Cultivating Inexpensive Tastes

October 12th, 2012
preferences
If you take the time to become educated about steak you can learn the joys of dry aging, wondering how you ever managed to enjoy watery supermarket cuts. Delving into chocolate you may develop a taste for plain dark high cacao content single origin, to the point that Hershey's stops being worth eating. If you really get into Chinese food you might seek out restaurants run by and catering to recent immigrants, where the food is cheap, delicious, and not modified for the mainstream American palate. For the most part, the enjoyment you get out of developing a taste in something is dependent on what you put into it: finding the hidden ethnic grocery stores that sell the spices you want, learning to pull the perfect shot of espresso, discovering the production and history of wine you buy. The raw sensory pleasure of a food, what anyone would get out of it, diminishes over time as you get used to it, while the enjoyment you bring as a devotee increases as you explore its complexities and varieties. All these passions hold promise of gastronomic pleasure to those who would apply the effort to get into them, and how much you would enjoy them if you were to chose to become an aficionado depends little on cost. By cultivating inexpensive tastes I am left free to pursue interests without being limited by the money I can spare for my current fascination.

(Food here is an example; the principle is broad.)

Referenced in:

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Ozy and Vasili Review Lilo and Stitch

Sometimes my seven-year-old, Vasili, wants to see some godawful movie that makes me want to melt my eyeballs out of my head.

via Thing of Things June 27, 2025

Elixir's Last Dance

On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew from across the country just to hear Elixir play one la…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts June 5, 2025

Workshop House case study

Lauren Hoffman interviewed me about Workshop House and wrote this post about a community I’m working on building in DC.

via Home April 30, 2025

more     (via openring)