Educated Tastes: Food, Drink, and Connoisseur Culture

10. Lionizing Taste: Toward an Ecology of Contemporary Connoisseurship

237 Lionizing Taste Toward an Ecology of Contemporary Connoisseurship roger haden In 1875 a special banquet was prepared at the famed restaurant Magny in Paris. Hosted by the editor of the hunters’ journal La Chasse Illustrée, it featured two dishes that today may well strike the reader as bizarre if not horrifying: an estouffade of lion haunch à la Méridionale and the great beast’s heart, prepared à la Castellane.1 While hunters have traditionally viewed their prey much in the same way as headhunters have viewed theirs, as a trophy to be consumed in triumph, the final all-conquering act, gourmets, epicures, and connoisseurs have tended to appreciate food gastronomically; which is to say, solely on its culinary and gustatory merits. No doubt there were a few gastronomic connoisseurs present on that night, and apparently, again according to the reports, the dishes of lion were well enjoyed. As hard a concept as this may be to stomach, particularly for today’s ethical eater, the consumption of lion and gourmandise are not mutually exclusive notions. To be reminded that this is the case we need only think of the predilections of those whose taste gravitates toward the farthest shores of gastronomy (in one current incarnation this goes by the name of “extreme cuisine”), and which underlines the more general point that humans can and Chapter Ten 238 Theorizing and Contextualizing Taste do eat and enjoy almost anything that is not immediately toxic: insects, spiders, grubs, molds, intestines, the putrescent, the “high,” the very old, the unborn, the fresh, the ripe, the rotten, the living and still moving, the savagely hot, the intensely bitter, and more.2 This anthropological omnivorousness is the theoretical ground zero of taste, although it has always been clear enough that human beings exercise their powers of taste in choosing only some foods from among many more available to them. This has been called the omnivore’s paradox.3 This essay considers the notion of gastronomic connoisseurship, a practice based on the exercise of discriminatory taste as it applies to gustatory taste. Omnivorousness sets a broad material limit for the exercise of both connoisseurship and taste, although the omnivore’s paradox suggests there are many cultural factors that limit the gastronomic choices implied. Religion , ethics, health, personal experience, and food associations all at some point affect our personal taste for foods and drinks. This broadly cultural influence on taste certainly in part explains the more or less infinite range of preferences expressed in the name of taste. At the same time, however, the notion of (Western) gastronomic connoisseurship connotes a “higher” aesthetic, a refined sensory awareness of the qualities of food and drink (typically wine). Although, historically, connoisseurs certainly appear to have had their culturally imparted prejudices shaped by culturally specific tastes, nevertheless, the objective reading of aesthetic qualities was expected of the connoisseur. In spite of the obvious differences between individuals, and their taste, the acceptance of the idea of an objective discriminatory taste seems curious for other reasons; in particular, that popular sentiment appeared to follow the often-cited Scholastic dictum, de gustibus non est disputandum : there can be no disputing over matters of taste. The inference here was that taste could lay no claim to objective criteria upon which to base an aesthetic judgment because taste was too subjective. Why argue over what I, as opposed to you, like to eat? Liking and disliking speak for themselves. Lionizing Taste 239 A further complication was that this traditional logic appears to be totally contradicted in practice, at least in the modern West. Who could seriously deny that the social expression of taste—the choices we make about what to wear or listen to, what we drive, or what we choose to eat—is not at the same time the very means by which we express our social selves and thereby our class, our wealth, and cultural status? That this process involves the shared understanding of commonly used signs seems to undermine the sense in which taste might be construed as fundamentally subjective . Moreover, Pierre Bourdieu’s efforts to document the modus operandi of “cultural capital” and its role in the performance of “good taste” surely reduce belief in the independence of personal taste relative to the power of class domination. Hence, one must conclude that there is in fact an incessant accounting for everything to do with taste, because taste is a fundamental...