It's all a matter of taste.

Resolved, for purposes of discussion:

Taste in food, like art, is all a matter of opinion. If someone likes hamburgers, only a snob or an elitist would say that he is wrong, incorrect or deficient to prefer a Quarter Pounder to a fancy meal prepared by the world’s greatest chef. It’s all just opinion.

Mods: move to CS if you like, but I think this fits in GD far more.

The problem I have with people who resolve everything to personal taste is that “taste” is often little more than what a person is used to. I don’t question the ultimate subjectivity of the experience, but personal quirks often seem to be less of a factor than culture and habit.

I agree with you both technically and in spirit, most of the time: folks who show disdain for those who don’t share their tastes generally piss me off, and what you say seems self-evident to me.

However, I do believe that you often have to learn to appreciate certain fields of aesthetics.

For example: when I was twenty, I couldn’t stand beer. I’d had homemade beers, I’d had Coors, I’d had small artisan microbreweries. At best they tasted to me like seltzer; at worst they tasted like goat urine*. In college, however, I decided to learn to like beer, and over the course of a couple of years I steadfastly tried drinking different beers even though all I could taste was an overwhelming, repulsive bitterness in them.

And I found a beer I liked (Widmer’s hefeweizen). ANd then I found another beer I liked (Killian Red). And then more and more and more beers that I could like; and soon, that overwhelming, repulsive bitterness transformed itself into a variety of pleasant hoppy notes in beer that I could taste along with other lovely flavors. Having learned to recognize and contextualize the strongest flavor, I was able to appreciate it, differentiate subtleties in it, and, most importantly, taste other flavors beyond it.

I think the same thing can happen in other fields. Right now, most classical jazz all sounds alike to me. I can’t tell my Marsalis from my Ellington, and to be perfectly honest, they both bore me to tears. They both sound exactly the same to me. I am virtually certain, however, that if I decided to dedicate some serious time to learning their music, I’d learn to contextualize the overwhelmingly jazzy “flavor” of their music, and I’d be able to differentiate between their styles and appreciate subtleties in what they do.

There’s a chance I’d dislike their music even after I learned it. But my experience with learning new aesthetics has consistently been that it’s very rewarding.

So there’s a way I disagree, perhaps, with a possible implication of the OP. Taste is subjective, yes. But someone who’s spent awhile studying a particular aesthetic can be objectively more knowledgeable about that aesthetic than someone who’s treated it with contempt, and so the person who’s studied it may be objectively more qualified to offer an opinion on an example of that aesthetic. I’m more qualified to offer an opinion on whether a particular IPA is tasty than is my mother-in-law, who never drinks alcohol; I’m not nearly as qualified to offer an opinion on a jazz album as is my wife’s ex-boyfriend, who plays in a jazz ensemble.

Daniel

  • To whoever’s the first to say “You know what goat urine tastes like?!”: HAW HAW HAW! Extra haws if you say it specifically because of this footnote.

Everything is subjective. And thank God for that.

Taste is a matter of opinion… and your opinion can be wrong. To say that taste is purely subjective is to deny the legitimacy of food as a craft. The continual refinement and education of the skill of a cook to produce better tasting foods. Your saying that the lowliest fry cook at McDonalds is exactly the same as a Michelin 3 star chef who’s worked all his life in pursuit of bettering himself.

By definition, it cannot be.

That’s not remotely what he’s saying.

Daniel

There are certain sensory experiences which are initially unpleasant, or neutral to you, into which you can immerse yourself in and eventually develop a tolerance or liking for them.

I’m not sure that that habituation renders one more qualified to judge the worth of those experiences than someone who is not habituated. It certainly doesn’t make one superior to a person who prefers other sensory inputs.
Spoken as someone who over the years has learned to appreciated one sensory note in beer above all others:

Cold. :smiley:

Insulting people for their personal tastes is wrong in general, but I’m not willing to go quite as far as “it’s all just opinion.” There’s such a thing as expertise in food and art. You can almost never prove any position, but you can cite examples and context, and I think that has value.

I’m saying that the food prodced by one is just as good as the food produced by the other. The chef has better knife skills, obviously; but who’s to say that his food is “better” in any real sense.
FTR, this is not my view … but I teach literature in a culinary school (long story), and it is the view of many of the little philistines I teach. I am adopting their view for purposes of discussion.

Well, let’s take the rhetorical question and answer it: who is to say this? What qualifications does a person need to have to make this declaration, and if two people with similar qualifications come to opposite judgments, how do you resolve the contradiction?

Daniel

Hhhmmm… I can agree with the OP… but if someone only likes Burgers and nothing else… I can say he is “limited” no ? Obviously that person hasn’t tried to make much of an effort to get to taste other stuff.

I know gourmets that love no fuss hotdogs for example. … but they like other stuff as well.

rumor has it that Bill Gates, who needless to say can eat whatever he wants whenever he wants prepared by just about any chef in the world, has quite a craving for a good burger and cherry coke. He seems to be pretty happy with a Big Mac. Rumored that he’s a regular visitor the old fashioned drive up burger place in Redmond Washington.

What’s wrong with this statement is that it’s all-or-nothing thinking. If you had left out the word “all” I would have agreed with you, but when you say it’s all a matter of opinion, you go too far, whether you’re talking about food or art.

Well, according to the view I’ve adopted here, “nobody” and “you don’t.”

Please expand on this.

Cooking is not just art, it’s science. The science part is objective. For example, “ketchup on steak,” is not just a preference that food snobs disdain. The sugar in the ketchup really does obscure the taste of the meat. People who put ketchup on their steak are tasting a cheap, processed, corn-syrupy condiment INSTEAD of the meat. That they “like it,” is indisputable. They can do what they want with their own steak. But they will not taste the steak, and this is a matter of fact. There are many other cases where you could look similarly to the flavors of food being objectively measurable in terms of nuance and subtlety.

I’m glad you learned something in college! :slight_smile:

Hey now! I also got to study the political ramifications of American science fiction during the Cold War! Never let it be said those years were wasted, even if I sometimes was.

Daniel

Well, only inasmuch as we’re not going to get agreement on what would constitute a universal definition of “better”, in this context. You answer LHoD’s question with “nobody” and “you don’t”, I would answer it with “everybody”, “and you don’t”. Just because something is personal and resistant to total consensus does not mean it lacks meaning. And for that matter, even if we do accept that there is no meaning to the word “better”, it does not therefore follow that everything is equally good; indeed, saying that a burger is just as good as Michelin starred filet mignon presupposes a definition of quality just as much as saying that one is better than the other. Your philistine students are buying into the very objectivity that they reject. :slight_smile:

Rather, I believe they should say: universal statements of the type “X is better than Y” are meaningless, but that the reasoning (if there is any) behind personal opinion can be the subject of debate, and that depth of personal experience may be considered to lend weight to an individual’s personal definition of quality. But this, of course, is all subjective.

I would disagree that art is all a matter of opinion, since there are skillsets involved in everything.

But what a person prefers is opinion, and should never be a subject of reproach.

Like anything else, there are various levels of skill in cooking. Some preparations of a dish are better than others–done with more skill and closer to the intended result. But if I prefer the more objectively poorly done one, that’s my prerogative as the owner of the tastebuds.

What makes a person prefer one food (or work of art, or whatever) to another? It’s a combination of factors, some of which are located in the person and some of which are located in the foods. That is, some factors are subjective and some are objective. That’s why there isn’t unanimous agreement about which foods are better than which, but there is some consensus.

Differences in taste have to do with actual enjoyment; differences in quality have to do with potential enjoyment. Somebody who gulps down his food without really tasting it, who doesn’t take the time to savor all the subtle nuances of flavor, isn’t going to get out of a food all that it potentially has to offer.