You May Also Like Read Online Free

flavor compound of the vanilla bean) had been added to one. Why? In Germany, infant formula typically contains small amounts of the stuff. In a list of questions about food preference, the researchers rather slyly asked visitors if they had been bottle- or breast-fed as infants. People who were breast-fed overwhelmingly preferred the “natural” ketchup, while bottle-fedpeople liked the one with the hint of vanilla.It is unlikely they made any connection; they just liked what they liked.
    One often hears, and says, with a shake of the head, “There’s no accounting for taste.” Typically, this comes as an incredulous response to someone
else’s
taste. The person who says this rarely uses it to suggest that he might scarcely be able to explain his own tastes to himself. After all, what could be more authentic to us than the things we like? When preferences are actually tested, however, the results can be surprising, even unsettling, to those who hold them. The French social scientist Claudia Fritz has examined, in various settings, the preferences of accomplished violinists for instruments made by old Italian masters like Stradivari. Everyone knows, if only from hearing of these incredibly valuable instruments being left in the backs of taxicabs, how lush and resonant they must sound, as if bestowed with some ancient, now lost magic. Who would not want to play one?But the expert musicians she has tested tend to prefer, under blind conditions, the sound of new violins.
    In his book
Strangers to Ourselves
, Timothy Wilson has argued that we are often unaware why we respond to things the way we do; much of this behavior occurs in what he calls the “adaptive unconscious.” But we labor under a sort of illusion of authenticity, he argues, in which we think we know the reasons for our feelings because, well, they are
our
feelings.Following his example, how do you feel about the cover of this book? Do you like it? If you had a choice—and book buyers rarely do—which of the two covers did you prefer? Did you stop to think why you might have preferred one over another? Or is your preference only now swimming into view? Now try to imagine how a stranger feels about it. Unless the cover strikes some particular chord in you—perhaps it reminds you of another book you liked, or you are a student of graphic design—your own response to the cover will most likely be generated by a process that is not so different from how you would explain why a stranger likes it (for example, it gets your attention, the colors work together better). You will be making guesses. *
    We are, in effect, strangers to our tastes. It is time we got acquainted. It seems only appropriate to begin with food, “the archetype of all taste.”
    ----
    * For added fun, now try to explain why the same book will typically have such different covers in different countries.

CHAPTER 1
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE?
    THINKING ABOUT OUR TASTE FOR FOOD
    Â 
IT ALL SOUNDS SO GOOD; OR, WHY THERE IS SO LITTLE WE SHOULD NOT LIKE
    Nowhere do we encounter the question of what we like so broadly, so forcefully, so instinctively as in a restaurant meal. Sitting down to eat is not just a ritual of nourishment but a kind of story. Venturing through the “course of a meal,” we encounter a narrative, with its prologues, its climaxes, its slow resolutions. But a meal is also a concentrated exercise in choice and pleasure, longing and regret, the satisfaction of wants and the creation of desires.
    And so we begin our journey with the journey of a meal. It is a blustery winter day on the windy western reaches of Manhattan, but inside Del Posto, the Italian restaurant run by Mario Batali and Joe and Lidia Bastianich, the wood-paneled room is warmly lit, a pianist is deep into “Send in the Clowns,” and the red wine is being poured by a waiter with a Continental accent and well-honed charm.
    What’s not to like?
    Very little, really. One does not generally arrive at the