Nine countries in one kitchen and no agreement on salt: can food be judged like art?
Every one of my cooks arrived knowing exactly how much salt, sour and heat a dish needs, and every one of them knew something different. My Keralite cooks find the Lebanese lentil soup timid. The Filipino cooks find my Goan vindaloo too much vinegar. The Lebanese find everyone's rice overcooked.
I have been reading about taste in philosophy, and I was surprised to find that Kant puts food among the merely agreeable. Canary wine pleases me or it doesn't; there's nothing to argue about. Nearly all his examples of beauty are things seen or heard, contemplated rather than consumed.
But that is not what happens on my pass. We argue about food all day, and the arguments are not only preference. A cook who has learned another tradition's dish properly can tell you when it is wrong by that tradition's lights, and the cook who made it usually agrees once they taste it with the right expectations. Carolyn Korsmeyer's Making Sense of Taste (1999) argues that philosophers demoted the "lower" senses for reasons that do not hold up, and that food can carry meaning and be judged with real skill.
So: is food relativist (each tradition its own standard), Humean (experienced tasters converge), or Kantian (just agreeable)? Or is my kitchen evidence that the categories need rebuilding?