There's an episode of Friends that nails the fundamental silliness of foodie culture. Phoebe is nostalgically reminiscing about grandma's cookies, Monica is trying to techbro-reverse-engineer it from Phoebe's description. Turns out to be nestle-tollhouse wrapper recipe.
Conversation
What makes the joke funny is the idea that an industrial mass-production process that strives to squeeze out all local variation might produce its own terroir. Which as it happens, is true. Cf: green-bean casserole.
Quote Tweet
part of an essay about green bean casserole and midwestern identity
Show this thread
2
4
14
There is an interesting tradeoff between excellence and tastefulness. Excellence requires consistency, to be well-posed. You need a reference ideal to go all six-sigma on anything. Tastefulness otoh requires constantly evolving variety, the leading "aha" edge of an essence.
Replying to
"The most excellent cookie" is always consistently the same, while "the most interesting cookie" (not tasty, interesting, as in the connoisseur's idea of the bleeding edge of cookieness) is a moving target driven by increasing understanding and sensitivity to nuances.
2
17
You could reverse this. Excellence requires experimentation (trial and filtering of the results) to find anything of sufficient worth. Six-sigma mediocrity isn't excellent. Tastefulness requires that you don't make big blunders, which are common in experimentation.
1
2
I think that's more a concern for consumer-connoisseurs than producers. I haven't yet quite figured it out. Last stab at it:
1


