Uncorked

Philosophy in a Wineglass

By Michael Braverman

(11/7/2007)    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 have won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, commented on the injustice that food and wine writing is not considered as serious or important as, say, philosophy, history, science, or politics. This despite the fact that food and wine are so much more immediate, are a part of our everyday lives.

    Ms. Hargrave, who was the organizer of the event and the moderator of the seminar, and is 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 writing about food and wine 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, have 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 themes of the seminar was the importance of limiting the damage being inflicted on the environment by current agricultural and distribution methods.

Florence Fabricant, a 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. Klindienst first spoke individually, and were later joined for a panel discussion by Eberhard Muller, the famed chef who is now, with his wife, Paulette Satur, a full-time farmer, and by Sybille Van Kempen, a co-owner of the Loaves and Fishes Cookshop in Bridgehampton. The subjects of what we eat, how it is grown, and how it gets to us underscored the discussions.

    A festive tasting of East End 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 the university’s 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.

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    Michael Braverman can be e-mailed at uncorked@ehstar.com.