A Little Philosophy of Forgotten Appreciation and the Lost Art of Perception

There are people who put garlic into a frying pan and heat it for so long that as little as possible remains of the very flavour for which they put it there in the first place.

This is, of course, perfectly permissible. Human rights cover culinary mistakes as well.

It does, however, raise a question: Why use garlic if the objective is then to make sure it tastes as little like garlic as possible?

Anyone who does not like garlic could simply leave it out. That would be consistent and, frankly, rather decent towards the clove. Instead, it is peeled, chopped, thrown into hot fat and eventually served as a flavourless shadow of its former self.

“He was a good clove. He had so much flavour left to give.”

One might dismiss this as a trivial culinary matter. Yet behind it lies a peculiar human habit: We want things — often on the condition that they bring as little as possible of what makes them what they are.

With wine, the same phenomenon presents itself in rather more sophisticated attire.

Wine is supposed to taste of something. We let it breathe, give it time, pour it into glasses whose shape is said to determine whether its aromas are allowed to develop properly. We sniff, swirl, observe and taste. Entire sciences concern themselves with what happens inside the glass, and entire bodies of literature with what one is supposedly able to discover in it afterwards.

There we encounter peach and apricot, blackcurrant and cherry, vanilla and tobacco, wood, leather, flint and flower meadow — a remarkable collection of things, none of which need accidentally have fallen into the fermentation tank during production.

There is nothing wrong with that. Language needs imagery when it tries to describe perceptions for which it has no exact vocabulary. If someone detects something in a wine that reminds them of peach, they are perfectly entitled to say “peach”. The language police will hopefully not be dispatched.

It becomes problematic only when one needs to consult the back label to discover what one was supposed to have tasted.

If it says “ripe apricot with a hint of citrus and mineral notes” while one’s own tongue reports nothing more specific than “wine”, there are two possibilities: Either one possesses a hopelessly uneducated palate — or the apricot made its appearance exclusively in the marketing department.

A flavour that emerges only after reading its description may be less an aroma than a successful exercise in public relations.

Our relationship with descriptions of taste is peculiar anyway. Wine, for instance, can be “dry”.

This is worth marvelling at, since as long as there is still wine in the bottle, it is quite unmistakably wet. Wine becomes genuinely dry only once the bottle is empty. At that point, however, it does so reliably.

Of course, “dry” means something else when applied to wine. It is a classification largely connected with residual sugar and how sweetness is perceived. But for precisely that reason, the word does a remarkably poor job of describing the actual taste. Above all, it tells us what is absent, or present only to a limited degree.

“What does the wine taste like?”

“Dry.”

That is about as helpful as answering the question of what the soup tastes like with:

“Not bitter.”

One knows more afterwards than one did before. Just not quite enough to go looking for a spoon.

Here lies a fundamental problem in talking about perception. Some things cannot be described directly. We can only approach them.

The Central Hessian author Siegward Roth used the example of a hole to illustrate this idea in his Knotterbock: Grundlejendes zoum mittelhessische Charakter o sich — roughly, Fundamentals of the Central Hessian Character as Such. A hole is rather difficult to describe by examining what is inside it. The defining characteristic of a hole, after all, is that there is essentially nothing there.

So we describe its edges.

We determine its shape, circumference, depth and boundaries and thereby gain a fairly precise idea of something whose most essential characteristic is an absence.

Beneath the guise of Central Hessian humour lies a perfectly serviceable epistemology.

We constantly do the same thing with abstract concepts.

What is freedom? What is dignity? What is justice?

Of course we can formulate definitions. People are exceedingly fond of doing so, particularly when other people are subsequently expected to abide by them. But such concepts often become interesting only at their boundaries.

Where does freedom end? When is dignity violated? What distinguishes justice from equality? When does consideration become paternalism, order become obedience, or security become control?

We examine the structures around the edges and hope thereby to understand the shape of the hole in the middle.

Wine, then, was merely the more harmless version of the same problem.

Taste works in much the same way. “Fruity”, “tart”, “sour”, “spicy”, “earthy” — all these words translate an immediate sensory experience into language. They are not the experience itself, but attempts to describe it.

That is useful.

Only at some point we ought to stop describing and start tasting.

Because taste has one almost unfair advantage over its description:

It tastes.

A remarkably similar epistemological insight can be found, of all places, in Kelly Bundy. In one episode, she is supposed to lend her face to commercials and asks, in essence, how she is meant to know which flavour she is advertising.

The answer:

“By the taste.”

Thousands of years of philosophy, and then along comes Kelly Bundy.

Sometimes epistemology requires remarkably little staff.

Our problem begins when we do more than merely give things names. We have to name them if we want to talk about them. But afterwards, we have a tendency to confuse those names with the things themselves.

Then wine no longer tastes. It is “dry”, “off-dry”, “mineral”, “complex”, or possesses “an elegant structure with a lingering finish”.

By now, the wine has more personality than some people.

And anyone unable to detect any of this may begin to doubt their own perception rather than consider the rather more obvious possibility that they are simply drinking wine.

The reverse order would be more interesting: taste first, then look for words.

And accept that sometimes there simply are none.

A wine can taste excellent without revealing “a hint of sun-warmed apricot against a mineral backdrop”. One is also allowed simply to say:

“That’s good.”

This is not an intellectual surrender. It can be an expression of a certain humility. Not every perception becomes more precise merely because the sentence describing it gets longer.

Sometimes only the sentence gets longer.

But taste has another dimension. Food is not merely something we perceive. Before we can perceive it, someone has to produce it.

That sounds banal. Which is precisely why it is so easy to forget.

The German duo Joint Venture explored this idea in their song Die Wurst, das Wunder und der Durst — The Sausage, the Wonder and the Thirst — using an object that at first seems only moderately suited to cultural-philosophical reflection: a currywurst from a snack bar whose standards of hygiene do not exactly inspire the narrator with spontaneous appetite.

He does not want to eat the sausage.

So he looks at it.

And suddenly the currywurst becomes a wonder.

Not because it is particularly good. Quite the opposite. But because this utterly ordinary object suddenly reveals an enormous chain of life and human labour.

A pig had to be conceived, born, fed and raised. People cared for it, slaughtered it, transported it and processed the meat. Elsewhere, the spices were grown and prepared. The bread roll required grain, farming, a mill and a bakery.

And at the end of all this sits a currywurst on a paper plate.

Enjoy your meal.

What is remarkable is how completely all of this disappears the moment the finished product lies in front of us.

We do not buy agriculture, working hours, transport or the life story of an animal. We buy a currywurst. As cheaply as possible, naturally. And if we do not like it, into the bin it goes.

Joint Venture reverse the perspective: The sausage does not become bigger. Our view of it does.

Suddenly, the ordinary is no longer self-evident.

The same can easily be applied to almost everything on our plates or in our glasses. Behind a loaf of bread lie fields, seed, machinery, people, mills, ovens and working hours. Behind a cup of coffee lie growing regions on another continent, harvests, processing, transport and trade. Behind a glass of wine stand vines, soil, weather, labour, time and experience.

And then we chill the wine to a temperature at which it tastes as little like wine as possible.

Humankind has a particular talent for creating wonders at considerable effort and then stripping them of their distinctive qualities as efficiently as possible.

With garlic, it is quicker. You just have to fry it long enough.

Appreciation begins where taking things for granted ends.

This does not mean turning a currywurst into a sacred ritual. Eating is allowed to be casual. Enjoyment is even allowed to be thoughtless. Nobody needs to commemorate the miller over breakfast, observe a minute’s silence for the potato at lunch, or include the winemaker in their evening prayers before opening a bottle.

But occasionally understanding everything that had to happen for this utterly ordinary thing to be sitting in front of us changes its value.

Not its price.

Its value.

Joint Venture’s narrator eventually eats the sausage after all.

Not because it has suddenly become more appetising.

He simply no longer sees the same sausage.

Which brings us back to perception. Things are not exclusively what physically lies before us. Our experience also includes what we recognise in them, what they remind us of and what meaning we give them.

And so back to garlic and wine.

We could occasionally allow things simply to be what they are.

Garlic may taste of garlic.

Wine may taste of wine.

And once we add tea and coffee, we finally enter the territory of Heinz Erhardt. One of his film characters once explained his preference for coffee over tea along these lines: coffee is allowed to settle, whereas tea has to draw.

At first, of course, this is simply a play on words — one that works particularly well in German, where sich setzen can mean both “to settle” and “to sit down”, while ziehen means both “to steep” and “to pull” or “to move on”. But like many good puns, it reveals something we normally fail to notice: our language treats food and drink almost like living beings.

Wine is allowed to breathe.

Coffee may settle down.

Tea has to get a move on.

Dough may rest.

Cheese has to mature.

Cream gets whipped.

And garlic gets thrown into the frying pan.

One is almost tempted to form a trade union.

Wine has body and character; it can be young or mature, heavy or light, closed or approachable. It is allowed to develop, occasionally needs to breathe and, with a bit of luck, even has a good finish.

Some people are granted less personal development by language.

This is more than a linguistic curiosity.

We speak about food and drink this way because taste is never merely chemistry. Molecules interact with receptors, of course, and much of this can certainly be described scientifically. But the chemical analysis of a red wine does not explain why a particular sip can suddenly return someone to a summer thirty years ago.

Taste is also memory.

It is habit, culture, expectation and biography.

A smell can bring back a kitchen that has not existed for decades. A dish can taste of childhood. A wine of a holiday. A coffee of a conversation. Almost everyone knows some food whose objective quality is entirely beside the point because a piece of their own life has somehow been preserved in it.

That is the real reason why taste is worth thinking about.

Not because we need the correct term for every sensation. Not because the person with the largest vocabulary of aromas necessarily tastes the most. And certainly not because an experience becomes complete only after it has been professionally categorised.

But because taste belongs to those experiences in which, for a moment, the world does not need to be described, assessed, optimised or explained.

We can simply perceive it.

That sounds banal.

In a culture that expends considerable energy improving things until hardly anything remains of their original character, it ceased to be banal long ago.

Food is flavoured, deflavoured, sweetened, desweetened, concentrated, diluted and optimised. Afterwards, pictures of the ingredients it is now supposed to taste like are printed on the packaging. And just to make absolutely sure nothing goes wrong, the label also tells us what kind of taste experience we are expected to have.

We have successfully kept nature at arm’s length and now buy “naturalness” back as a product feature.

The more radical idea would be:

Simply let the thing be.

Taste the wine before reading its description.

Allow the coffee to settle.

Give the tea the time it needs to steep.

Occasionally see the currywurst as the little wonder that had to happen for it to end up on that paper plate at all.

And if you are going to use garlic, it would be exceedingly kind not to kill it first.

It was a good clove, after all.

And it had so much flavour left to give.

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_{A thought continued:
The question of how we appreciate everyday food led me one step further: What happens to its value when nobody buys it and it is eventually thrown away?}

_{→ Next Batch, Please! — On the Value of Things and the Astonishing Practice of Throwing It Away}

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