Does perfect taste exist?

My wife loves strawberries but not the seeds. She loves Sichuan food but not the numbing from the peppercorn. She enjoys the body vs. stone fruit aroma balance of a barrel-aged Chardonnay but not the yeasty, buttery notes.

Liking is never complete. We are used to 40~80% approval of most things we eat daily.

Loving a food is like loving a person. You accept what draws you in, and you learn to live with what does not. If you try to remove every flaw, the whole system collapses. The #balance and #tension is part of the deal.

In 1971, psychologists Brickman and Campbell described the hedonic treadmill: no matter how much we gain, we adapt to the new level and return to baseline. Then we chase the next thing. The pursuit of #satisfaction is structurally #endless.

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan made the point more fundamental: #Desire, he argued, is never about the #object. It is about the #lack. We do not want the #thing we pursue. We want the #wanting. The moment we obtain it, desire migrates elsewhere.

In Japanese culture, there is a concept called #Kintsugi: Broken pottery is repaired with gold. The crack is not #hidden. It is #highlighted. The flaw becomes the most beautiful part of the object. The #imperfection is not a failure of the craft. It is the #story.

I guess it is time to take a pause and rethink many of the problem statements driving innovation in the modern food system. Are we chasing solutions to #delusional problems? Or is it about #recalibrating our collective expectation?

And in the future food system, should we keep chasing "The perfect taste"? Or should we learn to see the "gold in the crack"?