The Tao of Taste

By Warren Rojas

Courtesy of Wiley-Blackwell

When I tell new acquaintances I am a food critic, some ask about the career path required to secure such a position. Most folks, however, sidestep the feigned interest in my credentials and leap ahead to delineating why they should have my job.

I guess everyone really is a critic.

Just ask the academics, culinary experts and everyday food lovers who lent their voices to “Food & Philosophy,” a collection of thought-provoking essays on eating beyond basic nourishment.

Co-editors Fritz Allhoff, an assistant professor of philosophy at Western Michigan University, and Dave Monroe, an ex-chef-turned- philosophy student, argue that because humans consciously reflect on what has been eaten, “we ought to think about what ramifications our diets may have for other people, animals, or the world at large.”

St. Cloud State University assistant professor of philosophy Michael Shaffer takes critiquing down a peg by asserting that virtually everybody shares the hard-wiring for taste (“any properly functioning human can detect real, objective tastes such as saltiness, sourness, bitterness, and so on”). Elsewhere, Minneapolis Star Tribune restaurant critic Jeremy Iggers laments the rise of self-aggrandizing foodie web forums (“where participants reinforce each other’s sense that their sensibilities are more sophisticated and/or adventurous than the middlebrow tastes of the newspaper critics”) and communal-dining arbiter Zagat (“undermines the very premises of the taste hierarchy by treating all of its reviewers as ‘authorized knowers’”).

“Food & Philosophy: Eat, Think, and Be Merry.” Edited by Fritz Allhoff and Dave Monroe. Blackwell Publishing, 320 pgs. $19.95.

(January 2008)

Tags: Chew on this, food for thought