By Ryan Czech / ryan.czech@gmail.com
What is ‘taste’ exactly? If I make a peanut butter and pickle sandwich and love it, does that make me tasteless? Even if I think it’s delicious?
If I’m at a dinner party on the top floor of one of Vancouver’s most exquisite hotels and all the people around me take a hors d’oeuvre glistening with caviar from a passing platter, am I privileged and tasteful when I take a bite too? Even if I hate the quiver of it in my mouth?
I wonder… where exactly is the line between other people’s preferences and my own? Where class and classlessness collide. How important is it that I memorize the pairings of wine to go with fowl or a red sauce, and how dreadful a mistake it is if I should make a foul in front of my peers! If I want a glass of Shiraz with my phố, will I hang publicly for my crime against food?
Taste is a rule book of luxury, that we may tell apart the premier from the populi – manners maketh the man after all, or so has been said for hundreds of years. But, was that the case before somebody said it? Or was it said because it was true all along and we were lucky enough to discover the real way of the world. What did we do before we said such phrases? Were men made from things other than manners? Mettle perhaps, or for all we know it was meringue. Is the test of civilization knowing which side of the bowl your soup spoon belongs to?
We dirty our lips with deviant desserts and busy ourselves with etiquettel arts, endlessly in search of a life-affirming tart.
Perhaps manners matter, and perhaps it matters naught.
Photography by Alfonso Arnold
Surrounded by Serenity