Finding the philosophy... in a tin of tomato soup

[dansumners]

I do relish a tin of Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup. It reminds me of being a child, of being warm indoors on a winter day.

Today, as I enjoyed my lunch, I reflected on the fact that the flavour of this soup bears very little resemblance to any tomato I have tasted. If someone asked me what it tasted like, I'd have to say, 'Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup'.

In and of itself this is uninteresting. Many processed foods that purport to taste like this or that simply do not. Classic examples, at least from my life and the lives of friends, are prawn cocktail crisps and watermelon sweets.

But the recognition of this fact led me to ask myself how I might come to say, 'this soup tastes like tomatoes' (leaving aside the question of what the word 'like' means in this context - exactly the same? approximately? a synthetic reproduction of?). Because, is there a 'taste of a tomato'?

True, there are varieties of tomato, so you could say there isn't a definitive taste that is 'tomato'. But that isn't what I'm interested in, because we could again ask, is there a taste of beef or cherry tomato?

Neither am I interested in the answer, 'of course it has a taste, I'm aware of it as I eat it'. That is an answer to a different question - does a specific tomato have a taste to a specific individual?

What interests me is whether or not there is a 'taste of tomato' - something we could all point at and say, 'that's what tomatoes taste like!' - that a soup can be said to embody. That is, could we say whether or not Heinz has faithfully represented the taste of tomatoes?

It may seem as if I've answered my own question by stating the taste of the soup bears little resemblance to the taste of any tomato I have eaten. But then, those tomatoes haven't had a uniform flavour. Whilst living in Spain, I regularly bought large, lumpy, scarred tomatoes that tasted wonderfully fruity. In my city based UK life, I usually have to sprinkle salt on them and leave them for a while for them to have any flavour at all.

So, which of the tomatoes I have eaten tasted like a tomato, if any? Is the taste of one of my UK tomatoes the taste before I've added salt, when it tastes almost of nothing, or after? Did they all taste of tomato, but only to a certain extent? Or is there no such thing as the 'taste of tomato', just different experiences of eating different tomatoes in different forms?

Finding the relevance

An often heard response to the raising of philosophical questions is, 'fair enough, but why does it matter?' Either you like a particular soup or you don't, a specific tomato has this or that flavour, and we may agree or disagree, but it doesn't really matter.

On the one hand, no, the specific question of whether or not there is a 'taste of tomato' doesn't matter, but the conversation may in itself be an enjoyable diversion. Philosophy came from and continues to exist in discussions between human beings, and one reason they do it is because they find it interesting.

On the other, however, it opens the way for many further enquiries: what is taste? are taste and flavour the same or different? do we gain robust information about the world via our senses? can you be wrong about how something tastes?

Asking the question may lead us to ideas about the nature of our realities, about how they come to be constituted. For example, if you've never eaten a tomato, but you have eaten tomato soup, do you know what tomatoes taste like?

The relevance of that question ranges much further, and becomes much clearer, once we remove the specifics: if you've never experienced x do you know what x is like? Because, if the answer is no, it has implications for how - or if - we make decisions:

if you've never experienced war, can you make an informed decision to join the armed forces?
how should political decisions that will affect the lives of millions in unknown ways be made?
should we expect people to make decisions about work and education at an early, unexperienced age?

Of course, we make decisions based on imperfect knowledge all the time, this is nothing new, but perhaps it is something we need to think about more often. And the more often we think about things, the more often we ask questions about the way the world is, the better we'll become at making those decisions.

And a tin of soup can help us to do that.

[Bill Wiltrack]

.




Good post.






............................................




Welcome to the forum!





.