Proust’s mind was set racing by a madeleine, Isaac Newton’s by an apple, albeit it probably apocryphally. So maybe I’m not so strange to have had my latest train of thought set off by a piece of charcuterie. Improbable though it may sound, a few pieces of cured pork led to me to ideas about how we all have two minds and being only in one is the real aberration. Let me explain and, trust me, the philosophical significance will come.
I’m at the Abergavenny Food Festival to talk about my forthcoming book and as you might imagine the quality of the food in the hospitality room is a cut above the usual crisps and Tunnock’s caramel wafers of most literary festivals. The ethos of the festival means that an ethical omnivore like me can trust the meat will all be from high-welfare livestock, so I tried a bit of charcuterie, and it was exceptional. I was not surprised to learn that it came from Trealy Farm, surely Britain’s best charcutier in a nation increasingly well supplied with them. And being the Abergavenny Food Festival it was also not surprising to run into the founder of the company, James Swift.
We got talking about how traditionally, the best European charcuterie has come from France, Spain and Italy. But you can’t just transfer their methods to a UK operation because so much of what makes them work is dependent on local factors such as climate and soil. In Trevélez, for example, the exceptional flavour is largely the result of cool sea air coming into the high mountains from the Mediterranean. Ibérico ham relies upon the free-ranging pigs eating huge amounts of acorns.
To make great British charcuterie requires a deep understanding of the science of ageing meat. Swift told me that many of these traditional producers are largely ignorant about all this for the very good reason that they have never had any use for it. They just learned the old ways from their parents, knowing that the results were superb. Those trying to get the same results in novel environments do not have that luxury. They need to understand the science in order to engineer the optimal mode of production.
What this shows is that the question of whether charcuterie is an art or a science poses a false choice. It is both, or either, depending on where you are starting from. For a traditional producer, the difference between a very good and an exceptional product is often down to the skills and instincts of the producer, able to use their experience to make small changes with big impacts. But there is still a science to what is going on. The only magic at work is of the purely metaphorical kind. In principle, you could explain why these intuitive interventions had the effects they did by appeal to chemistry, biology and physics. And for someone trying to make charcuterie in a new environment, science probably comes before art. Intuitive judgement is based on long experience and when you’re starting from scratch, there just isn’t any to draw on.
Whether you work more artistically or scientifically might also be partly a matter of temperament. The food world is full of geeks who obsess about numbers, from the exact moisture content of coffee beans and the temperature and time of their roasting, to the molecular gastronomy of Heston Blumenthal, in which a deep enquiry into the science of cooking generates new recipe ideas. But it is also full of intuitive artisans who couldn’t tell you anything about the science but can work their dough or blend their whiskeys to perfection using nothing but their own judgement.
I wonder whether there is a more general truth in play here. Often, when we ask whether something is art or science, algorithm or judgment, maybe we’re asking the wrong question. These are two lenses, two ways of looking at the world, both of which have their value. The question of which is right depends on a combination of exact context and personal inclination. Fundamentally, everything is science, in the sense that if you accept that the natural world is all that there is, and the natural world obeys scientific laws, then there is a scientific explanation for everything that happens, including the delight you get from eating an incredible raspberry or why one chocolate maker gets more out of the same cocoa as another. But very often that science is opaque and you’re more likely to get good results by setting it aside and going on feel.
Music is surely a good example of this. As Pythagoras knew, music is deeply mathematical. Any piece of music can be described in terms of fractions of wavelength interval, time and so on. Whether they use the language of numbers or not, many composers consciously draw on this mathematical dimension to inspire their creativity. But how much they do so varies enormously And my hunch is that more rely on their feelings than do on their calculations.
In other words, human beings have two minds. One is strictly logical and quantifying, the other is intuitive and relies on judgement. Philosophers tend towards one type or the other. Thinkers like Hume and Aristotle are suspicious of formulae, while the likes of Plato and Kant are dissatisfied with anything less than strict precision. Which provides the better guide depends on how fruitful it is to treat a question as though it were scientific, given the limits of our insight into the fundamental workings of reality.
Take ethics. I am the kind of philosopher who is suspicious of any attempt to reduce moral reasoning to a kind of algorithm which will generate the right answer. That may be because there is an in principle reason why ethics cannot be treated this way. (For example, if there is a plurality of values which cannot be measured by a single common scale.) But it could also be the case that ethics is so complicated that even the most Byzantine moral systems cannot capture it and so we have to rely on less precise forms of judgement.
In food, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And what we usually find is that superlative producers use both of their minds, albeit one more than the other. It is a rare and probably foolish baker who never weighs or checks times and temperatures. But it is also unusual to find an excellent artisan who sticks strictly to a formula at all times and doesn’t change things when the dough doesn’t feel right, or the ham seems to be ageing incorrectly.
So here’s my suggestion. Always try to be in two minds. Use your analytic mind to furnish with you as much data and facts as it can. But use your intuitive mind not only to fill in the gaps, but to decide where the gaps are and how big they are. And try to compensate for your own biases. If you have a very black and white mind, challenge your desire to find a neat rule for everything. And if you prefer operating intuitively, be open to the idea that facts and data may have more to say about the subject in question than you think.
Being in two minds may be uncomfortable. But it is better than being wholly in one.