurants.
The regrets begin on Day Two, and by Day Six:
Oh, god, I don’t know. Another Parisian three-star. Doormen in peaked caps.Claw-foot chairs. Side tables for the ladies to put their handbags on. The food was standard three-star stuff: langoustines on sticks wrapped in sea-water foam, beetroot meringues, yeast ice cream decorated with silver leaf. You know the score by now.
Rayner’s weary lamentation shows that appetite is not quite a ravenous, insatiable beast. It’s not that the food wasn’t good. Most of it met his expectations. But the adage “too much of a good thing” applies even to the finest cuisine. In the absence of compulsive disorders, pleasures aim at their own extinction. (There is probably an evolutionary explanation for this. Organisms that are never satisfied will ignore everything else to their obvious detriment)
Many philosophers have noticed this tendency of pleasures to be satiated but argue that the desire for pleasure always returns in a never ending cycle of debilitating craving. But, again, Rayner’s experience shows that this is not necessarily the case.
But the wonderful thing about perfection is that it is, of course,unobtainable. That didn’t stop me searching for it. That hasn’t stopped me wondering about it. All I need is the appetite. There is only one problem. I’m no longer sure I have one.
Having experienced the best cuisine in the world, the post-quest prospect of the many failed meals that await the restaurant critic no longer appeals to him. Once one develops aesthetic standards and acquires an ability to discriminate, fewer pleasures seem attractive. Critical awareness enhances self-control. The motivation to seek pleasure can be tamed by the very intellect that Plato thought would be overwhelmed.
There is no reason to think there is something peculiarly “brute” or instinctual about taste—it can be refined and disciplined just like any other sensation.
Philosophy at the Table October 4, 2011
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Food and Drink, Philosophy, Uncategorized.Tags: aesthetics, food and wine, Philosophy of food and wine
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Food and wine are among the consummate pleasures of everyday life. But philosophy throughout its history has largely ignored these pervasive satisfactions. Preoccupied with the life of the mind, the activities of the body were presumed to be quite separate from and inferior to thought. After all, we are biologically predisposed to enjoy salt, sugar, and fat and it takes only a little effort and no cognitive skill to reap their rewards. Since, food and drink are tied to our primitive, animal instinct to survive and socialize, philosophy’s conceit has been to remain chastely untouched by passions that stir likewise in pigs at a trough.
Furthermore, our tastes seem to be so irredeemably idiosyncratic, subjective, and immune to standards that philosophers have typically decided food and wine could not be systematically studied.
I think all of this is quite misguided. The study of food and wine is cognitively interesting and enhances our enjoyment. Although subjective up to a point, the appreciation of food and wine is no more subjective than the appreciation of painting or music, all of which are profitably understood as subject to standards of evaluation.
And so I have decided to plunge back into the blogosphere, after an extended hiatus, with Edible Arts, a blog and newsletter devoted to unpacking these dimensions of food and wine that please the palette, the intellect, and the heart. I will cross-post here when the post is related to philosophy and aesthetics, or visit me there for regular posts on the world of food and wine.
And we should not be so disparaging to pigs. There is no part of a pig I dislike—although I must confess never to have tried a pressed sow’s ear. There may be a line to draw here some place.
Cross-posted at Edible Arts.
The Emperor’s Feast November 8, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Food and Drink, Culture, Dwight Furrow's Posts.Tags: Apicius, Dairy Management
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From the famed cookbook of Apicius, (A Roman cookbook from the 4th Century)
The proposed menu for a banquet:
APPETIZERS
Jellyfish and eggs; sow’s udders stuffed with salted sea urchins; patina of brains cooked with milk and eggs; boiled tree fungi with peppered fish-fat sauce; sea urchins with spices, honey, oil and egg sauce
MAIN COURSES
Fallow deer roasted with onion sauce, rue, Jericho dates, raisins, oil and honey; boiled ostrich with sweet sauce; turtle dove boiled in its feathers; roast parrot; dormice stuffed with pork and pine kernels; ham boiled with figs and bay leaves, rubbed with honey, baked in pastry crust; flamingo bioled with dates.
DESSERTS
Fricassee of roses with pastry; stoned dates stuffed with nuts and pine kernels, fried in honey; hot African sweet-wine cakes, with honey. (h/t Brian Leiter)
Does anyone know where I can get sow’s udder in San Diego?
Meanwhile back in the contemporary world, empire just isn’t what it used to be.
From Talking Points Memo:
The Cheese Industrial Complex
Here’s an article in the Times that is both disturbing and oddly comic, if darkly so. The US government is now making a major push to combat obesity. It’s the First Lady’s big cause. But for years Americans have been moving away from full-fat to reduced fat or skim milks. And this has created a surplus of whole milk and milk fat.
So what to do? While trying to get Americans to reduce fat intake and eat better, the USDA has also created a marketing arm called ‘Dairy Management’ which has the job of teaming with companies to find ways to get more cheese into consumers’ diets.
The story in the lede is about how ‘Dairy Management’ helped Dominos overcome sagging pizza sales by introducing pizzas with 40% more cheese. It’s been a rousing success and sales have doubled.
Is this progress?
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Anti-Americanism Explained June 30, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Culture, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Food and Drink.Tags: American character
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Via Huffington Post
The video below has been making the rounds, and for good reason. In it, an American tourist (YouTube user simoneharuko) visits what she calls, “pretty much the coolest grocery store of all time” in Alexanderplatz, Berlin, and found something she had never seen before: an American ethnic section. As Eater pointed out, “most of this stuff seems to be there for expatriates who want brands they recognize.”
Here is the video.
And here is the list of products included in the “U.S.A” ethnic food section:
- Swiss Miss Hot Chocolate mix
- Cans of V8
- Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup (original and “Shell” style)
- Maple syrup
- Regular old syrup
- Betty Crocker Baking Mixes: Blueberry, Chocolate Chip Cookie, Brownie, Cake, Muffins, Bisquik,
- Betty Crocker frosting: Vanilla and Chocolate
- Five (5) Pain Is Good Hot Sauce varieties
- Jim Beam Barbecue Sauce, Steak Sauce, Hot Sauce, and Mustard
- Four (4) Jack Daniel’s Barbecue Sauces
- Paul Prudhomme “Magic” Seasoning blends
- Paul Newman salad dressings
- Hellman’s Mayonnaise
- Wish Bone Blue Cheese Dressing
- Marshmallow Fluff (original and strawberry)
- Kraft Macaroni & Cheese
- Cheese Zip (cheese whiz)
- Head Country Barbecue Sauces
- Bull’s Eye Barbecue Sauce
- Hunt’s Barbecue Sauces
- Cheddar, Nacho, and Jalapeno-flavored squeeze-bottled cheese
- Mustards
- Heinz sweet relish
- Crisco shortening
- Marshmallows
- Campbell’s Soups
There is not much here worth eating.
I’ve just returned from Spain and Portugal, and I have spent some time in Italy and Germany as well. If there is one thing Europeans do well it is eat. If you are an ex-pat American living in Europe do you really pine for this stuff? You really want cheese whiz when you can have a nice Allgau Emmentaler?
Of course, our ethnic food sections don’t look much like a real market either. But much of what one finds there is at least edible and sometimes interesting.
A box of Kraft macaroni and cheese might induce all manner of speculation about the “American character” deficit.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
I Am A Tremendomeatatarian March 2, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Culture, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Food and Drink.Tags: vegetarianism
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Tremendomeatatarianism is the ethical stance of vowing only to eat meat that’s tremendously delicious. To some who are blinded by old ideas, tremendomeatatarianism may sound more like a joke than an ethos.
Your doubts and jeers aside, it is a demanding standard by which to judge your actions. The tremendomeatatarian refuses to eat meat simply because it is what his parents did, or because it is convenient, or because he lacks willpower. The tremendomeatatarian respects the fact that his food came from a living being, which died to provide him with dinner, and which may have suffered or be rare and overfished.† Or perhaps it’s bad for the environment. Any of these things are costs, so the good utilitarian must balance them out. So he vows that he will respect that sacrifice by only eating meat if it is tremendously delicious.
(†) Fish are not meat, but here they are honorary meat.
(‡) T-Rex made up the concept of Tremendomeatatarianism, but maybe he meant something different from what I mean. If you’re interested, go look at the interpretive issues.
(‡†) I’m not the only philosopher to propose a peculiar ethical doctrine concerning food. If you want a view that’s worked out in more detail, you can look at the Acutetarian page.
h/t Brian Leiter
I think this is the only rational approach—an approach that integrates aesthetics and ethics, a comprehensive conception of the good. May there be 10 Facebook groups devoted to Tremendomeatatarianism. May Peter Singer and Sarah Palin join hands and acknowledge the virtues of mooseburgers roasting on an open fire.
And peace be upon the world.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Vegetarians Rejoice! December 3, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Food and Drink, Science.Tags: frankenfood, vegetarianism
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SCIENTISTS have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.
The advent of so-called “in-vitro” or cultured meat could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals — if people are willing to eat it.
So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time.
They initially extracted cells from the muscle of a live pig. Called myoblasts, these cells are programmed to grow into muscle and repair damage in animals. […]
“You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals,” said Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University, who is leading the Dutch government-funded research. […]
Peta, the animal rights group, said: “As far as we’re concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there’s no ethical objection.”
It is my understanding that a muscle has to be used in order if it is to develop the texture we are accustomed to eating.
So what would an exercise yard for disembodied pork parts look like?
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Friday Beer Blogging September 11, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Food and Drink.Tags: German vs. American Beer
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This article comparing German and American beer is quite interesting. The writer is an American writing for a German publication. And he argues persuasively that American beer is better. (His German readers were less than enthusiastic)
Of course he is not talking about the Coors-Budweiser-Miller swill. He is promoting the fast-growing micro-brew market. (Germany has their own inferior mass-market brews which, to my taste, are a bit better than their American counterparts, but not by much.)
On quality, variety, and innovation he rates American micro-brews better than the brew-pub offerings from Germany.
I’m no expert on beer but I have done some beer tasting in Germany. On quality, I think it’s basically a wash; both countries make wonderful beer. The linked article confuses price with quality. German beers are not luxury items—their quality beers will not be outrageously expensive. Nevertheless, their meticulous attention to detail and quality ingredients make wonderful beer.
But on innovation and variety American beers are hands down better.
But what makes such comparisons difficult are the vast differences in the two beer cultures. In Germany, every city has their own style about which they are quite proud and they serve mostly that style with slight variations. In Munich you will drink primarily Hefeweisen, in Cologne Kolsch, in Bamberg Rauchbier (smoked beer). (Pilsner is available all over but with subtle regional differences). They are not much interested in variety (and don’t even ask for Belgium beer!)
In America, brew pubs are always innovating, searching for new styles, flavor combinations, and new methods. As the linked article points out:
To some extent the difference is unbridgeable–Germans are uninterested in innovation or even a wide variety of choice, because they feel they have already found perfection. Americans are dazzled by the possibilities of new angles and avenues, and pursue them relentlessly, even if it means breaking rules. Is there is a better statement about the basic differences between European and American culture?
I adore Hefeweizen, especially at 10:00 in the morning with Weisswurst, which is their mid-morning snack in Munich.
But if I lived in Germany, I would grow weary of the lack of variety.
