The Geographical Flavoring of Foods
Today I learned about taste.
Goldstein, Jenny. 2009. "The Rapid Rise of the Rwandan Specialty Coffee Industry: Localizing taste through global commodity markets." Unpublished Manuscript; Los Angeles, CA.
The terms "symbolic value" and "material value" can be thought of as the two constituent parts that define the concept of taste. Colloquial use of the word taste suggests this. One can have good taste, or even acquire good taste, as in "limburger cheese is an acquired taste." Taste, in this case, however, need not be related to oral sensation or food; it can be towards any aesthetic moment, and a learned person often claims to have taste in all aesthetic moments: he or she knows "the best of" for any given situation. It takes good taste to decorate a room. In this "symbolic value" part of the definition, taste must fit into cultural and classed norms. Taste, then, becomes a mechanism by which distinction is made between people or groups of people. There is no inherent value that one taste or aesthetic style has over another, but prestige is attached to certain tastes and styles by groups of all classes. Thorstein Veblen has perhaps articulated this notion of conspicuous consumption most eloquantly in his book "The Theory of the Leisure Class," written in the early 20th century.
Taste is also used colloquially to refer to the body sensation that happens on the tongue when it meets foreign objects and organisms. This is the "material value" of taste. To use the coffee bean as an example, it is comprised of shape, color, size, odor, texture, chemistry, and place of origin. We have words to describe physical taste, like bitter, sweet, sour, etc.
When people speak of "terroir" they generally refer to the qualities of the landscape from which a food product came. Landscapes impart irreproducible material value to food objects. But in accordance with the complexity of "landscape" that geographers have demonstrated, terroir (the geographical flavoring of foods) cannot be divorced from a culturally-specific process that guides the material value of a plant-grown-in-place into a food object with symbolic value. For example, roasting coffee beans is a cultural process, but adds to the material value of a coffee bean from X soils on Y hillside with Z amount of rain. This, then, is the first geographical experience of food consumption: understanding how the growth, harvesting, and processing of plants - i.e. the transformation from plant to food product - relies on natural and cultural attributes through and through.
The second geographical experience of food consumption is taste. In the same way that material food products must be understood in relation to their hybrid nature-culture, "landscape" history, taste must also be understood in this way. The sensation on the tastebud - the assignment of "yummy" - of a food can never be separated from the social structure that gives "symbolic" value to those "material" sensations. Yet it is a trap to think that symbolic value is simply added on top of material value, like a layer. This detracts too much from physical sensation on the tongue. Sensation helps create symbolic value, and they are co-constituted. This is to me the cornerstone of geographical thought, and the discipline's most pressing quandry: how can we understand physical sensation (materiality/nature) and symbolic value (culture/belief) as one event instead of two? Taste gives us an inroad to study this question.
Goldstein, Jenny. 2009. "The Rapid Rise of the Rwandan Specialty Coffee Industry: Localizing taste through global commodity markets." Unpublished Manuscript; Los Angeles, CA.
The terms "symbolic value" and "material value" can be thought of as the two constituent parts that define the concept of taste. Colloquial use of the word taste suggests this. One can have good taste, or even acquire good taste, as in "limburger cheese is an acquired taste." Taste, in this case, however, need not be related to oral sensation or food; it can be towards any aesthetic moment, and a learned person often claims to have taste in all aesthetic moments: he or she knows "the best of" for any given situation. It takes good taste to decorate a room. In this "symbolic value" part of the definition, taste must fit into cultural and classed norms. Taste, then, becomes a mechanism by which distinction is made between people or groups of people. There is no inherent value that one taste or aesthetic style has over another, but prestige is attached to certain tastes and styles by groups of all classes. Thorstein Veblen has perhaps articulated this notion of conspicuous consumption most eloquantly in his book "The Theory of the Leisure Class," written in the early 20th century.
Taste is also used colloquially to refer to the body sensation that happens on the tongue when it meets foreign objects and organisms. This is the "material value" of taste. To use the coffee bean as an example, it is comprised of shape, color, size, odor, texture, chemistry, and place of origin. We have words to describe physical taste, like bitter, sweet, sour, etc.
When people speak of "terroir" they generally refer to the qualities of the landscape from which a food product came. Landscapes impart irreproducible material value to food objects. But in accordance with the complexity of "landscape" that geographers have demonstrated, terroir (the geographical flavoring of foods) cannot be divorced from a culturally-specific process that guides the material value of a plant-grown-in-place into a food object with symbolic value. For example, roasting coffee beans is a cultural process, but adds to the material value of a coffee bean from X soils on Y hillside with Z amount of rain. This, then, is the first geographical experience of food consumption: understanding how the growth, harvesting, and processing of plants - i.e. the transformation from plant to food product - relies on natural and cultural attributes through and through.
The second geographical experience of food consumption is taste. In the same way that material food products must be understood in relation to their hybrid nature-culture, "landscape" history, taste must also be understood in this way. The sensation on the tastebud - the assignment of "yummy" - of a food can never be separated from the social structure that gives "symbolic" value to those "material" sensations. Yet it is a trap to think that symbolic value is simply added on top of material value, like a layer. This detracts too much from physical sensation on the tongue. Sensation helps create symbolic value, and they are co-constituted. This is to me the cornerstone of geographical thought, and the discipline's most pressing quandry: how can we understand physical sensation (materiality/nature) and symbolic value (culture/belief) as one event instead of two? Taste gives us an inroad to study this question.
posted by Nick at
10:46 AM
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