Sublime taste: wine and food approached as serious subjects
Uncorked, published in The East Hampton Star
Wine, Food and Thinking
At “Sublime Taste,” an end-of-October seminar and tasting at the Stony Brook Southampton campus, Louisa Hargrave, while introducing Jonathan Gold, the only restaurant reviewer to win a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, commented on the irony that food and wine writing is not considered as serious or important as, say, philosophy, history, science, or politics—even though it is so much more immediate, something that is part of our everyday lives.
Ms Hargrave, who was the organizer of the event and the moderator of the seminar, and is as a writer as well, had a point. Because food and wine are so close to us and so enjoyable, they are, academically at least, thought of as superficial. But I could not help wondering if a gathering on 21st century epistemology, for example, would have attracted the 150 or so people who attended this seminar, and the additional 150 or so who came for the tasting. It also occurred to me that food and wine writing often requires the same analytical depth as other disciplines.
Isn’t philosophy, after all, a search for the meaning of a good life? I don’t mean to suggest that Socratic virtue exists on an hors d’oeuvre tray, but what and how we eat and drink, where our food comes from and how it gets to us, are decisions with important philosophical implications. This is especially true now, as the seminar participants pointed out, with the industrialization and globalization of the food supply. Which brings us right around to politics and history and science. They are inseparable from the subject of food and wine in the 21st century.
What counts is not just the chardonnay in your glass, or the lobster salad on your crouton, but the earth from which grapevines grow and the seabed on which the lobster scavenges. What counts is our approach to growing and raising and harvesting and gathering and fishing and husbanding. One of the recurrent themes of the seminar was the importance of limiting the damage being inflicted by current agricultural and distribution methods.
Florence Fabricant, the New York Times columnist and East Hampton resident, pointed out that these things make us “become active and become angry” Patricia Klindienst, a master gardener with a doctorate in Modern Thought and Literature, spoke on the cultural meaning of growing food and sustainability. Mr. Gold, Ms. Fabricant and Ms. Keindienst first spoke individually, and were later joined for a panel discussion by Eberhard Muller, the famed chef and now a full-time farmer with his wife, Paulette Satur, and by Sybille Van Kempen, co-owner of the Loaves and Fishes Cookshop. The subjects of what we eat, how it is grown and how it gets to us, underscored their discussions.
A festive tasting of local wines and some excellent dishes from local restaurants and purveyors capped off the seminar. Although “Sublime Taste” was the second annual seminar and tasting hosted by Stony Brook University Center for Wine, Food and Culture, the event, at least for me, had an inaugural feeling setting the tone for things to come as Stony Brook gets into gear and creates its Southampton campus.
