Hume-ility and Kant-empt

In a previous post, I asked whether Jonathan Gold and certain yelp reviewers were wrong when they celebrated Mission 261, a Chinese restaurant in L.A.

The underlying question, however, is the only one I can answer, and it is this: Can a reviewer who is sincere ever be "wrong", and if so, what does it mean?

For one person to be wrong, and another to be right, they have to share some common ground. Being "wrong" or "right" is meaningless without some agreement on what "wrong" and "right" entail. Otherwise, two people are merely at cross-purposes, not in fact in disagreement.

It's not surprising then, that the more committed one is to certain standards, the more vehement the disagreement with another who also is committed to those standards.

Hume elegantly outlines this tension in "Of the Standard of Taste":

There are certain terms in every language, which import blame, and others praise; and all men, who use the same tongue, must agree in their application of them. . . . But when critics come to particulars, this seeming unanimity vanishes; and it is found, that they had affixed a very different meaning to their expressions.

The whole point of tension is that it demands to be released or undone. Thus:

It is natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another.

What might this standard look like when it comes to restaurants and food?

Familiarity breed Kantians


I am the very model of a modern mantou.
image: Fried Buns from moriza.

There may be specific qualities that one looks for in certain dishes or cuisines. To the extent those qualities are present, the dish, and hence the restaurant is "good". Take, for example, this comment on chowhound:

I think the dumplings are too sweet there. I'm expecting a savory taste and would be hit with granules of sugar. On siu mai? Very unacceptable.

But Gold seems to be on a different track. He acknowledges the value of the paradigmatic and ultra-familiar, but ends up celebrating the unusual and abnormal:

I like gooey steamed har gao and flash-boiled Chinese broccoli as much as the next dim sum freak, but the dishes at Mission 261 seem almost from a different planet.

Mission 261 has some dumplings with combinations of fillings and shapes that I've never heard of. Gold does acknowledge the precariousness of a restaurant that breaks from tradition in the presentation of their dishes, noting that:

If the dumplings were dried out or flavorless, the fanciful shapes might be meaningless, even annoying, but they are so fresh, so bursting with juice, that the follies are as charming as fairy stories.

To borrow a Kantian dualism, then, it seems that with food, there are two forms of tastiness (beauty):

The first presupposes no concept of what the object should be; the second does presuppose such a concept and, with it an answering perfection of the object.

- Critique of Aesthetic Judgment

Kant calls these kinds of beauty "free beauty" and "beauty which is merely dependent". However, for our purposes, we could call them "deliciousness" and "authenticity".

Thus, all arguments for a restaurant like this one (from yelp) fall into the "authenticity" or "merely dependent" category:

Almost everybody in the restaurant was Chinese which is always a good sign (there was 1 other non-Chinese person out of about 50 during dim sum last Saturday).

While phrases like "subtly crunchy baked buns" (Gold) and "fillings are clean, lean and fresh tasting" (Burum) seem to lean more towards "deliciousness".

In arguments about food, people often switch between the two competing attitudes about taste. In my experience, it is not uncommon to be involved in conversations like this:

A: I really did not like the curry at that restaurant, there was an unpleasant bitterness.
B: The eggplant curry? That's supposed to be slightly bitter.
A: But it was way too bitter to be palatable. Also it was slimy.
B: It's an acquired taste. I used to dislike it, but now I love it.


It's supposed to be green and goopy!

It seems that for the familiar, we want adherence to established standards, but for the new, we want "free" deliciousness. Over time, however, we can "acquire" tastes for things that previously were not delicious to us. The wider the range of things we have eaten, the more models of authentic food we have, and the more able we are to form analogies and make distinctions between new dishes and recognized ones. This is the "educated" palate that many foodies prize.

Pride and Prejudice

Hume has a slightly different explanation for this phenomenon. Rather than positing a dualism between "free" and "dependent" beauty, he acknowledges the presence of "prejudice" in all critics, whether arising from our "humour and disposition" or from "the manners of [our] own age and country". This prejudice arises to a greater or larger degree and colors our appreciation of "the true standard".

Thus, for Hume, there is only one kind of beauty (or deliciousness), and we are hindered from appreciating it by notions of authenticity or familiarity.

Those who value authenticity could contest this Hume-an position. What Hume sees as "prejudice", an impediment to true aesthetic assessment, a diner sees as cuisine, memory, inextricable from the object of criticism. As M.F.K. Fisher said, in her introduction to Gastronomical Me:

It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one.

Given food's connection to the personal, can we ever achieve the Hume-an ideal for aesthetic judgment when it comes to food?

in the sound state of the organ [i.e.: free of prejudice], there be an entire or considerable uniformity of sentiment among men, [from which] we may thence derive an idea of the perfect beauty.

If we could, it would mean that every joy is intensely personal and yet shared by all. That every hunger is unique and all the same. That every morsel of food that passes your lips is yours alone to eat, but everybody else can share in that experience. It's the kind of paradox that keeps philosophers up at night.

Perhaps this is what prompted Kant to insist on a disinterested standard for beauty. Just as with ethics, when we must be guided by duty above mere moral sentiment, so too with aesthetics, when we must be guided by principles and not that fickle feeling of "Oh! This tastes good!"

Yet, a Kantian position appears completely untenable when it comes to food (which is probably why Kant did not talk much about food). It seems ludicrous to say something like "this food tastes disgusting to me. However, applying the principles of taste, I discern that it is delicious!"

In fact, food reviewers seem to pretty soundly reject a "principled" assessment of food every time they note the surprising deliciousness of certain dishes which, in principle, sound bad. Linda Burum's review has two examples:

Oddly named dishes that seem unappetizing can turn out to be wonderful. "Shrimp colloid balls stuffed with cheese," for instance, are delicious deep-fried shrimp balls with a bit of mild cheese filling, encased in a crust of minuscule croutons.

and

The word "pith" may not whet your appetite. But this dish of steamed chicken paillards rolled around slender asparagus-like bamboo pith, served in a broth flecked with a fine dice of "pumpkin" (actually winter squash), could take bamboo pith mainstream.

On the plate and in the mouth, phenomenology triumphs over idealism.

Silencing the Bad Critic


Related to the issue of the Standard of Taste for a restaurant is the issue of how to persuade others either to adopt that standard or to properly apply it. To fully answer the question of How Was Jonathan Gold Wrong, we will need to get into rhetoric as well as aesthetics.

More on this next time.