The best Friday nights are the ones where you drink a glass of wine and then go to sleep. I see I have become middle-aged. When we got home we ordered chicken from Pollo Rico, which comes with a mustard sauce that goes well with white wine. But we had no ice to chill the white wine with and no patience to refrigerate it, so we went with red instead, and the taste of ground berries made for an unpleasant contrast with the roasted chicken. Calling this a first world problem would be an insult to the first world, but I only want to point out how the experience of any food or drink is so heavily dependent on the context and order in which you try it; you can be indifferent to the taste of something at the outset and then watch it grow on you in the course of a meal, or you can try some kind of drink that entirely clashes at first and then watch everything come together, especially if you have good company or good conversation. It’s enough to make me wonder if there’s even any possibility of an objective assessment of food. You can take the food critic approach, I guess, and go to a different three-star restaurant every single night, but that is setting up a laboratory experiment that treats food as an aesthetic object, rather than an everyday necessity subject to our emotions and moods. There is a question about whether food really is just a matter of taste, and if so then all you are left with is your own opinion, which itself is subject to unconscious bias and the sum of your experience and culture.
(Photo: Clouds, Silver Spring, Maryland.)
365 Days of Food 