Why Is Gratitude So Difficult?

Introduction

Right off the bat, I get that the title of this post probably annoys you. I’m surprised you’re even here, honestly. Something about having our capacity for gratitude challenged is just off-putting. You may well ask, who am I to position myself as some kind of authority on this?

Who am I?

I’ll freely acknowledge that in terms of managing to feel grateful, I’ve got it pretty easy, being a homeowner in the Bay Area. Worldwide, the median annual income (adjusted for local buying power) is about $5,000-$6,000 a year; something like 93-95% of the population lacks a college degree; about 26% lack safe drinking water. Compared to so many, I’ve had a very charmed life, and what suffering I do experience (e.g., via cycling) is voluntarily self-inflected, which seems the height of privilege. That said, in my  experience gratitude doesn’t always track along with good fortune, and even in my relatively upscale community I don’t have to look far to find people who are anxious or uptight.

[Art by Copilot, to try it out.] 

An example

Here is my poster child for the capacity to be tetchy or ill at ease despite advantageous circumstances. Many years ago, I won an award at work that came with a cash bonus. One of my colleagues, though he seemed happy for me, confided that his wife was pretty upset, feeling like he should have won the award. On what grounds she supposed this, being entirely absent from our workplace, I have no idea. Nevertheless, I wanted to make things right, and invited my colleague and his wife to join my wife and me at Chez Panisse, one of the fanciest restaurants in the Bay Area, on me. My colleague reciprocated by bringing a really nice bottle of wine. As the waiter fussed over the bottle, and employed a strange decanter designed to optimize it somehow, and during the long process of letting the wine breathe etc., it looked like a truly splendid evening was unfolding … but my friend’s wife was getting increasingly agitated. The problem was, she admitted, she was worried about the wine. But she didn’t really elaborate. What was this worry? Worried she wouldn’t like it? Worried that it wouldn’t live up to everyone’s expectations? Worried that everyone would like it but her? Whether she feared the wine might reflect badly on her and her husband, or threaten her epicurean cred, or she just hated to be disappointed, or some combination of these and/or something else entirely, I have no idea. But the magnificent wine had practically become a curse.

So what?

This post explores why it’s hard to focus on the positive in our lives. It turns out there are several tangible reasons that we don’t, supported by science and psychology. I’ll describe these, and then explore what we might do about it.

Reason  #1: negativity bias

If our view of the world tends to be less than rosy at times, we can somewhat blame human nature, or to be more specific, the way our species has evolved. In the essay “Negativity bias,” in the great essay collection This Idea Is Brilliant, the columnist Michael Shermer investigates how the negative packs a bigger punch. Here are a few of his examples: negative stimuli command more attention than positive; pain feels worse than no pain feels good; there are more ways to fail than succeed. He provides this theory:

Why is negativity stronger than positivity? Evolution. In the environment of our evolutionary ancestry, there was an asymmetry of payoffs in which the fitness cost of overreacting to a threat was less than the fitness cost of underreacting, so we err on the side of overreaction to negative events. The world was more dangerous in our evolutionary past, so it paid to be risk-averse and highly sensitive to threats, and if things were good, then taking a gamble to improve them a little was not seen as worth the risk.

Obviously, biological evolution cannot keep up with societal progress. Most of us don’t live among warring tribes anymore (bickering political parties, sure, but nobody is sacking our village). It’s up to us to challenge our negative impulses, and to remind ourselves how much progress has been made and how different modern life is than the human experience over the last 300,000 years. But it doesn’t appear we’re very good at transcending our evolutionary instincts.

Reason #2: relative deprivation

Our feelings of satisfaction and happiness don’t really depend on our absolute situation—that is, whether we have basic needs met like food, shelter, and safety. As everyone knows, we evaluate ourselves and our lives based on how we’re doing compared to our neighbor. In general we don’t have to look very far to see people in our communities with nicer stuff, and coworkers who outrank us. The temptation to feel relatively deprived is always with us, and it can be hard to get over it. In the essay “Relative Deprivation” (also in This Idea Is Brilliant), Kurt Gray, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at UNC-Chapel Hill, explains this tendency:

The yearning for relative status seems irrational, but it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. We evolved in small groups where relative status determined everything, including how much you could eat and whether you could procreate. Although most Americans can now eat and procreate adequately, we haven’t lost that gnawing sensitivity to status. If anything, our relative status is now more important. Because our basic needs are met, we have a hard time determining whether we’re doing well, so we judge ourselves based on our place in the hierarchy.

Let’s put together these two human tendencies: negativity and relativity. If we have a biological reflex to judge ourselves vs. our neighbors, that’s bad enough—but because of our negativity bias, we focus on the endless array of seemingly higher status people instead of those beneath us, and moreover instead of appreciating how well we do live and how much we’ve achieved in our own right. To put it more succinctly, we’re negative to begin with and will never lack for ways to feel inferior.

Reason #3: emotion contagion

Once again, I’ll cite an essay in This Idea Is Brilliant. (This book contains 205 brief essays, most of them concerned with scientific concepts pertaining to our daily experience.) June Gruber, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at CU Boulder, in “Emotion Contagion,” explains, “Emotions are contagious. They are rapidly, frequently, and even at times automatically transmitted from one person to the next.” She cites Charles Darwin, who pointed out that this contagion is “fundamental to the survival of humans and nonhumans alike in transmitting vital information among group members,” and points out that it’s “in the service of critical processes such as empathy, social connection, and relationship maintenance between close partners.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is, when emotion contagion hops geographies and goes virtual, it is not necessarily in the service of communities anymore, and becomes a less precise social tool. Gruber goes on to say:

Faulty emotion-contagion processes have been linked to affective disturbances. With the rapid proliferation of online social networks as a main forum for emotion expression, we know, too, that emotion contagion can occur without direct interaction between people or when nonverbal emotional cues in the face and body are altogether absent.

What emotions, in our modern smartphone-addled society, would you say are the most likely to spread? I would say envy, pride, and outrage would be in my top five. Sure, some goodwill is shared as well, but remember: we humans have a negativity bias, and a tendency to compare ourselves unfavorably to others … a perfect recipe for feeling bad online. Meanwhile, the algorithms that determine what to show us are geared toward the feelings that are most likely to trigger forwards, comments, etc., so they’re not making any effort to keep things light or positive. Our reactions train the algorithm, and in time it begins to train us, in a cycle of perpetual irritation that doesn’t strike me as conducive to gratitude. Emotion contagion seems to be morphing from a largely healthy community-building trait to a way for tech companies to monetize some of our more annoying tendencies.

I guess I should acknowledge that it’s not just social media at fault here. It’s how we choose to use the Internet, and how we ourselves decide what’s important enough to share. I base this on a cursory examination of my most polemic albertnet posts and which of these have the most page views. Since I don’t imagine all that many people find my posts via Google, most of the traction my posts get is through being forwarded. Here are my top three positive and negative opinion pieces, and the number of page views they’ve notched. Notice how it’s the more negative ones that get forwarded the most:

Positive:

• Election Result: It Will Be OK - 265
• Has Any Good Come From the COVID-19 Pandemic? - 201
• 10 Reasons to Cut Barbie Some Slack - 643

Negative:

• Velominati’s “The Rules” – Brilliance or BS? - 4,145
• The Problem With Soccer - 3,890
• The Case Against Margolis & Liebowitz - 2,088

(Happily, albertnet is not primarily a platform for serious polemics. None of the above is among my top ten posts. Only the first two negative ones are in the top fifteen. None of the others is in the top thirty.)

To make matters worse…

Okay, perhaps you, gentle reader, are not some status-seeking, insecure person who wastes a lot of time on social media and frets over not getting enough likes and comments. You’re the sort of person who looks beyond himself or herself, and worries more about the state of the world and your fellow human. Perhaps you’ve grown frustrated by this essay and how ungenerous my opinion of you seems to be. Well, congratulations: you’re probably in the most difficult position of all.

How’s that? It’s because you may feel a responsibility to educate yourself about what’s going on in the world, and to try to make a difference. And that means you read a lot of news. Unfortunately, the news is not good. I almost wrote “the news right now is not good” but actually, it’s never been good. If it were good, it wouldn’t be news. “EVERYTHING’S JUST PEACHY” read no headline ever.

We don’t even get the headline “MANY THINGS ARE IMPROVING.” That’s the opposite of news, even if it happens to be true. In his excellent book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, Hans Rosling, a cofounder of Doctors Without Borders, points out that journalism doesn’t exist to document steady progress. It highlights the negative, exacerbating the pessimistic tendencies I’ve already discussed. Consider this observation by Rosling:

       In 2016 a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations. Only ten ended in fatal accidents. Of course, those were the ones the journalists wrote about: 0.000025 percent of the total. Safe flights are not newsworthy. Imagine:
       “Flight BAO016 from Sydney arrived in Singapore Changi airport without any problems. And that was today’s news.”
       2016 was the second safest year in aviation history. That is not newsworthy either.

I’ve already blogged about our responsibility to defend ourselves from the onslaught of bad news, bitter perspectives, doomscrolling, etc. Now I’d like to address the growing habit of grousing to our friends and family about all that’s wrong with the world. I suppose that we feel as though we’re doing this to be responsible citizens, to show that we care, and to get the word out that we should all be doing something about these problems. But what, as mere citizens, can we do? Let’s be honest with ourselves: is our grousing always (or even usually) in the service of some specific call to action? I doubt it. I think it’s generally a result of—wait for it—1) our negativity bias, and 2) our desire to elevate our relative status by showcasing our excellent knowledge of the issues.

What is to be done?

To address the central question of this post—why gratitude is so difficult—I think we can find a way forward by having more compassion for ourselves in this realm. If you sometimes struggle to feel grateful, it’s not you—it’s us. We’re hardwired for negativity, and for making comparisons with others that often leave us feeling inadequate; meanwhile, modern vectors for emotion contagion exacerbate the problem.  Beyond compassion, let’s consider how to combat this situation and specifically address these three factors.

For this I’ll turn to yet another essayist: Richard Carlson, author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … And It’s All Small Stuff. My favorite among his 100 micro-essays is titled “Think of What You Have Instead of What You Want,” and offers this advice:

In over a dozen years as a stress consultant, one of the most pervasive and destructive mental tendencies I’ve seen is that of focusing on what we want instead of what we have. It doesn’t seem to make any difference how much we have; we just keep expanding our list of desires, which guarantees we will remain dissatisfied.

At first blush this seems to be about material possessions, and thus about showing off with, say, a flashy new car to enhance our status. But it’s more than that, because a lot of what we want is for the world to be better, for people to be better, for more social justice, and all kinds of other things that we can never have or at least never bring about. So satisfaction seems impossible if we continue to focus on what we want. Being dissatisfied, we lack gratitude.

So what’s the secret to shifting our focus? As I see it, the critical component of wanting is the human capacity for counterfactuals, which is to say we are very good at imagining a set of circumstances that is different from reality. I mean, sure, my cat can do this, in imagining a full food bowl instead of an empty one, and thus hassles me at mealtime, but this assessment is as unsophisticated as operant conditioning. She feels hunger and knows there’s a way to satisfy it. But she doesn’t dwell on this want; once her belly is full, she’s happy as a clam and goes off to wash and nap. Suffice to say she is not preoccupied with anxious thoughts (have you ever known a cat with insomnia)? But we humans take counterfactuals much further, such that we are constantly—almost as a reflex—measuring the delta between how things are vs. how we think they ought to be.

This continuous assessment  generally does us no good, of course, because it’s informed by our negativity bias and our persistent dread of relative deprivation, and is exacerbated by how enamored our tech-driven society is with data and all the ways it can describe things: how many thumbs-ups, thumbs-downs, likes, re-posts, rankings, ratings, views, impressions, etc. The urge to measure ourselves, our lives, our personas, and our society against some hypothetical perfect version has never been stronger.

Consider dating. You used to meet a single person somewhere somehow, have a reaction to him or her (the real person, not a curated version), and might decide to get to know him or her better, gradually, via a series of dates … a non-targeted exploration. Following this path, you might be surprised to realize you could actually be attracted to a dog person who likes to play cards and eat barbecue, even if you’re a vegan cat person who reads novels. All this is to say, people used to focus on the actual person—i.e., how things are. Online dating, on the other hand, trains people to swiftly evaluate and usually reject an endless stream of candidates based on their profiles—creating a focus on counterfactuals, always imagining a (hypothetically) superior prospect. I suspect (though I’ve never dated online, having met my wife years before the Internet) that online dating is a good example of modern society taking us in the wrong direction—as if evolution hadn’t already caused enough trouble.

To wrap up, I’m proposing that, following Carlson’s “small stuff” advice about focusing on what we have, not what we want, we fight this growing impulse to compare the actual with the ideal. As negatively biased, socially insecure people susceptible to emotion contagion from every corner, we must protect ourselves from the assessment impulse. We need to recognize that negativity is a bias that no longer protects us; that social comparison is bound to cause hard feelings; that a thousand ways to measure something doesn’t always amount to a single good reason do so. So taste the wine with your tongue, not your discernment, and see if you can’t just enjoy it.

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Wine Tasting - Castello di Amorosa

Introduction

Oh, shit! I just realized I’ve got only 45 minutes to write up my freelance article for Wine Spectator magazine, about my visit to the Castello di Amorosa winery! I better get right to it.

Wine Tasting  – Castello di Amorosa

The environs

The site of the winery, or terroir in viticulture parlance, is quite extravagant, almost exquisite. The castle is so imposing, I have to wonder if our military has an arrangement in place to appropriate the property in the case of an attack. It’s kind of hard to believe that all that goes on in this mighty fortress is the production, tasting, and sale of wine. Oddly, the grapevines themselves are virtually unprotected and in fact during our visit several goats escaped and started chowing down on them! Fortunately, stone walls are not the only protection: the castle turrets have arrowslits, aka balistraria, which are those tall slots that an archer can shoot arrows through. Or, a crossbowman can launch bolts through them. How badass is that? So let’s say I’m not even tempted to return under dark of night to steal grapes from this place. Besides, they just finished their harvest.

(Note: I’ve just been advised, by someone reading over my shoulder, that terroir has nothing to do with territory and in fact pertains to the combination of soil, climate, etc. that influences the character of a fine wine. Yes, I’m embarrassed. But honestly, that sentence reads so well, I’m going to leave it.)

You might be wondering if there’s a moat. Hell yeah there is! It doesn’t look very deep, nor are there crocodiles, but who knows … maybe it has piranhas? Or maybe there’s an underwater cage of piranhas they can release on command, if anyone storms the moat? That would be so cool. Now, no moat would be complete without a drawbridge … so does this Castello have one? Yes! I’m not sure if it’s operational, though. The brochure says, “The heavy iron chains would be used to raise the drawbridge to prevent marauders from entering through the main entrance.” Well, yeah … it’s not like it’d keep marauders from coming through the side entrance. Or from doing something other than entering. But what really bothers me about that sentence is that the verb is in the hypothetical subjunctive, “would be used...” There’s such a whiff of “never” about that. How about “The heavy iron chains can be used…”? Or, since we all grasp the concept, how about just saying “the drawbridge totally works”?

So, does the castle live up to its reputation as “a magical place which will transport you to medieval Italy”? I can’t say for sure, since I’ve never been to Italy, but at a minimum the Castello transported me to modern Anaheim, home of Disneyland. But in a good way.

The tasting room is down a flight of stone steps. My party had been warned that it’s a cave and can be quite chilly, but in fact a) it’s not a cave, and b) it’s not chilly. Could my daughter have confused the Castello with some other winery she researched? Easily. The brick ceilings are hand-built which seems remarkable unless you consider the alternative: robot-built? Is that even a thing? The arches are impressively vaulted, if that makes any sense. The bars are travertine stone and present an impressive and quite functional surface on which to place glasses of wine and fill out our tasting forms. I’ll bet you could hand-mix ice cream or fudge on this bar, like at those tourist places. Or you could lay out a corpse on the stone surface. It’s like marble.

Here I am filling out my tasting form.

That’s not my purse, by the way. I don’t carry a purse. (It’s not that a purse would compromise my masculine dignity; I could totally carry it off. I just don’t happen to desire one. If I did though, it would be soft kid leather like the one you see here.)

White wines

Castello wines are sold only at the winery. I’m sure the vintner is tempted to say, “Not sold in stores!” but that phrase has such a strong association with the QVC network and/or Ginsu steak knives, it cannot be uttered. But it’s true: you cannot buy this Castello di Amorosa wine at any restaurant or store. So what happens if you’re entertaining late and run out of wine? Perhaps that is where the fortress, with its moat and drawbridge, come in to play. Don’t even try it.

During our tasting we were cared for by Elisa, who is new to the Castello, having just arrived from Italy. She spoke with a charming Italian accent, as in “We-a will-a start-a with-a the white-a wines-a and-a work-a our way-a down.” Come to think of it, it’s possible her name is Elise, and it just sounded like Elisa. (Full disclosure: as I mentioned before, I’ve never been to Italy, so it’s possible she’s not Italian at all and has just mastered a fake Italian accent. If so, she-a had-a me fooled!)

Pinot Grigio

At Castello the Pinot Grigio is vintned with a young Malvasia grape. (An old grape would be a raisin, from which wine cannot be reliably produced.) This being an Italian style wine, it is more acidic than a traditional American wine such as Thunderbird, or a soft drink like Kool-Aid. The fragrance, or nose, is beguiling, almost coquettish, with hints of come-hither. The taste is light and frisky, almost meretricious, like the sassy tongue of a young prostitute. Overall I find the wine very sippable. I cannot say whether it would be quaffable or guzzle-able since I was given only about an ounce. (The exact tasting amount is unknown, because Elisa knows only the metric system and I was too enthralled with the terroir to calculate the conversion.)

Gewürztraminer

The Traminer grapes producing this varietal are notoriously difficult to grow, given their unstable genome, especially in Napa County, where the climate is a bit hot for them. As a result, the young grapes are often exposed to routine profanity and even abuse at the hands of frustrated growers. This results in traumatized grapes and a final product that’s easily the most hard-bitten bad-boy of whites I’ve ever sampled. The wine is initially sharp on the palate with notes of anguish (or agnosia in wine parlance) but tamped down by subtle hints of musk, lychee, and leach. The flavor starts out rather boldly and strongly, like a German with a megaphone, but then softens and dissipates like evaporating solvent and ultimately resolves into a graceful waft of gingerbread nostalgia as it rolls past your lingual frenulum.

Breadsticks

The breadsticks come lovingly wrapped in a form-fitting plastic bag, suggestive of both high density polyethylene and old-school cellophane. Presentation is in a simple glass, and I had the small thrill of tearing into the bag myself. The sticks are long and pale, like a British rocker’s slender fingers, but the flavor is pure Tuscany, with tones of airy sifted flour and extra virgin olive oil. The finish is salty, like a good sea shanty, and left me yearning for more wine, ideally right out of the spigot like how I used to get it in my childhood home.

Red wines

The reds are justifiably famous at the Castello, earning a loyal following among wine aficionados and culinary epicures, along with a begrudging but undeniable sense of street cred. Two of the reds on offer for the tasting have won awards from the SFC, which (I admit, I had to look this up) stands for Sucka Free City, i.e., San Francisco. Imagine all those ballers from the Western Addition or the Mission district rolling up to the castle in their low-riders or souped-up Acuras with aftermarket spoilers, subwoofers booming. “Don’t gimme no Clos du Bois, we don’t swill that shit in tha SFC.”

Pinot Noir

After much hemming and hawing, I settled on the Pinot Noir Morning Dew, known among local tech millionaires as a perfect breakfast wine and a nice replacement for their beloved Mountain Dew, now that they’ve graduated from coding in the garage to grandstanding in the boardroom. The flavor awakens the tongue with all the sharpness and clarity of a modern OLED digital display, accompanied by the bold stride of berry and accented with a tannic spice reminiscent of silicon. For all its cutting edge spine, though, there’s a reassuring coziness to the mouth-feel: a tongue-numbing cloak of gentle clove, summoning wistful affection for one’s youth, such as one might experience stumbling across a Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM at a yard sale.

Cabernet Sauvignon

It is said a winery can be fairly judged by its cab, and the Castello’s has plenty of swagger, with a flavor-forward bite that electrifies the tongue. The zesty tones of pepper grinder, like those very long wooden grinders favored by fancy restaurants, put you on notice just before the strong-armed tannins kick in. This is a big proud cab that quickens your pulse. If you met this wine in a bar it would challenge you to punch it in the stomach as hard as you can … but you won’t find it in a bar because, again, Castello di Amorosa is available only right here at the castle!

Sweet wines

If you travel widely among the many wineries in Napa and Sonoma, you’ll start to realize the age cohort is edging upward. Let’s face it, with the global ascension of California wines driving up prices, the only people who can afford it are those who’ve broken the backs of their home mortgages and whose 401(k)s are well into seven figures. There’s a reason Tesla charging stations dot the Napa landscape: these people are as foggy and forgetful as they are rich. So what is the industry to do, as its ageing patrons gradually die off? The Castello has taken a page from the cannabis gummy playbook and is clearly courting the younger set with a nice array of unapologetically sweet dessert wines. Think Hawaiian Punch or Hi-C, but with legs—and plenty of alcohol.

Simpatica

After being pushed around so much by the Cab, I needed a friend—so when I saw the word Simpatica I was hooked right in. But I hesitated because this was last wine I’d get to taste. Would I be selling myself short by skipping the Moscato? Perhaps, but I couldn’t get past the “mosca” part, that being Italian for “fly,” and I just knew I’d take the bait and make a corny joke like “Elisa, there’s a fly in my wine, and he thinks it’s gazpacho.” (I’d already lost a bet that Elisa would make a joke about the wine-spitting bowl, along the lines of “We send that down to Charles Shaw and they bottle it.” She didn’t say anything of the kind. But like I said, she’s new.) In the event, the Simpatica did not let me down: this was a bright wine, redolent of pears and honey, that caressed my tongue, but then took an unexpected detour into light fizz, like fermented peaches at a salad bar, with just a hint of bong water. It’s a highly drinkable wine that says, “Hey, buddy, lighten up.” I could totally see myself drinking this out of a bota bag at a sweltering music festival. It would pair nicely with those weird cream cheese appetizers at P.F. Chang’s, or with Rice Krispies.

Il Passito

I only had a little sip of this, when my tasting companion insisted I try it. I know that, as a wine critic, I should use words like “remarkable,” but my honest reaction was OMG! This is by far the sweetest liquid I’ve ever had in my mouth. Honey is so over. The flavor is so fawningly unctuous, I thought this wine would try to sell me a timeshare in Honolulu. But as it lingers on the tongue it’s all Sweetness & Light, like old school Grade-A maple syrup without the maple. I suddenly had a craving for the totally crusty, blackened pork ribs you find in the dark corner of the grill toward the end of a barbecue. But Il Passito also has a regal flair; if this wine could talk, it’d tell a Bartles & James wine cooler, “You’re just a vulgar little street urchin.”

The scoring

Nobody in my party remembered to fill out the score card. Or maybe it’s not a memory thing; for me, numeric scores kind of seemed beside the point. I mean, would you give a point rating to the color of your child’s eyes, or to the length of your cat’s tale? Suffice to say, I shall surely return to the Castello di Amorosa, next time I need a full lineup of artisanal wines, or am fleeing a zombie apocalypse. As for which wine impressed us the most, I suppose that can be answered by the one we ended up deciding to buy: the Simpatica, at $30 for a 750ml bottle. I have a feeling it’s gonna go great with chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream.

Epilogue

No, Wine Spectator never did run my story. This may have something to do with the fact that I never submitted it. Why would I bother, when I haven’t arranged for the Castello di Amarosa winery to place an ad with the magazine?

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Curse of the Epicure

Introduction

Adam and Eve had a pretty easy life in Eden, with very few complications.  God took care of most things, and Adam could make minor fixes around the place.  Adam joked to the snake:  “How many humans does it take to screw in a light bulb?  /  It better not take more than two!’”  The snake, unimpressed, changed the subject:  “See that tree?  You should really try an apple from it.”  Adam refused, remembering it was forbidden.  But the snake eventually convinced Eve to try an apple.  When Adam saw this, he immediately had to have his own.  God appeared when Adam was on his second bite, but before He could say anything, Adam looked up and said, “God, these apples suck!  They’re all mealy and mushy and the flavor is so cloying.”  God roared back, “That’s why I told you not to eat them!  I haven’t perfected them yet!”  God was so furious He banished Adam and Eve from Eden.  Not long after, Adam suddenly noticed things about Eve that he hadn’t before.  “Eve … I don’t know how to tell you this, but, uh … you need a bra,” he said.  She fired back, “Well, I was just checking out your, uh, endowment, and you’re not exactly Big Man on Campus!”  So they were embarrassed and covered themselves up.  And that is the tale of the original sin:  being finicky.

A confession

I have a confession to make:  I used to love Chevy’s.  I once walked 2 1/2 miles to a Chevy’s, when I lived in San Francisco, only a mile from what is now my favorite taqueria, in the Mission.  I liked Chevy’s’ really thin chips.  I liked their stupid beans.  It seemed as good a Mexican restaurant as any.  What an idiot I was.  My roommate confronted me about it:  “Why would you want to eat mall food?”  He would bring salsa home from his favorite place in the Mission, and once even brought a couple quarts back from his favorite place in Denver.  But I didn’t listen.  It took me years to realize not only that Chevy’s is a mediocre corporate chain hawking non-spicy soulless fare to the uncultured masses, but that I should feel embarrassed to have ever thought that place was worth going to, especially when I lived in the best taqueria city in the world.

A cautionary tale

When I was in college, my then-stepdad took my mom and me out for a nice meal at this upscale French restaurant called the Metropole.  It was an old Berkeley standby, exactly the kind of place college kids get taken to when their parents are in town.  I was impressed by how swanky the place was, and thought the food was pretty good, but my stepdad complained about absolutely everything.  He had been to France, and this food didn’t seem French, and blah blah blah.  By the end of the meal he seemed downright miserable.  And yet, there were plenty of things he could have been happy about:  having enough money to eat in a fancy place like this; the fact that nobody was smoking like they would have been in France; the fact that were it not for his complaining I’d have thought it was an awesome place.

So there’s a flip side to having sophisticated tastes.  Once we know what we’ve been missing, we’re no longer satisfied by what used to please us.  Meanwhile, there’s an ego aspect.  Consider my confession about Chevy’s:  should liking a restaurant chain really be embarrassing?  Should there be any shame in not knowing from good Mexican (or French) food?  I mean, so what?  But there you have it:  we’re all a bit afraid of being seen as uncultured rubes.  (What, you’re not?  You mean it’s just me?  Fine—go read something else then … your sensibilities are too advanced for this blog.)

When we become judgmental about aesthetic choices, we sometimes stray into other territory.  Have you ever noticed that when you see litter, it’s always a McDonalds wrapper or a 7-Eleven Big Gulp cup?  You never see a Godiva wrapper or an empty Veuve Clicquot bottle on the side of the road.  It’s tempting to conclude that unsophisticated tastes, or at least the poverty that makes it necessary to embrace them, are a sign of vulgarity, part and parcel with the ignorant impulse to just throw your trash out the window.  But (as I shall explore) there’s also a coarseness in aspiring to impress people with your aesthetic sophistication.

Sophistication for sale

Consider Godiva chocolate:  it’s really expensive, and the packaging is really fancy, but the product itself is mediocre.  No, I’m not some expert or chocolate or anything, but I was shocked at how waxy and bland it was when I first tried it.  (My opinion isn’t unique; I had my albertnet fact checker google “godiva chocolate sucks” and he reported 444,000 hits.)  Am I trying to impress you with my taste in chocolate?  Well, maybe I am, but I’m also making a point:  Godiva chocolate exists simply because there are plenty of people out there willing to pay extra for it, just to look rich and savvy.

We’re surrounded by the blatant marketing of sophistication.  For example, there are Stella Artois billboards that show a glass of the beer with the headline “Perfection has its price.”  Normally “price” in such a context is figurative, suggesting sacrifice, but with a beer I guess the point is “this beer is expensive so it must be good.”

Magazines like “Cigar Aficionado” make their nut teaching, or seeming to teach, their readers how to be more discerning about cigars.  I suppose there are people who actually do love cigars (though the only thing I’ve found them good for is filling a friend’s car with smoke), but could you really predict how much you’d like a cigar based on its ratings?  A review of a mainstream product like a camera gives all kinds of objective information, and can provide sample photos taken by the camera itself—but the flavor of smoke cannot be described in any useful way. 

Each issue of “Cigar Aficionado” has a rich celebrity cigar smoker on the cover and I guess that’s really the point:  the reader can think, “Yeah, if Jack Nicholson and I met, we’d hit it off.  I’d show him my humidor, and we’d hang out and smoke some fine Cubans.”  This seems like the kind of magazine you’d leave lying around on your coffee table to showcase your expensive tastes (because your wife would never let you light up around guests—cigars stink too bad).  I’m going to guess not many subscribers to “The Costco Connection” would leave that mag lying around.  (I’m not the only one to mock “Cigar Aficionado”; consider this.)

I’m not quite as skeptical of “Wine Spectator” (put out by the same publisher as “Cigar Aficionado,” by the way), because I understand there is a huge, rich vocabulary available for describing wine.  I won’t attack the validity of that vocabulary (how could I, being an uncultured rube?), but there does seem something fishy about “Wine Spectator.”  First, there’s the name.  Spectator?  Like, the point of wine isn’t just to drink it, but to watch others drink it?  See, drink, be seen, and be drunk?

Okay, I’m quibbling.  But consider this:  the magazine has an award it presents to restaurants that have great wine lists, which brought about a great hoax in 2008.  A guy created a fake restaurant (nothing more than a mocked-up menu and website), put together a wine list comprising wines that “Wine Spectator” itself had reviewed harshly, submitted his $250 application fee to the magazine, and his “restaurant” won the Award of Excellence, following which magazine’s ad sales department contacted the “restaurant” soliciting an ad to accompany the Award of Excellence listing.  I dare you to try to convince me this is anything more than a circle-jerk-for-profit.  Subscribers would surely defend the magazine, but that’s because their own standing as wine experts depends on its good reputation.  It’s the emperor’s new wine journal.

Taste, if I’m not mistaken, is supposed to be a personal thing.  We try a bunch of different things, and decide we like certain ones more than others.  (Yes, our friends help turn us on to new things, but those friends presumably know us well enough to guess what we’d like.)  Defining our tastes by ratings in a magazine smacks of insecurity.  Really, what could be more vulgar than letting ourselves be manipulated by advertisers and other profiteers, just to make sure “our” tastes show sophistication and class? 

A dilemma

On the one hand, it makes sense to cultivate refined tastes, lest we miss out on the best the world has to offer.  (If Adam and Eve hadn’t eaten the apple, humanity would still be in Eden, getting nothing but Middle Eastern food.)   On the other hand, striving to be an epicure can end up being just another treadmill of one-upmanship, with the ever-present threat of getting jaded.  (I sometimes wonder if the hallmarks of a mid-life crisis—fancier food, better booze, faster cars—aren’t actually the cause of the crisis, given the ageing process and how it ruins our earthly pleasures via heartburn, hangovers, and the need to drive responsibly.)

So the question is, how can we best walk the fine line between cultural refinement and mere contentment?  I’ve mulled this over and here are my suggestions.

Don’t forsake your old tastes just because you’ve developed new ones.  Take Chevy’s, for example.  No, I no longer think it’s great, and wouldn’t recommend it to others, but if I went there, could I still enjoy my meal?  Sure—my taste buds haven’t changed, and I won’t let my attitude spoil my appetite.  (That said, those doughy, baking-soda-y “tortillas” made by “El Machino” are pretty disgusting.)  Former delights we’ve transcended don’t have to be abandoned; they can have a long afterlife as our guilty pleasures.  I kind of like the Uno pizza chain, which is more like Pizza Hut than it is like the original Uno.  And speaking of pizza and forsaking old tastes, when I told my daughters I was coming to prefer Little Star over Zachary’s, they looked stricken, like they might never get their beloved Zach’s again.  “Take that back!” Alexa demanded.  (I told her not to worry … I’ll always enjoy getting bloated on stuffed pizza even if it’s not from my favorite place.)

Try to keep ego out of it.  Naturally, when we discover something wonderful, we want to turn others on to it, and occasionally to help them overcome their hesitation.  This is well and good—but we should keep an eye on how we conduct ourselves.  I’ve seen my own enthusiasm turn into a bludgeon, where the person I’ve exhorting to try something becomes reluctant to admit he dislikes it.  Things can get worse if the supposed expert demeans a product rather than promoting one.  Consider this rant on chowhound where, instead of answering a question, somebody decided just to complain, unbidden, about the pizza crust at Zachary’s:  “Had a think [sic] crust slice at Zachary’s on Solano the other day and was kind of shocked at how bad the crust was.”  Of twelve replies, eleven were negative, and it seemed like the reviewers were trying to outdo each other with their explanations of why the crust is bad (e.g., “the cross section of the dough that touches the pan was dry”) and of what else is wrong (e.g., “I find their sauce rather bland”), and with their own credentials (e.g., “didn’t start disliking Zachary’s until I returned from an Illinois trip … doesn’t come close to Giordano’s or the even better Art of Pizza in Chicago”).  That Zach’s pizza is hugely popular among a discerning Bay Area clientele, and yet gets such poor treatment on chowhound, suggests a striving among these reviewers to out-foodie each other.  On a somewhat related note, I’m often relieved I know nothing about wine, because I’d hate to see myself getting into one of those logorrheic pissing contests you sometimes see when wine experts clash in the night.

Cultivate tastes that can’t be marketed.  If you’re afraid of being played for a sucker by luxury brands, slick marketing, veiled ads (i.e., magazine “articles”), and/or peer pressure, consider focusing on pleasures that are impervious to such manipulation.  For example, you can search for the perfect taqueria (which will have no advertising budget at all), try to learn how to mix for yourself the perfect martini (which, I have it on good authority, has as much to do with technique as with good ingredients), or tackle a culinary challenge (e.g., learn how to make your own pasta).  Such quests for the finer things take effort, as opposed to merely “buying” sophistication by trusting the authority of this or that brand, magazine, or celebrity endorsement.

Along these lines, would you like to know what soft drink is my very favorite?  I’ll tell you:  it’s that ice-cold can of Coke (or Pepsi, whatever) you get at a convenience store in the middle of a long bike ride, on a hot day fifty miles from home when your blood sugar is crashing.  Try that out and you’ll be the greatest snob of all:  the connoisseur of epic experience.

Ask Mr. Beer

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for references to alcoholic beverages.  Also, this post originally appeared with a slightly different title.  I have changed the title and some of the text at the request of a reader who holds a certain copyright.

Dear Mr. Beer,

What beer should I drink to impress my date?

Bill P, Columbus, OH

Dear Bill,

Don’t kid yourself.  There’s little chance your choice of beer would seem impressive.  Your date might think beer is for philistines, or might associate your choice—however tasteful it might be—with her ex-boyfriend who was mean to her dog.  If you really want to impress your date, fix her bike or write a sonnet for her.

Dear Mr. Beer,

My friends fancy themselves beer experts and I want to show that I’m also very knowledgeable.  Is it okay to describe expensive beer the way you’d describe a fine wine?  Is there a vocabulary available for this?

Chip M, Boston, MA

Dear Chip,

There’s no need to bloviate like wine aficionados do.  If you want to impress your friends, here’s a simple way:  next time they serve you a beer with a twist-off bottle cap, act amazed, like you’ve never seen one before.

Dear Mr. Beer,

Say I’m at a party digging through a cooler for a tasty brew.  Is there any way to tell ahead of time how bitter a beer will be?  Thanks!

Louise S, Tucson, AZ

Dear Louise,

Sometimes you can go by the brand.  If a beer sounds dangerous, like “Ruination IPA,” “Knuckle Dragger,” or “The Rassler,” it’s probably at least strong if not bitter.  If it has “hop” in the name, well, it’s probably hoppy (i.e., bitter), e.g., “Hopasaurus Rex” or “Hoptober.”  An IPA will tend to be bitter, especially if there’s a numeric modifier, e.g., “Double IPA,” “Quadruple IPA.”

Getting even more quasi-scientific, some beer companies are providing a numeric bitterness rating, right on the bottle.  The units are IBUs--International Bitterness Units.  For example, New Belgium's Ranger IPA, which is pretty hoppy, is 70 on the IBU scale.  Their more mainstream beer, Fat Tire, is only 18.5.  These numbers not only help you select a beer you like, but they're good for bragging rights.  (For a website ranking the bitterest beers click here. ) 

(For what it’s worth—i.e., very little—there’s also a scale for measuring a beer’s color, and this is expressed in EBCs; e.g., 4 for a pale lager, 138 for an imperial stout.  I fail to see the point.  If you’re drinking the beer from a bottle, who cares what color it is, and if you’re drinking it from a glass, well, just look at it!)

Dear Mr. Beer,

I’d swear Heineken here in the States tastes different than the Heineken I had in Holland.  Is it?

Helen N, Oakville, CA

Dear Helen,

Well, it could be different.  They do bottle batches specially for the American market.  You may recall it coming in a brown bottle there, whereas it’s obviously a green bottle here.  Also, you cannot get Heineken in a can in the Netherlands.  It’s only available in bottles there, because they refill, rather than recycle, their bottles.

Could special bottling, or bottles vs. cans, affect the taste?  Maybe.  I first had Heineken in a can on an airplane, where everything tastes awful by association.  Meanwhile, a Dutch woman I know had Heineken in a can over here and thought it was the greatest thing in the world.

Dear Mr. Beer,

Have you had McEwan’s Scottish ale, and if so is it any good?  Also—unrelated question—how do you decide what questions to answer?

Lawrence H, Greensboro, NC

Dear Larry,

(You don’t mind if I call you Larry, do you?)  McEwan’s is excellent.  When I try to describe it, I’m oddly inspired to do so in French:  présente des arômes de pâte à pain, de fleurs et une finale passablement fruitée avec des notes de cerises.  Définitivement une bière de degustation.  Loosely translated:  it has a good and yummy taste, well worth drinking.

As for deciding what questions to answer, that’s a trade secret.  I will allow that efficiency plays a role.

Dear Mr. Beer,

Let’s get down to brass tacks.  Once and for all, what’s better:  beer or wine?

Jonathan R, Washington, DC

Dear Jonathan,

It’s not hard to guess how I’m expected to answer, and I feel like I may be walking into a trap.  Look, that’s really almost a religious question, and cannot be definitively answered by me or anybody else.  But if you're looking for ways to argue that beer is better, here are a few:  a) a great and impressive beer, like a Chimay Première from Belgium, is only like $12 for a 750ml bottle … way cheaper than a fancy wine; b) beer gets you around the debate about cork vs. synthetic corks vs. bottle caps; c) beer is better for hydration.   But before you decide to trot these out, consider that you are far better off keeping them to yourself as a way to feel smug.

Dear Mr. Beer,

Is it considered unseemly to eschew cheap beer?  Or to put it another way, is there a polite way to turn down a beer when you realize you’re being offered Coors or Budweiser?

Harris L,  Danbury, CT

Dear Harris,

Listen, I didn't get to be Mr. Beer by being a snob.  I love all beer, even cheap beer, even bad beer.  I can't see why you’d want to turn down any of it.  Not only would you probably come off as rude, but you might miss out on something passably tasty.  (Yes, cheap beer can be enjoyable, though it is an acquired taste.)

Meanwhile, consider that you might not be as discerning as you think.  (How would you do in a blind taste test?)  Plenty of wealthy, educated, hip types—you know, like the trust fund kids who become journalists because they can, and drive old beater Toyotas to maintain their cred—are going around these days drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, just to show allegiance to their working class brethren.  True, most of them are drinking this beer ironically, but some of them aren’t in the joke and yet still seem to enjoy their PBR, and anyway the alcohol still works its magic.  I’ve always liked Newcastle, and when some cosmopolitan type informed me that it’s considered rotgut in England, that didn’t make my beer taste any different.

In fact, one of my favorite beer memories involves very, very cheap beer.  I was in college, and I was flat broke.  (“Broke” as in I’d just deposited the last of my cash into my bank account so my rent check would clear.)  A friend and I were going to a barbecue and needed to bring our own meat and our own beer.  My friend was almost as broke as I was and for funds we had to dig around under sofa cushions and all through his car.  We ended up with a little less than five bucks, which at Safeway we parlayed into a pack of house-brand turkey franks, a pack of house-brand buns, and a 6-pack of Meister Bräu.  Not the greatest food and drink, but good enough, and the people and side dishes at the barbecue were all excellent.

Dear Mr. Beer,

Can you recommend some food/beer pairings?  Maybe some rules of thumb (like how “red wine goes well with meat,” but for beer)?

Leyla A, Seattle, WA

Dear Leyla,

Beer/food pairings aren’t unheard of; there’s even a such thing as a beer sommelier.  That said, for me beer is best on an empty stomach.  I don't like any other flavors competing with it (though it’s pleasant to counter the spiciness of Mexican food with a watery beer like Corona).  Now, you might say, “Aha, but what about the nuts and pretzels bars give out for free during happy hour?”  That's to get you to drink, of course.  It doesn’t make it a pairing per se.  When’s the last time you were drinking beer at home and somebody said, “Gosh, I sure wish I had some nuts”? 

Now, it is the case that when eating pizza you might have a sudden craving for beer, but that’s just to improve your hedonistic experience.  Take it a step further:  you’re eating pizza and suddenly you say, “I wish we had some beers right now.  And geishas!  We should get geishas!”  Am I right?

Dear Mr. Beer,

In one of your previous columns you mentioned a happy beer memory.  I love this concept of beer memories.  What is your all-time favorite beer memory?

Thomas W, Austin, TX

Dear Thomas,

I’ve had all kinds of glorious beer in all kinds of wonderful settings, but really the most memorable was the very first time I had beer.  I was just a bit shy of my eighteenth birthday, and I was such a non-troublesome, well-behaved teenager that I felt, on principle, I should at least one time drink a bunch of beer before I was of legal age.  This was in Colorado back when the legal drinking age, for three-two beer, was only eighteen—so I was running out of time.  I got my brother to buy my friends and me some six-packs of generic beer.  They were dingy white cans with “BEER” printed in a plain black font.  My brother, who was an even bigger goody-two-shoes than I, decided to join us in drinking them.

Of course I’d had sips of beer before, but never enough to really taste it.  I didn’t expect to like generic beer—and I didn’t—but that wasn’t the point.  We all sat around the dining room table, methodically working our way through can after can of the beer.  Three-two is weak to begin with and this was generic to boot, so it was a whole lot like drinking water.  After six of these I still didn’t feel a thing.  At this point my brother’s friend walked in.  He was even more straight-laced than we were, and surveyed the proceedings with a plainly judgmental eye.  I can’t blame him; it wasn’t a very sophisticated thing we were doing, and besides, we’d neglected to invite him.  He turned his attention to my brother and said grimly, “Are you drinking that for the taste?”  My brother looked at him a moment, looked down at the generic beer in his hand, looked back up and said:  “No.”  In that moment I felt very proud of my brother.  I can’t exactly say why.

(Note that I’m not advocating drinking to excess.  Ads for good booze always say, “Those who appreciate quality enjoy it responsibly.”  That’s a good start, but why should people who can’t appreciate quality be let off the hook?  They should behave responsibly, too!  I’ll confess that as a teen I had the worst intentions with this little stunt, but it came out okay in the end.  It’s probably impossible for a large fellow to get drunk on generic three-two beer, because he’d probably feel so bloated by the sheer volume of liquid he’d give up, just like I did.)

Dear Mr. Beer,

I really want to use my knowledge of beer as an affirmation of my self-worth.  Is there any way you can help?

Todd M, Sausalito, CA

Dear Todd,

Sure, you can take this little quiz.  Match the beer quotation with the person who uttered it.

1. Abraham Lincoln
2. Henry Lawson
3. Homer Simpson
4. Flann O’Brien
5. Jack Handy
6. Steven Wright
7. Tina Fey
8. Dave Barry
9. H.L. Mencken
10. Benjamin Franklin

 a. “A pint of plain is your only man.”    

 b. “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

 c.  “Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel ashamed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn’t drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, ‘It is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true, than be selfish and worry about my liver.’”

 d.  “I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer.”

 e.  “Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer.”

 f.  “In a study, scientists report that drinking beer can be good for the liver. I’m sorry, did I say ‘scientists’? I meant Irish people.”

 g.  “I like beer. On occasion, I will even drink beer to celebrate a major event such as the fall of Communism or the fact that the refrigerator is still working.”

 h.  “24 beers in a case.  24 hours in a day.  Coincidence?”

 i.  “Marriage is based on the theory that when a man discovers a particular brand of beer exactly to his taste he should at once throw up his job and go to work in a brewery.”

 j.  “Beer … the cause of, and solution to, most of life’s problems.”

Answers:  1.  d;  2.  e;  3.  j;  4. a;  5. c; 6. h; 7. f; 8. g; 9. i; 10. b  Note:  Ben Franklin is widely credited with quotation 10, but it turns out he never actually said it.  But in the words of another who liked beer, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

dana albert blog