The Eight Basic Tastes or Flavors

Last month, I delivered a talk at one of our local libraries - in Whitefish Bay - straying a bit from philosophy into the field of gastronomy (you can watch the video of the talk here).  This isn't an area in which I do all that much work, but in which I've got a considerable, though basically amateur, interest.  The topic that I proposed is one that has exerted a kind of distracting pull upon my research work for some time - a history of basic tastes or flavors of food.

At present, and for roughly the last century and a half, most people here in the West tend to think that there are four main flavors - sometimes five, counting the umami flavor, what we might call an intellectual import from Japanese researchers.  There are, to be sure, food researchers here in the West who do discuss and research other basic tastes or flavors - but the additional gustatory qualities they rightly bring to light are typically regarded as recent additions to an otherwise all-too-simply palette of the palate.

Talk about additional flavors beyond the four or five typically acknowledged and taught about here in the West, and a common first response from other people is to reference the basic tastes distinguished in other culinary traditions of great civilizations of the East - in Indian or Chinese cooking, for example.  And yet, here in the West, there is also a millennia-old tradition of thinking in terms of significantly more than four flavors, one that tends to be overlooked.  It reaches an early apex and touchstone in several passages from Aristotle's works, in which he sets out for us the eight basic flavors.

Matthew Arnold at the Book Club

Some time back. I recounted portions of discussions that took place when the Cumberland County Library Great Books Club read Immanuel Kant's essay Towards Perpetual Peace.  As a philosopher by both profession and inclination, I was very interested to see what non-academic educated, interested, attentive readers would make of that classic philosophical work.  In explaining that interest, I mentioned a notion found (though not originated) in Alasdair MacIntyre's thought -- the idea and experience of  taking what "plain persons" make of things as one important criterion, all too often ignored or disparaged (at other times idolatrously invoked) by academic types.  That entry, somewhat surprisingly to me, has occupied a place each month among the most read in my blog (explanation as to why that is so, perhaps someone will suggest in a comment?)  So, since we had another rather philosophical text to explore together, I thought I'd add another post to what threatens to become a series  (next month, William James' essay "Pragmatism" -- how can I resist writing on that?)

This month's reading selection consisted in portions from Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, a work which I freely cop to not having read but only read references to -- one of those someday-to-be-remedied gaps in my education, though shamefully not of my library:  the sections "Sweetness and Light," "Doing as One Likes," "Barbarians, Philistines, Populace, and Hebraism and Hellenism."  Only four of us made it this time -- scheduling conflicts, family visits, thunder and lightening threats of a real downpour last night, all pruned our numbers -- myself, the librarian who coordinates the club, and two other locals, one a former military man, the other a transplanted French woman.

Predictably, the discussion ranged over many points and passages of the text, ran off on a few fruitful tangents, and came back to its implications or applications for contemporary affairs.  The very first remark that was made -- I'll report that one, and just summarize the others, because this one was rather striking -- was stylistic:  Arnold used self-deprecation well as a device (specifically in the section "Doing As One Likes"), listing criticisms made against his "religion of culture" from various sides, and then addressing them, showing that he understood but could not agree with his opponents and why.  By engaging in such measured dialogue, by granting the relative rightness of opposing views and only then pointing out their shortcomings, by profit[ing] by the objections I have heard and read," Arnold thereby models aspects of the very stance of culture he espouses.

Arab States, Revolution, and the Viability of Democracy

The protests against Mubarak's regime, at first pitting protesters against police, the army in the midst but on the side, then giving way to clashes between looters and citizens protecting museums, churches and mosques, followed by bloody confrontations between pro-Mubarak and anti-Mubarak crowds, then peaceful gatherings again. . .  and next week who knows what -- this is one of those situations where the West, composed of societies long governed by liberal-democratic (in the broad sense), largely secular, principally civilian regimes, becomes conflicted over who to support, what outcome they would like to see and to promote in Egypt -- and indeed in the broader revolution ongoing in the Arab world -- this round of a revolution whose rallying cry is Democracy, or at least democratic elections, starting in Tunisia, then taking roots in Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Algeria.

The protests call for and aim at change of regime, and the protesters have good cause.  One devil's bargains western governments entered into or inherited from previous administrations has been maintaining or at least turning a relatively blind eye to autocratic and repressive regimes throughout the Arab world.  Why?  A host of different reasons, trade-offs, decisions, precedents.  There's already enough bloggers weighing in daily about the many aspects of the unfolding Egyptian situation -- and its broader implications -- aspects including its backdated history, so I don't intend to delve into that in detail, except where that history impinges on a question I think many in the West would like to ask, but are afraid to vocalize, perhaps for fear of its implications, perhaps worried whether it might not sound racist:  Can Arab states realistically move towards functioning, sutainable democracies?