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.
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Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Annie Zak
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.https://twitter.com/annie_zak/status/1065732910106333184 …
Venkatesh Rao added,
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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.
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"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.
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