Scott Samuelson is a professor of philosophy at Iowa State University and the author of several books. His latest work is called To Taste: On Cooking and the Good Life.
Greg asks Scott about his views on why philosophy and aesthetics have sidelined food and actual taste in favor of nutrition, consumer preference, or narrow ethics. Scott argues food, cooking, and communal meals are central to human meaning, ethics, and hospitality, and that taste is a form of wisdom joining truth, goodness, and beauty while bridging the labels of subjective, objective, and intersubjective judgment.
He links taste to style through cooking as an active practice of tasting and adjusting, critiques consumer capitalism’s push toward radical aesthetic subjectivity and “food porn,” and the subject of tradition as an evolving conversation. They also connect food to education via metaphors of digestion, emphasizing initiation, attention, and the cultivation of judgment and style, and Scott defends ‘festivity’ and ‘shared meals' as two foundations for intimacy and flourishing.
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Episode Quotes:
Is it possible to be intimate with someone that you've never eaten with?
57:28 [Greg LaBlanc]: Do you think that it's possible to be intimate with someone that you've never eaten with? Is it possible to be a friend with somebody that you've never sat down and had a meal? I find it hard to imagine in a way.
57:45 [Scott Samuelson] I mean, it's almost impossible to imagine having deep connections, intimate connections with family members, with friends, with a lover that doesn't involve sharing a food and drink on a pretty regular basis, actually. And it's not simply that, "Oh, well, you need to eat," and whatever. It's that, that becomes a scene in which, the intimacy plays out, sometimes at its most fundamental level. The family dinner conversations, or the drinks with the friend or the great meal with your lover or whatever, those are things that are fundamental to what it is.
We’re not just consumers of food
20:01: We've thought about things as we thought about ourselves as consumers, and I want us to think of ourselves not just as consumers, but as cooks, not just as eaters, but as makers of food. And that to me is a better lens for thinking about a good life.
Taste is meeting of the subjective and objective
09:50: The beauty of taste is that it is precisely the meeting of the subjective and the object. It's putting an object into my subjective mouth, and it's the meeting of those two things. So there's an objective component, there's a subjective component, and there's an intersubjective component as well that one can't really develop one's taste independent of a community, I think, of taste at some level. But just again, to speak fairly bluntly and straightforwardly, I just think the development of taste is just one of the best things in life.
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