SOS: ComAlt. Sarah Williams.
Tasting Response. Wk 1.
Zoe Wright.
1/16/17.
In the stead of participating in the tastings every other week, I will be writing a short note on my observations of the tasting and of the social culture related to food that is created in the classroom during mealtimes and tastings.
During the tasting last week there was brief discussion about the phenomenon of liking things less or differently the more you learn about them, and about how so many classes with social justice aspects have a very large success rate of making you really despise things you used to like, or at least feel highly guilty about wanting to still like them.
The idea of taste, as in personal taste – taste in food, taste in clothing, taste in movies – is a very prevalent idea in our culture. Now whether having your own tastes and your own personal style in the way you live your life an interact with objects is a good thing or a bad thing is not something I would attempt to consider. But thinking about personal taste and individuality in this culture brings up an interesting contradiction.
So many of the good things about interacting with different people and difference places is the amazing breadth of diversity in how people live and build and take up their space. Fostering diversity and being able to handle difference is a huge hot topic of this school, this state, country, whatever level you want to look at. In that area, it’s something to strive for.
But there is also the idea of fitting in. and that while sure, you can have a personality, but it has to fall within these boundaries. If it doesn’t fall within those boundaries you can become an outsider, a novelty, or worthy of ridicule.
Thus the contradiction. Have your own personality, but only within this pre-approved selection of actions and tastes.
There are some who enforce those boundaries, some who purposefully flaunt then, and some who just try to live without being pressured by either of the other two.
These social boundaries exist in every part of a personality I can think of. Clothing, movies, culture, religion, food, books. In some cases, there are rules about what actions you are allowed to take to partake in particular aspects of personality, or to enjoy a particular thing. For example, if you eat string cheese by biting the end of whole each time, you are considered differently than if you eat the string cheese by pulling it into strings.
There is a collection of things that go into taste, or liking things. At least for myself there is. Even just focused on the liking of food, there are many aspects to liking that food. Where it came from, how it was grown. Who’s serving, why, when. Some of what was discussed last week was how knowing background information affected how you physically tasted, or mentally decided, which was better.
I wasn’t exactly sure what I was supposed to be doing for the tasting workshop, so I suppose this was a kind of musing to figure out what I wanted to be able to pay attention to during the next tastings, so I could write in more depth about those.
With this piece of musing on fairly random bits about taste, I did find a few aspects I’d like to come back when it fits with the tasting. Some of the topics that have come up:
Social interactions around food, or the casual ritual of food. The things that influence taste, both the physical taste of food, and the attachment of the value of liking something. And the maintenance of social boundaries around food. And then whatever might come up after observing each tasting.