All this and more I am exploring in the first episode of a mini-series, in conversation with https://twitter.com/smargot_finn 6/6
https://www.eatthispodcast.com/margot-finn/
Maybe there is something universal about what tastes good? And then there’s the equally difficult question of who decides what constitutes “good taste”. Is taste all a matter of status? 5/6
So much for taste being purely subjective. But there’s more. If taste were purely subjective, how would the evil NuFood Corp be able to engineer foods that taste so good that almost all of humanity becomes borderline addicted? 4/6
And yet, it is incredibly easy to leap from “this tastes good (to me)” to “I have good taste,“ and from there it is a hop, skip and jump to “I am a good person”. That being the case, my clear moral duty is to improve your taste and so to improve you. 3/6
What happens on my tongue, in my nose and especially in my brain is mine alone, and you can have little useful to say about it. You could of course point out that I have no idea how bad cilantro tastes to you, but that’s not helpful. 2/6
I’ve been getting myself in a right old muddle about taste lately. Not music or architecture -- well, not entirely -- but gustatory taste, the taste of food. Of course, we all acknowledge that taste is subjective. 1/6
Gardens and Streams
I have a suspicion that people retreat into protocol work to escape from the human work that must be done. And there’s no getting around it: we should learn to better work in this medium and we are really resisting having to confront it.
This is a very real tension, to me.
Friday 17 April, 2020 | Memex 1.1
So many interesting ideas about not returning to normal when (if?) this thing is over.
Chicken Skin Music is truly balm for the soul on an afternoon that feels weird for reasons I cannot put my finger on.