Taste Is What's Left
Blue whales & a thousand disgusts
Taste is made of a thousand disgusts.
— Paul Valéry
When feeding, a blue whale uses its mouth like a giant fishing net, temporarily engulfing some half a million gallons of seawater. It then ejects the water back into the ocean through a hair-like sieve, called baleen, leaving behind a meal of ~5,000 pounds of krill and other prey.
Maybe more striking than the magnitude of its feeding though, is that in terms of weight, this means that only ~0.1% of a blue whale’s intake is food.1
Literally a thousand bits of salt water for every bit of krill.
There are a few reasons I love this as a metaphor for Taste and how to develop it:
You have to put up with a lot of bad to get to the good. Like, a lot. You need a tasting funnel that starts with a wide mouth and finishes with a fine filter. You want a lot of exposure, but you need to be decisive and forceful in rejecting the bad. Taste is more about what you discard than what you keep.
Related to (1), the bad flows in with — and sometimes even carries — the good. The bad can be a necessary vehicle for the good, and it certainly helps in discerning the two. Don’t always avoid what you initially think is bad, or you might not find or have a benchmark for the good.
Honing your taste is a perpetual process. You have to be regularly ingesting, parsing, and refining.2 You’re always updating your model of Taste: folding in and integrating new exposures and experiences. Ed Catmull, one of the co-founders of Pixar, said that their process for movie making is to never stop taking “the suck out of it.” Keep taking big gulps and flushing out the sea water until you’re left with the krill.
Taste is what remains — what’s left over after all the disgust.
Estimates are for an entire day’s feeding and are order of magnitude correct, per ChatGPT.
This is because you’re continually faced with new material and environments for training and refining your Taste, and because Taste is asymptotic — it’s always approaching perfect, but can never reach it. There are always more levels to refinement: more details and nuance to be uncovered and evaluated. You might know that you like pizza, a pair of sneakers, or a genre of film. But when you look at them deeply, can you answer “why?” Quality is a collection of minutiae, and you have to repeatedly observe with new eyes from different angles and depths to unveil its essence.
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