The Cognitive Understanding of Food Philosophy

Preface

Chromosomes are part of the patterns of the ever-changing forms and shapes found in nature, encouraged by motions of atoms and matter. Zooming out of these chromosomes that are part of a green leaf, a different shape jumps from here to there with the excitement of being a Robyn. It's that time of the year when the leaves are green, the birds are chirping and everything around grandpa and I and our game of chess and a platter of olives, sun blushed tomatoes, red peppers, red onions, baby rocket etc... is dazzling with life. The puffy clouds surround the life giving sun and as we are sitting on old wooden chairs in the garden I am reaching for my knight to make my first move. Suddenly grandpa says, “What good is knowledge in enjoying the experience of eating simple organic raw food?” I said, “Does knowledge about food make the food taste better grandpa? I mean can it enhance the experience of eating good food?”

He then posed the following question as an interesting side issue: Are people who know more having a different perceptual experience? “I'm not asking what good knowledge is in growing, selling or evaluating food – I take it that knowledge is good in all those respects,” clarifies grandpa. “Also,” as he takes another green olive stuffed with garlic, green peppers and rosemary, he says, “I'm not asking whether there is any value in being able to blind taste say a good organic olive.” Instead, distinguishing these from the pleasure one has eating olives. Many of these types of knowledge pertain to taste. Open a bottle of good organic raw olives you've had before and there is expectation: this is the cognitive pleasure of remembering what a good olive will taste like.

As grandpa raises another wrap filled with olives, red peppers & baby rockets into midair to look at its rich colors, and bites into it, his face lights up with a rosy glow and he says: (1) We are talking about people who have a basic liking for food. (2) That people have the practical skills of knowing how to taste. (3) And, I know that this is rather shaky assumption, that expectations and external influences play no role in one's experience and judgment. (4) We’re discussing the effect of knowledge on people with normal sensitivity to aromas and flavors.

I thought about this for a moment then I understood what he is saying. Then to clarify his meaning I came to three related questions, posed in order to help frame his arguments. To what extent do differences in preference reflect differences in taste? Do we share a common experience? Is it possible for two people to taste the same say kalamata olive, experience the same thing and then for one person to like it and the other not?

According to grandpa, it is possible to distinguish three types of pleasure: sensory, cognitive and emotional, with the third, he suggests, not being relevant to food. He also makes a distinction between four levels of perceiving components of food tasting characteristics.

There is (1) sensing, (2) noticing, (3) recognizing and (4) identifying.
If we compare scenery watching and bird watching with eating good organic raw food tasting, there's a difference. In the first two pursuits, the fun is in recognizing and identifying. With food, there's a level of pleasure that occurs beyond merely recognizing and identifying flavor components. Then grandpa continues and drew attention to the sorts of terms used to describe experts in particular fields. ‘Discerning’ and ‘discriminating’ have both an aesthetic and cognitive meaning. Both can imply merely expertise, but there's an additional level of meaning that implies good taste.

There's a distinction here between being an expert and a food connoisseur: the latter implies some level of good taste in the area of expertise. Then he continued to illustrate his example in a gross way and said imagine someone with a special ability to taste and smell. They work in a medical laboratory, but instead of using analytical devices to test blood and urine samples, they use their elevated sense of taste and smell. But there wouldn't be an aesthetic side to this, and we wouldn't consider them as food connoisseurs.

Grandpa seems to be in a trance of some sort and he doesn't seem to think that I am there, it seems that he is talking to someone else, perhaps to the food! Anyways he proceeded to compare vision and taste/smell, contrasting the terms we use to describe these different senses. For vision, he said our words are precise: we have lots of specialized descriptors for colors – even for shades of redness. For taste and smell the vocabulary is much less precise, and most of the terms are connected with the ‘cause’ of the smell or taste. With vision it is much easier to make a judgment. Look at the just noticeable differences (JND's) in color perception: one researcher has estimated that there are 10 million JND's in color possible by untrained judges, a remarkable number (based on extrapolation).

When people are presented with tastes and smells it is more difficult for them to discriminate and it takes them longer. We are slow to respond to different stimuli. Grandpa is referring to the work on multidimensional scaling that is used to quantify sensory data in psychophysics. Large data sets have been collected on people's similarity concerning judgment. From this work, the conclusion is that taste has the five well-known dimensions (umami, salty, sweet, bitter and sour). However, estimates of the number of dimensions for reflection (in which smells can differ) have varied, ranging from 7 to 18, but in any case many more than the three needed for color (hue, saturation, and intensity). This may help explain why differences in smells are harder for us to describe, but it does not mean that we are not capable of discriminating them.

Although I was thinking about all of these questions I wasn't going to interrupt grandpa I just let him continue. And so he posed another question: do experts like chefs taste something that other people don't? Putting this another way what is wrong with the default position that knowledge doesn't seem to make a difference? Could it be that novices can sense and notice, but can't recognize tastes and smells in food?

Well I have to say that for me food is life and a way of socializing that goes well with chit-chat and in good company. However it seems that for grandpa, his olives and wraps are something else, it's a friend, a family member and a good listener. I hope that like everything that our senses come close to recognizing as pleasurable as food, they have the tendency to hold on to them for different moods of cognitive understanding.

Food & Beauty

I would like to finish this article by concluding that there is a beauty within every object, action, taste, smell, sound and feeling. Like everything in life, the more awareness we have, the more we start to enjoy whatever is under the spotlight of our attention. Of course, as you have read from the philosophy of food it is very hard to suggest or conclude that everyone conceives beauty in the same way. However, I do believe that there is a universal logic to how we define beauty and it is as so on how to define the beauty of say raw foodism. But, the question that I would like to raise is how do we define whether a good organic raw olive is beautiful or disgusting? Is there any logic to our aesthetic appreciation of say the olive? Is it an instinctive, more-or-less automatic response that follows the tasting act, or is it a more considered, intellectual assessment? I think it's a bit of both. When I have an olive in my mouth, there's an immediate hedonic response ('hmmm, nice', or 'uh, yuk', for example). This is then followed by a procedure where I attend to the bottle of kalamata olives, I examine it, I think about its various components, I compare it to the templates of previously tasted olives stored somewhere in my memory. This results in a more considered response, which no doubt has its origins in the instinctive ‘gut reaction’ phase of tasting.

Of course, not all people are looking for beauty in their food. They want just something to perhaps feed their emotions or hunger. Organic Simple Raw Food might, at best, elicit a response of ‘tasty’, or ‘nice’, but that's it. It's like someone leafing through a catalogue of paintings, as opposed to taking the time to stand in front of them in a gallery. To a degree, if we want to find beauty in food, we have to look for it. We also have to know what we are looking for – learning and context are very important in wine tasting. Related to this is the subjective element; we each find different wines appealing. This brings me back to a familiar theme: in tasting, our response to food is as important as the properties of the food itself. To conclude, then, I’ll state that I think food can be beautiful, but it's the combination of our understanding, our perceptive abilities and the characteristics of the type of food that can create that beauty. But you could conclude that there is no need to describe simple raw food or even judge it. Perhaps this way, you find that every individual type of olives has it's own essence and it's own beauty that surprises you spontaneously. Maybe this is because we have eliminated the vial of judgment all together and want to enjoy the elegance of simple raw food in it’s own nature.