by Adam Gopnik
Veblen’s point is not that we want to separate ourselves from others by showing off while spending a lot of money on big consumer goods: the guy with the giant house in the Hamptons is, to the true uppers, an embarrassment. The point of conspicuous consumption is not that it is more consumption but that it is conspicuous—that is, clearly distinguished from its surroundings, which are the status-manners of the vulgar middles. We want to separate ourselves from the bourgeoisie, and the leisure class does this by taking on the manners of the other exempted people, the peasant or criminal classes. The privileged classes, and their professional attendees, will always struggle to make their true status and income clear by differentiating themselves from the middles. (Already, in 1899, Veblen pointed out that the fashion for candlelight dinners was pure invidiousness; nobody thought candles were romantic until they were archaic.)
Veblen’s analysis of taste can be vulgarized, most often in a broad, crude, or merely snide way. But it isn’t hard to see how arresting a true Veblenian account of food taste in our time might be. In an era of plenty, when we can’t distinguish ourselves by eating more—when obesity has become a sign of the lower-middle classes, not the high uppers—we eat local and seasonal produce in order to annex the exemption of the few surviving peasants. Whole Foods has grown, on Veblenian principles, as more of the professionals and upper-middles try for the same status symbols—and come under suspicion from the true uppers as mere fakery, a counterfeit of “our” beliefs.
Similarly, a Veblenian account of taste can explain apparent oddities: for instance, the question that I raised at the very beginning of this book, and that is the seemingly contradictory trends that have grown up among taste-setters in our own age: the taste for molecular gastronomy, and for slow, peasant food. What they have in common is that they are hard to take part in if you are on a middle income. When Calvin Trillin made fun of the “Maison de la Casa House” restaurant, the typical Continental cuisine spot in Cincinnati or Akron—with its stuff-stuff with heavy cooking—he was noticing, with his matchless eye for the details of American life, that what had been a high cuisine restricted to a handful of people with access to New York or Paris was now a common ideal of the middle classes—which meant that it would now have to be rejected quickly and completely by the uppers and the pros. And so we came to the end of even real French cooking, to the French restaurant, with its velvet banquettes, to the disappearance of all those “Le” and “La” restaurants in New York; no more Le Cygne, La Caravelle, or Le Lavandou. They’ve been replaced by single words and numbers—Basil, Butter, Cilantro—which suggest the elemental ingredient derived pseudo-peasant style.
The molecular—or “techno-emotional”—cuisine depends on resources for travel, and on machinery for making, that are also outside the range of all the middles; the localist cuisine depends on resources that take more organization, and more time, than money, but the two are the same in many ways. It would be no surprise to the Veblenian that the new “best restaurant,” taking the place of all those old French temples, is René Redzepi’s Noma, in Copenhagen, which combines extreme localism with high molecularism, a double whammy of Veblenian achievement: René stores vintage carrots for years—the ultimate peasant tribute—but also manufactures potato chips that taste like chocolate and raw soil that tastes like caviar and so on. You win the triple: you get to eat local, you get to eat high, and you have to go to Denmark to do it.
For Veblen, it’s all status and symbol; it isn’t possible to have an authentic response to food, much less an altruistic one. We are social creatures driven to confer status on ourselves. Every taste choice we make is a status choice in a not-very-hard-to-see-through disguise.
Veblen’s theory was that there were large areas of real life that defy free-market theories, and that what we call taste is like the antigravity mineral in Avatar, the thing that makes it all float up. There are antigravity zones made by the acceleration of taste, where we pay more to get less and the rain falls up and the grass grows high in winter.
Yet the most influential American economist of taste in the century since Veblen was writing has been the University of Chicago professor Gary Becker, who in 1992 won the Nobel Prize in economics, for his studies of taste, time, and money—in fact, the paper he cowrote, called simply “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum,” is one of the most cited papers in the literature. In it, Becker insists, a little shockingly, that there is no such thing as taste, and that all tastes are all the same. By this he means not that they never change but that, from the point of view of an economic model, they can all be mapped in the same way. Where earlier economists would say that changing tastes violated or overthrew classical laws of supply and demand, Becker insists that that’s not so: it doesn’t matter what it is you want, the ends of wanting are all alike. People make rational decisions to invest in what they like and what gives them pleasure; the mistake is thinking of the product and not the entire social process.
Why, Becker asks, if you have two restaurants across the street from each other, serving comparable food, do the normal rules of economics not apply? Why doesn’t the one with the long line each night expand its premises, or raise its prices? Why doesn’t the restaurant across the street lower its prices? Veblen’s answer is that we have been coerced by capitalism into imagining that people will envy us if we are standing in the right line. Becker’s answer is, in plain English, that the line is what we’re paying for. It is the sum of the experience, which is the experience of standing in a line with people. The presence of other people makes the product more desirable. This explains why crowded restaurants don’t expand, and why, in New York, they often set up obstacles—private numbers, snooty young women maître d’s—designed to drive away customers. Knowing that the chances of staying in fashion are very slim, the best strategy is to milk as much money as you can from the intimidated consumer now. Keeping customers out is a very good short-term strategy for making a profit, so long as you can keep the other customers coming in.
Or take that E.A.T. cappuccino; the Veblenian explanation is that it’s an irrational perversity imposed by status overriding economic sense. Becker’s explanation is that the six-dollar cappuccino is good economic sense. The price is a rational price given that what you’re paying for is the social interaction—and though this sounds like the same thing said in a different way, it is different inasmuch as Veblen thinks the cycles of taste are silly and to be escaped from, if you can, and Becker thinks that they are part of the rational logic of markets. Seemingly irrational phenomena of mere taste are actually completely rational phenomena of utility. The cappuccino is correctly priced, in its own weird way. Veblen thinks that people adopt silly tastes because they’re driven to do it by capitalism; Becker thinks they do it because the market frees us to be honest in our likes and dislikes, and then reveals them as they really are. What we call educating our tastes is merely maximizing our utilities, and all utilities look about the same seen from a sufficient distance. All rat races look the same to everyone but the rats who are running in them.
Now, in real life we don’t live within one model of taste, but many. We may each be, by turns, Montesquieu and Rousseau and Veblen and Becker at a single dinner. Many of my friends who run restaurants race through these roles every day: in their role as cooks they are Rousseauian optimists, in their view of their customers Veblenian cynics, and in their view of their business partners Beckerian realists. They want their food to be authentic and pure and natural; they know their customers will come only if they think it’s hot and hip; and they recognize that the best way to persuade clients that it’s hot and hip is to have someone else say it is. They want to serve the best steak they can but they know they’re selling the sizzle; they want the sizzle to last as long as it can by making people hear it.
Though the thinkers are various, and the views complex, the common point is simple: wherever we stand, we cannot escape the cycles of symbolic social life—whether they are driven by invidious com
parison, self-interest, imitation, or utility. They may derive from our desire to keep up with the Joneses, or from our urge to find out what it is the Joneses are keeping up with themselves—in every case, the romantic idea of true taste as a thing revealed after false taste and fashion has been stripped away fails. What we find when we look at taste—from the viewpoint of sociologists, psychologists, economists, and novelists alike—is a system of imbalances, asymmetries, persistent illusions, turning cycles, tail-biting serpents, deferred self-interests, not just wheels instead of ladders but gyrating spirals instead of simple wheels. None of us can escape the web of competitive, cyclical, counterintuitive, imitative relations that shape the social role of taste. There is no privileged space from which we can look down and say, Your tastes are trends, my tastes are truths. All taste effects depend on contexts. The smell in our nose changes the taste in our mouth, and the length of the line outside the restaurant changes our view of the taste of the food we’re waiting for, and even how much we’ll spend to eat it. We are what we eat? Probably closer to the truth to say that we eat what we are: the total self we bring to the table shapes the way we choose, and even how we chew. Our morals and our manners together drive our molars.
There is no true or “natural” taste outside the circles of social ritual. You, me, the guy at McDonald’s, the kosher butcher down the street, and the evangelical vegetarian actress on television, the locavore and the mad seasonalist and the organic shopper and the crazed carnivore—we are all part of an inescapable network of social relations that shape our tastes in ways small and large. Our circumstances whisper in our ear what we ought to eat and what we ought to like and why we ought to like it. To insist that ours is true simplicity, true taste, that we at last know the right way to eat, is to lobby for an exemption from history that history will not provide. It is even to imagine that we can escape the effects of living among our own kind—our humanity. That was Rousseau’s mistake, and Robespierre’s sin.
Yet I know from long and sometimes painful experience that this truth often goes down very badly, or is taken to mean that all our tastes are just delusions. Take, for instance, the obvious smaller truth about the social texture of taste—the experimental truth that wine tasting is a social ritual as much as it is an objective rating. We know that the taste of wine is heavily dependent on all kinds of social cues—the order of glasses, color, place, expectations, labels… even experts do no better than random chance in determining between a glass of white and a glass of red in a blindfold test. We see “Rousseau effects” in the trend toward organic and biodynamic wine (biodynamic viticulture combines organic treatment of the vineyard with a spiritual aspect), which must taste better; we see Veblenian effects in wine tasting (the bottle of Cristal or Pétrus has become marked as nouveau riche, so better buy the biodynamic ones); we see Beckerian effects (the price is justified by our chance to take part in the community); and so on.
Doesn’t this mean that you’re saying that it’s all phony? That it’s a fraud or a fake? Just the opposite; what it shows is that the experience of taste is like all of our other experiences of meaning, produced by complicated frames and interactions and effects and all the richer for it. Wine writing or tasting is no more fraudulent than music criticism or art appreciation, which are also crucially dependent on context and expectations, on social context at least as constricting as those that govern mouth taste. All the things that make us human—the nature of our social lives, our taste for competitions and our capacity for learning new games—make the distinction between acquired taste and authentic taste, trendy taste and true taste, meaningless in any discussion about real life.
Yet, just because they can be partly explained as conspicuous display doesn’t mean that our tastes are without value, meaning, importance, or integrity. The naïve naturist believes that insistently asserting the sincerity of her values places them outside the realm of mere style; the naïve Veblenian believes that having shown that a thing has an element of style is enough to empty it of any sincerity at all.
In truth, much, perhaps most, of the good in our lives comes from recognizing the fragile and temporary basis of what we choose to do, and then doing it anyway. We don’t have to believe in natural or absolute grammar to believe in beautiful sentences. We don’t have to believe in natural monogamy to work at a happy marriage. All the good stuff is at once universal and overwhelming, and local, tempered by taste, finely articulated to the place and moment. When we have a child in a foreign country, it is all foreign and all child. When we have an omelet in Spain, it is all Spain and all omelet. When we eat beautifully in 2011, we are both free diners and prisoners of the table of our time.
So the choice between an authority to tell us what we ought to eat and the anarchy of warring fashions is a false one. Between authority and anarchy falls argument, and though arguments aren’t always better for being ended, they’re always better for being addressed. What “De gustibus…” really means is not that taste is not disputable but that it’s not decidable—if you don’t like Brussels sprouts, I can argue you into trying them but I can’t argue you into liking them. But that’s an argument worth having. We have it every time I put them on the table.
What the arguments do show is something deeper, and vital—that behind nearly all taste squabbles are value disputes. All morals manifest themselves as manners, and all manners have a moral locked inside. We know the values that we want to uphold on the “green” side of the fence: community, tradition, care, sustainability, and pleasure above all else. But on the “industrialized” side there are values, too: efficiency, prosperity, ease of choice, and abundance. This is a case where the seeming “left” is entirely conservative, while the industrial and populist right, as happens so often in the capitalist regime, is essentially progressive—say good-bye to the family farm, the slow-cooked chicken, and in exchange you get, or hope to get, what we have not had ever before on this planet: cheap meat for everyone. Organic, local, slow—if this is what we want, it is, the counterargument goes, the best way to go hungry. There is the silent spring of industrialized agriculture, but there is also the long silent summer of natural starvation.
On the other hand, or in the other fork, there is the truth that the diet of grease and sugar and salt, produced by reducing living things to machines, creates the overfed, glazed, and ill American majority. The argument is that cheap meat for all will end with no cheap meat for anyone; the argument in return is that the threat of no cheap meat means that we must find ways to make more. The animal Auschwitz meets the silent clearing of the Congo. That there are no simple solutions to be had does not mean that there are no good arguments to be made. All good arguments have no end, only provisional settlements.
One thing is for sure: these questions won’t be solved by a nostalgic appeal to nature. The appeal to nature is always a false appeal. Every appeal to nature or the natural way or the way we were meant to do it has always failed in the history of human thought and action. If anything is natural, it is the flight from nature. If anything is genetic, it is the willingness to be fascinated by the elaborate, the deceptive, and the deliberately overcharged. Birds in the lek were Barcelona chefs long before there was a Barcelona. If anything is efficient, it is waste. The peacock’s tail, which does nothing except show the peahen how much he has to throw away, is as good a model for a natural life, or diet, as the happy Paleolithic eater sharing the healthy diet.
There is no right way to eat, spell, get dressed, wear clothes, make love, listen to music, drink wine, raise children, because there is no natural way to do any of these things. Every attempt to say what nature wants us to do turns out to be what someone thinks we ought to. There may be nature-based explanations for why some ways are taken more frequently than others, but they fail at the moment of specific choice, and the specific choice is all that counts: we can explain why people like music, but we cannot explain why some prefer Barry Manilow to Mozart. That lies beyond reason.
Nature
does, and makes us do, many good things and many horrible things. Nature gives us the bounty of the fields; it also offers the slavery of agriculture, and the cruelty of animal slaughter. Nature lets worms eat other animals alive from the inside out. As John Stuart Mill said, what matters is not to discover what nature does, but what it is good to do. (In any case, we generally argue that the tastes we already have are the ones that will save the world to come: people who believe that the answer is to reduce consumption don’t much like the culture of consumption in the first place—they’re already living in Vermont.)
This isn’t a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of devoted detachment. Let me now offer the secret of life—or, rather, what James Taylor calls, in his fine song of that name, the secret o’ life. The secret of life is having enough intellectual detachment from our tastes to see their absurdity, while taking enough emotional fulfillment from them to grasp their necessity. We are absurd followers of the fashions of a time and place and class; we are also wise worshippers of ideas. We need not flee manners to embrace morals. The morals are the manners in more complicated form. If we lack the proper distance from our tastes, we can’t see things as they are; if we lack the emotional attachment to them, we see things merely as they are. With mouth taste as with moral taste, we cannot escape a frame of ritualized context; but with mouth taste as with moral taste, the frame is what contains the feeling, and leads the eye. (Wallace Stevens put it nicely: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”)
