Guys, I like onions now / December novel-reading

[garran]

A couple of days ago I was eating Chinese food, and I became aware that I like the taste of onions. I used to find it unpleasant, and for some years now I've considered it inoffensive-but-boring, but now I am to the point where eating a bite with an onion in it was an unexpected pleasure; the sort of thing I might seek out, rather than just tolerating. The strangest thing about this is that I remember and recognise this taste I now enjoy from back when I didn't like it, and it's exactly the same taste. I always subconsciously assumed that there was something inherent that determined whether something tasted good or not -- I mean, not that the quality of 'tasting bad' was an integral part of any given food (despising cheese, which everybody else in the world is delighted by, made it impossible ever to make this mistake), but that the subjective sensory experience of it included a sense of its being either pleasant or not-so, so that 'badness' was part of the taste I experienced. I guess I kind of supposed that other people eating cheese were tasting something different. But no; there is nothing changed about the taste of onions now, except how I react to it. So the thing that caused me to find onions objectionable wasn't in my sensory perception of them at all, even though that's the thing I clearly didn't like.

It strikes me how much of the work of interpreting inherently neutral stimuli my brain is doing outside of (or rather, presumably underlying) my conscious mind. I've been thinking for a long time about the role of completely chemical-contingent (even by human standards) involuntary affective reactions in my experience of the features of people that I find physically attractive (that's what this poem is about), but clearly I still have some adjusting to do toward applying this sort of understanding more generally.

I keep feeling like I read a book that I forgot to write down, but if so I've since forgotten more than that, since I can't call it to mind. I might be getting a false positive from the Iain M. Banks book that some of you saw me with, which I put down not far in because I didn't feel like I was in a space to want to read about the protagonist's making stupidly self-destructive decisions. I'm sure I'll get into the Culture books eventually.

Madeleine Robins, Point of Honour
Steven Brust, Jhegaala
Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
Madeleine Robins, Petty Treason
Ekaterina Sedia, Alchemy of Stone

Comments

[masamage.livejournal.com]

I guess the phenomenon you're talking about is why some foods can be "acquired" tastes. (Heath recently experienced a miniature version when he accidentally bought a certain brand of chips again, having not liked them much the first time. Dutifully working his way through the second bag, he found by the end that he liked them after all. But then, he starts at at least "tolerate" with every food in existence except coleslaw.)

On a related note, I ate my first entire salad recently. It was palatable, funnily enough, only because of being heavily flavored with parmesan dressing.

[garran.livejournal.com]

I usually think of acquired tastes in food similarly to the way I think of acquired tastes in music -- something baffles or bothers you at first, but as you start to become acclimated to it you notice nuances in it that you formerly hadn't seen, and so gradually appreciate it more. This seems to be what J. is talking about below, where you essentially come to like something more because you understand better what's good about it (or in some cases develop better associations for it), and it's in keeping with my traditional way of thinking of one's affect as being in response to something in the objective quality of one's perception of the thing in question. In this case, I haven't grasped anything new about the taste of onions, or even found a new way of looking at it -- I understood it pretty well already -- so I didn't learn to like the taste; I just suddenly did. (For a very gradual value of 'suddenly'.)

So really I've been made to question my former assumption that I was in some way making a judgement when I had each of these reactions. I thought that I was observing elements of my experience which my predispositions (either conscious or fixedly constitutional) led me to interpret positively or negatively. But it turns out that sometimes, or a lot of the time, I'm not just being presented with the information of my senses; I'm being presented with an affective attitude toward it that my body has already decided upon in what is to my conscious mind an unsettlingly arbitrary way. I guess I might have spotted this before from the way that some ordinarily lovely foods become disgusting to contemplate when I'm sick (but I didn't).

On the other hand, I don't think that all subjective reactions to aesthetic stimuli are arbitrary in this way -- I think that both food and music do have objective qualities that provide them with, er, objective quality in the other sense of the word. I am increasingly persuaded that the judgement of whether something is pleasant or not is, if it can be classed as a judgement at all, just one of one's own affect, so that someone can say, "That's just your opinion," and be making a meaningful claim that the thing isn't actually pleasant or unpleasant in its own right; on the other hand, the judgement of whether something is a good example of its kind I think can be spoken about in a moderately impartial way, and so, as with one's opinion about scientific facts, is best evaluated by considering the thing itself. The two sorts of judgement are, of course, somewhat orthogonal; I can observe of a song or a dish that it is well-constructed without particularly liking it. But how much there are real aesthetic criteria is a huge controversy in philosophy so I'm sure that someone reading this will probably disagree with me -- a lot of people do think that all aesthetic judgements are of the first kind.

(Really, I think of it as being analogous to the objective existence of morality, where you have to take it as given that some ends, e.g. harm prevention, are important, but once you do there are ways of behaving that clearly lead to better outcomes than others. Any laws of aesthetics are human-relative at least, but art and so on can be judged meaningfully on what it accomplishes and on what it is trying to, in terms of those laws.)

Wow, I think this is longer (and maybe even more needlessly arcane) than my original entry. So far, most of the salad dressings I've tried I've actually liked less than the salad's constituent vegetables.


-Andy H.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_quinn/]

Oddly enough, I eat all my salads dry. For some reason, despite adoring liquid fat in practically all of its other food forms (;)), I really loathe the concept and have hated the ones that aren't so much (like the Caesar salad dressing, whatever it's called).

I was going to say something about the "somewhat arbitrary" judgement might be based on things it's difficult if not impossible to be conciously aware of, like nutrition, but then I got distracted trying to remember which food it was that I half-remembered as not being as terrible as I used to think it was and both couldn't remember and forgot whatever point I may have been making.

*sigh* At least more of Az-chan's e-mail is working now.