The Table Comes First

by Adam Gopnik

  So it is not simply that tastes, mouth taste and moral taste, change. It is that they change in absolute ways—not incrementally, as we drift toward taking two lumps of sugar in our coffee instead of three, but entirely and radically, and in ways that almost always involve treating as beatific what has been before rejected as base. And they change cyclically—if not predictably, then certainly not haphazardly. That’s why we have movements and patterns and periods in the history of cooking. It’s why we have a history of culture. Taste is all that we dispute.

  Well, okay. But they were wrong, and we are… right! The cost of transporting strawberries in winter from the warm climate to the cool is bad for the fruit and worse for the planet; the poets eating cabbage from Les Halles were luckier than the ones eating imported lobster, a little later on, at Lapérouse. The old taste was bad, artificial, and mistaken, and the new taste is good, natural, and logical. The seasonal is preferable to the remote and exotic for reasons we can enumerate; Tynan and Levin were foolish Englishmen torturing themselves for no reason at all. We now eat the right way—we even have books telling us what the right way is to eat!—with the right balance of healthy organic vegetables and the right suspicion of too much butter and cream covering up the vegetable’s natural taste, and the right concerns about keeping our planet and our palate in balance….

  No doubt. Very probably so. But it requires arrogance in the face of history to imagine that history has stopped with us. The terrible condescension of posterity is a thing we should avoid, since we are surely those to be condescended to next. Don’t misunderstand! I am as partisan about these tastes as anyone else: I evict presweetened food from my children’s larder as sternly as Carrie Nation evicted sinners from a saloon; I would, if my children asked to go to McDonald’s, say, in the immortal words of Alice Waters, that I would prefer not to get involved in that kind of activity. But I also recognize that these are the tastes of my caste and class and kind, and no likelier to last forever than those of any other, older caste and class and kind.

  Presented with these two truths—the never-ending whirligig of taste and our own certainty that our tastes are best and surest—we usually try to escape the contradiction by escaping the problem of taste completely, insisting that we can root our judgment in something that transcends mere fashion. We try to root our tastes in an idea of progress, or in an appeal to nature. We think, Tastes may be trends, but trends trend toward truth. Or else we think, Well, our mothers knew what they wanted, but we know what Mother Nature wants. How well have these efforts worked over time to solve the problem of taste?

  Before modern times, taste in food particularly was enforced by the two greatest of enforcers: faith and famine, and their not-so-nice foster parent, fear. Dietary restrictions are a big part of most religious practice; kosher and halal rules are the most famous of these, and though various attempts have been made to justify them on rational grounds—pigs eat too much, or are too expensive, or too likely to make you sick when you eat them—few anthropologists take this seriously now. There are too many rules and subrules, covering too many improbable beasts and circumstances. Even the rabbis and mullahs admit now that the purpose of food laws is to create a form of symbolic solidarity that keeps a tribe or faith together. There is nothing so powerful to keep you eating with your family on this side of the river as disgust at what the people on the other side think tastes good.

  Faith shapes food, and so does famine. As we’ve seen, the first birth of “gastronomy” is inseparable from the end of the constant fear of famine that had been part of the European, and particularly the French, condition almost from the beginning of time. Many forces played a role in this transformation, not least new methods of transport that brought food into Paris more efficiently—Les Halles was not then a site of nostalgia but a hub for distribution—and of course new foodstuffs. People who like eating should praise Antoine Parmentier, the father of the French potato, every day. (In a sense, given the ubiquity of the French fry in the world, we do.) It isn’t an accident that the one exceptional famine in the West after 1800 was the potato famine in Ireland. With the end of famine in Europe as an immediate, nonpolitical threat—famines afterward would be the work of wars or sieges—came the possibility of a free play of taste. We can say “You are what you eat” only when we have some minimal choice about what we’re eating.

  With the coming of modernity—which of course came at different times for different reasons, but which we can fairly associate with the growth of science, with its search for truth, and the growth of merchant-economies, with their faith in trade—taste in general and mouth taste in particular had to find another source than faith on which to rest its principles. The 1755 “Essay on Taste” by Montesquieu is the last, classic statement of the traditional, authoritarian view of taste. Taste is produced by education, and the people who have education learn to be tasteful. The best way to be tasteful yourself is to imitate the good taste of your social superiors. (Yet no good thinker thinks just one way. Montesquieu, though he assumes a ladder of taste, also invents the idea of the “je ne sais quoi”—the idea that there is as much delight in disorder as in order.)

  It was the great Scottish philosopher of the Enlightenment David Hume, in his 1757 essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” who first articulated as a consistent view the notion that taste doesn’t depend on the spell of authority, but on the slow acquisition of ideas. Though everyone can see that tastes change, Hume was one of the first to insist that this is the central truth about them:

  The great variety of Taste, as well as of opinion, which prevails in the world, is too obvious not to have fallen under every one’s observation. Men of the most confined knowledge are able to remark a difference of taste in the narrow circle of their acquaintance, even where the persons have been educated under the same government, and have early imbibed the same prejudices. But those, who can enlarge their view to contemplate distant nations and remote ages, are still more surprised at the great inconsistence and contrariety. We are apt to call barbarous whatever departs widely from our own taste and apprehension: But soon find the epithet of reproach retorted on us. And the highest arrogance and self-conceit is at last startled, on observing an equal assurance on all sides, and scruples, amidst such a contest of sentiment, to pronounce positively in its own favour.

  So how could you make distinctions? Hume thought that you could do it by learning to make ever more minute judgments. “It is acknowledged to be the perfection of every sense or faculty, to perceive with exactness its most minute objects, and allow nothing to escape its notice and observation,” he said. “The smaller the objects are, which become sensible to the eye, the finer is that organ, and the more elaborate its make and composition.” Practice makes perfect—and what is interesting is that Hume assumes that the best theater of taste is the mouth and the table (though he was born a Scot eating Scottish food, he lived in France as a young man, which may explain it):

  A good palate is not tried by strong flavours; but by a mixture of small ingredients, where we are still sensible of each part, notwithstanding its minuteness and its confusion with the rest…. A very delicate palate, on many occasions, may be a great inconvenience both to a man himself and to his friends: But a delicate taste of wit or beauty must always be a desirable quality; because it is the source of all the finest and most innocent enjoyments, of which human nature is susceptible…. But though there be naturally a wide difference in point of delicacy between one person and another, nothing tends further to encrease and improve this talent, than practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty…. The mist dissipates, which seemed formerly to hang over the object: the organ acquires greater perfection in its operations; and can pronounce, without danger of mistake, concerning the merits of every performance.

  Hume’s idea is simple: sensitivity is what counts, and our palates get sensitive by experience. The longer you stand on tiptoe, the easier it is to dance
. All taste is acquired taste. Practice makes almost perfect, and practice plus instruction makes as perfect as we can get. A developed palate is more reliable than an instinctive one.

  But the most enduring new idea about taste in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was the romantic move away from acquired taste and toward an idea of authentic taste—a move that we associate with Hume’s great friend, rival, and, eventually, enemy, the philosopher, novelist, and essayist Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Though Rousseau’s ideas were not, as is always the case, all his own—others had them before him, and some that we associate with his name were never actually articulated by him—the great change in taste that made the peasant’s brown bread as attractive as the prince’s brioche is tied to things Rousseau asserts in his novels and philosophical books.

  Rousseau thinks that taste is not taken from authority, or acquired by educated palates; he thinks that true taste, authentic taste, is derived, somehow, from nature. Rousseau insists that brioche taste is the taste of a corrupt and decadent upper class; if we return to natural man, the noble savage, the virtuous peasant, we find a taste in constant harmony with nature. In a famous letter to Jean d’Alembert he rejects with disgust Hume’s love of small discriminations as the basis of good taste. “And what at bottom is this so vaunted ‘taste’?” Rousseau asks. “The art of knowing little things. In truth, when one has something so great as liberty worth knowing, all the rest is quite puerile.” And in Emile, Jean-Jacques teaches his student to feel nothing, but to “fix his affections and his tastes, to hasten to be sure and that he does not search in luxury to find means that he can find best very near to him. Good taste [is] defined very simply as that which pleases or displeases the greatest number.” Rousseau loves to describe the joys of a harvest, the pleasures of the vineyard, the superiority of the terroir to the city. True taste is popular, near at hand, not the delicate acquired taste of the educated.

  Yet this idea of a natural and simple eternal taste, waiting to be found if we could just discard our pretensions, produced, in its own era, very different practices. The natural was as complicated a concept as the acquired. Rousseau’s first great public disciple was the Queen herself, Marie Antoinette; his second Robespierre, and his third the man who invented the restaurant, Chantoiseau. Each possessed an idea of simple naturalness, and they gave us in turn the symbol of elite cluelessness, the “rustic village” on the grounds of the Petit Trianon; the symbol of popular terror, the guillotine; and the symbol of common pleasure, the restaurant.

  Marie Antoinette built her Petit Hameau in homage to the new cult of simplicity. The Hameau was the first boutique farm where agriculture could be practiced in an ideal and deliberately “antiquated” form and a circle of the rich could restore their inner balance by milking cows and growing carrots. This was mocked at the time, of course, in exactly the same way that the same kind of activity is mocked now: when we insist on an organic garden at the White House or, as many cooks do now, run an organic hothouse attached to an expensive restaurant, we can expect to see it sneered at as a mere plaything of bored privilege.

  Yet there is little doubt that Marie Antoinette was perfectly sincere in her beliefs, and that the movement toward terroir and fresh produce had a lot to do with what she did. (To deepen the irony of her infatuation, perhaps the most famous culinary imperative—her alleged cry of “Let them eat cake!”—actually comes from Rousseau’s Confessions, where he uses it ironically in reference to an “ancient princess.” The connection of Marie and Jean-Jacques ended by connecting her to a cry of indifference that, whatever other crimes she was guilty of, was none of hers.)

  The man who took off Marie’s head shared many of her tastes. Maximilien Robespierre, the maker of the Reign of Terror, also took his ideas about religion, rectitude, and dining from Rousseau. But where Marie Antoinette had taken the lesson that simple pleasures are natural to life, Robespierre took the related lesson that austere pleasures are necessary for virtue. In an especially creepy note, he had the keepers of the plain rooming house that he lived in prepare for him, night after night, as he came home from the killings, a meatless diet of strawberry jam and white bread. It was left to his great rival Georges Danton to be the fresser of the French Revolution—and for his sins he lost his head, too.

  But there was also a more enduring relation between Rousseau’s ideas and our own food life. As we’ve seen, Chantoiseau took up the new cult of self-conscious health to make the restorative bouillon that lent its name to that new institution, the restaurant. And the kind of “sentimentality” that Rousseau loved played its role, too: the idea of the restaurant as a public place where women could come for their health without having their morality impugned allowed for a whole new ritual of courtship and sublimated sex. (The appeal to self-improvement is always an acceptable cover for sex; that’s why they call them health clubs.)

  So from this same simple turn toward brown bread, toward the terroir and the authentic, we get radically unlike results: the move among the upper classes toward boutique farming, among the radicals the move away from delectation toward delicacy, and among the middle classes the invention of the most durable of all “bourgeois” institutions, the restaurant. Whatever simple pleasures may be, they aren’t simple.

  Taste in the Enlightenment belonged to philosophy. In the nineteenth century, the study of taste turned to evolutionary theory and to economics. The idea of the authentic has always been haunted by the possibility that what we call authentic is arbitrary, and in the nineteenth century this instinct was given systematic form by the economist who could be called the Darwin of taste. His name was Thorstein Veblen, and he was a professor who came to fame in 1899 with the book The Theory of the Leisure Class. The most original, if the most discouraging, thinker about taste of modern times, Veblen, a passionate Darwinian, must have been well aware of Darwin’s writings on that subspecies of natural selection Darwin called “sexual selection,” in which Darwin was trying to create a kind of natural science of taste.

  What Darwin had noticed was the seemingly perverse elements of sexual display in animals, which seemed to contradict “natural” principles of the efficient use of resources. You might think that animals that used resources most sparingly would live longest and have the most offspring. But in fact, far from existing in a state of parsimonious, peasant-like simplicity which only human artifice and pride disturbed, the state of nature looked more like the rococo interiors at the Nymphenburg Palace than the peasant hut. Peacocks and elks and many other species in the wild indulge in expensive displays of needless plumage and endless antlers: they strut up and down in the lek, to display how much they have to waste. They make themselves as conspicuous as possible in order to show off their goods and get a mate. Showing off, not simplicity, is the rule of nature.

  Veblen came from a Norwegian farm family and grew up in Minnesota; a little Norwegian goes a long way toward making you reluctant to put on any kind of display. Inspired in part by Franz Boas’s insight that anthropology could explain economics, Veblen began The Theory of the Leisure Class with a myth. He imagined that money trouble had begun way back, with the transfer from a state of “peaceable savagery” to one of “predatory barbarism.” The peaceable savage was a creature of material appetites who was satisfied when he was satiated. This natural state was superseded by the coming of the predatory barbarian, a category that for Veblen includes the Kwakiutl warrior, the medieval feudalist, and, in America, the businessman—anyone who lived off the labor of others.

  The distinguishing characteristic of predatory-barbarian society is a ruling class that doesn’t do physical labor—a leisure class. (Even a banker who goes to the office every day is, in Veblen’s scheme, a member of the leisure class.) In tribal and feudal societies, he argues, the leisure class had certain occupations—making war, exploiting vast tracts of land, running slave plantations—that gave it prowess and status: its members could fight, and actually owned other people. With the growth of modern industrial societ
y, only the outward show remained, and it became a powerful symbol. In Veblen’s scheme, the Ralph Lauren effect is universal: even when membership in the leisure class no longer depends on being able to ride horses and own land, it is still symbolized by polo and ranches. “Manners are symbolical and conventionalized survivals representing former acts of dominance,” he writes. “In large part they are an expression of the relation of status—a symbolic pantomime of mastery on the one hand and of subservience on the other.”

  The rules of this “symbolic pantomime” became Veblen’s subject. It was founded on the practice of “invidious comparison.” For preindustrial predatory barbarians, it was pretty clear who stood where: you just counted slaves and acres. For industrial society, though, there is no obvious way to rate predatory barbarians except to see where they shop and what they buy. Since you can’t count the slaves or acres of the stranger on Madison Avenue, the only way to know where he stands is to see how much he pays for his cappuccino. In today’s terms, if he goes to Three Guys he pays three dollars, and if he goes to the E.A.T. café he pays six. Some would rather pay the six and buy the status. Veblen called this urge to show off your status by spending your money “conspicuous consumption.”

  And yet Veblen saw that, even among the very rich, conspicuous consumption was usually complicated, involving a tension between the need to display money and the need to be seen to display old money. “Archaic simplicity” had to be evoked in order to demonstrate the age and solidity of your “industrial exemption”—your freedom from the necessity of working with your hands. Conspicuous consumption had to combine “a studious exhibition of expensiveness with a make-believe of simplicity.”