An appreciation of style and aesthetics isn’t innate—it’s something that must be developed and refined over time. And there are standards of quality and beauty. For example, just because you don’t happen to like Bordeaux wine does not mean you cannot learn to tell the difference between a good one and a bad one. You can. The more you learn about what makes something good, the more you are able to appreciate it, even if it is not to your personal taste. The most obvious way to understand how taste evolves is to take a look at how our taste for certain foods and drinks changes over time. In this chapter, I use taste—the sensation of flavor—as a metaphor for the broader notion of taste—one’s perception of aesthetic excellence.
Eating is a fundamental experience. Everyone does it. So many things affect the taste of food—not just ingredients, but environment, setting, memories, anticipation, company (how many delicious meals have turned into indigestion when the meal included an argumentative dining companion?), and so on. Taste levels are either enhanced or diminished by the experience of eating. Understanding how this works is a window into how taste, in the broader sense of the word, is developed and elevated.
A taste for food or drink is formed between the sensory nervous system and distinct parts of the brain, and, like most other neurological functions, it can be strengthened and sharpened through attention, practice, and experience. Historically, scientists believed that the human nervous system was fixed and that neurogenesis (the growth of nervous tissue) ceased after the embryonic development phase. However, in the second half of the twentieth century, researchers discovered that neurons continue to form throughout life, reshaping our brains and making new connections through experiences, concepts, and even sensations. For example, most young children enjoy eating ice cream despite the fact that they aren’t taught to enjoy it. The sweetness, richness, and creaminess are innately pleasurable. In contrast, children typically do not enjoy the taste of coffee or alcohol. Yet, these beverages are enormously appealing to many adults. Unlike ice cream, both coffee and alcohol are acquired tastes. Their enjoyment comes through exposure and cultivation. They offer clear evidence that tastes change and that many tastes are developed and learned.
There are many exercises and activities that can help facilitate and expedite the development of taste, but the first step is to be committed and patient. Good taste develops over time and is influenced by a wide variety of factors, only some of which we can control. Individual taste is heavily shaped not only by the context in which one lives—for starters, the time and the place—but also by individual circumstances such as education and family values. It is also formed by genetics. Some studies suggest, for instance, that our genes determine whether we like or dislike the taste of cilantro—a controversial herb that always seems to provoke lovers and haters to argue whether it tastes like soap or not.1
Whatever the influences, I believe people are born with the capacity to discern good quality from bad with taste as a vehicle. The aim of this chapter is not to teach you how to develop “good taste” but rather how to rediscover, expand, and unleash your own personal taste. In other words, how to reconnect with the sensory input from your environment, interpret it more precisely, and leverage it more powerfully for personal and ultimately professional advantage.
Thinking about how we connect to eating is useful for learning how to become more attuned to a variety and diversity of taste sensations—not to mention how and why we turn away from some sensorial experiences. Training ourselves to become more mindful about them is an important (and usually highly pleasurable) step in aesthetic development. The same exercises and principles discussed here can be applied to other sensorial activities, and in doing so, these principles reveal how particular aesthetic experiences, expressions, codes, and choices work together and why some combinations work well and others don’t.
The notion of “good food” is deceiving. We experience food through our taste buds, of course. This biological function is the primary way we recognize sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami sensations. However, we also experience food through our culture, our expectations of what something should taste like, our memories of how it tasted in the past, and new information or ideas about what we are eating. When conveying information about food, taste has to be considered holistically, not just scientifically. It’s not enough to get consensus from a room full of taste testers that a particular food experience is desirable or objectionable; it’s important to understand all the factors that feed individual perceptions.
In fact, our DNA determines a large part of what we taste and how much we like or dislike whatever it is we’re tasting. Research shows that between 41 and 48 percent of our food preferences are genetically based.2 Humans have anywhere between two thousand and five thousand taste buds on their tongues.3 Every taste bud has fifty to one hundred receptors that process five flavor profiles: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami (often described as savory).
The number of receptors is determined by one’s DNA. In some areas of Asia, South America, and Africa, 85 percent of the native population are highly sensitive tasters (especially to particularly bitter compounds), while indigenous Europeans tend to be less sensitive to different tastes.
Researchers have also discovered that people who dislike highly flavored foods have more taste buds than the norm, meaning they are closer to reaching or exceeding 5,000 taste buds, whereas the rest of us may hover around 2,500 to 3,500. Scientists call these people “supertasters.”4 These people may register flavors much more acutely than others, and they often have a distinct dislike of ultrasweet foods, strong coffee, greasy and spicy barbecue sauces, and hoppy beers.
If genetics account for almost half of our preferences for some flavors over others, what determines the other half? And how can the other half be shaped by experience, exposure, and effort?
All our senses come into play when we eat. The British food writer Sybil Kapoor, the author of Sight Smell Touch Taste Sound: A New Way to Cook, examines how foods can stimulate different senses: “the downy touch of a peach skin, the scent of freshly picked basil, the shock of sour lemon juice.”5 In her book, she impresses upon readers the importance of becoming aware of how temperature can make food taste different. She suggests that iced coffee is not as bitter tasting as hot coffee because heat intensifies our reaction to bitter flavors. In order to bring out the full flavor of food, it’s best to serve it at room temperature. Any good cheesemonger will tell you this: it’s better to bring that wedge of cheddar or wheel of Camembert out of the refrigerator at least an hour before serving to truly experience the subtle layer of flavors various cheeses offer: sweet, salty, nutty, milky, grassy, and so on.
Even the way food is sliced affects how it tastes; a thick slab of roast beef is gamey and chewy, while a paper-thin slice, cut against the grain of the meat, is more tender. Similarly, a thin slice of Thanksgiving turkey breast can be dry, papery, and flavorless, while the whole breast, cut thicker and on the diagonal, is juicy and buttery. While nibbling on a chunk of Parmesan, you may focus on the gritty texture in lieu of its salty nuttiness.
A lot of what we think of as taste is actually smell. Kapoor suggests taking a fresh bay leaf, crushing it in your hand, and then smelling the bruised leaf. The unmistakable herbal essence is a pleasant reminder of wintery dishes and hearty soups. However, if you taste the leaf, you’ll find it to be quite bitter and unpalatable. The same is true of vanilla extract. It smells divine, but take a sip and you will find it bitter and harsh. Many people love the scent of garlic being crushed for a sauce or other dish, but the taste of raw garlic is acrid and stings the tongue.
The pleasure of these and many other foods is really in our nose, not on our tongue.6
Yet we are, in essence, suffering from a collective anosmia. A study published in early 2018 by the biologist Asifa Majid found that modern Westerners have a feeble sense of smell compared with that of hunter-gatherers in the Malay Peninsula. Dr. Majid wrote that hunter-gatherers find “odors as easy to talk about as colors, yet for your average Westerner our olfactory life goes past unnoticed and unremarked.”7
Physical environment also colors the eating experience. I’m sure you’ve been in a “greasy spoon” and had a terrible meal mostly because the space you were in was vile: harsh fluorescent lighting, dirty floors, sticky tables, ripped vinyl seats, and the smell of rancid oil hanging in the air. In a situation like this, the food tastes bad before you even put it into your mouth. Contrast that with a picnic of fresh cheese, plump grapes, red wine, and a warm baguette enjoyed on the banks of the Seine. The bread is crispy on the outside and warm and chewy on the inside, the yeasty aroma still apparent as you break it in half. The Brie is just the right degree of runny, the grapes pop open in your mouth with an audible snap, and the wine is ruby red, sumptuous, and fruity as it hits your nose even before it touches your tongue. Of course, the atmosphere in which you consume this simplest of meals adds to the sensations and experience. Glorious.
Unfortunately, we’ve become numb not only to the power and effect of our individual senses but also to the interconnections among our senses when it comes to experience. And this is true not only when it comes to food; I would argue that it is true in all areas of aesthetic experience.
Even though our individual DNA has a lot to do with how we perceive and enjoy tastes, nature isn’t in complete control. How we are introduced to food in our families and communities, and the messages we receive about foods that are all around us, also make a difference and can in fact outweigh our natural predilections. When we prepare food, the ritual of peeling, slicing, mixing, and sautéing evokes various memories of home, childhood, romance, fun, meals we’ve eaten, and gatherings we’ve enjoyed. Food and flavor preferences are inextricably tied to personal experience. The touch, taste, smell, and look of food induce strong and meaningful emotional associations. We’ve already seen this in terms of how the shape, thinness, clarity, and quality of a wineglass affect how wine tastes, as we discussed chapter 2.
Our tastes continue to evolve, in part, through the introduction of new multicultural foods and flavors. As the world grows more connected and people are more apt to migrate and travel, flavor preferences once thought of as regional have spread and the desire for new flavor profiles has expanded. Chris Lukehurst, an international food industry consultant at the Marketing Clinic, based in the United Kingdom, says, “The globe is getting smaller. While many countries maintain very strong food cultures, they are increasingly also affected by influences from outside.”
This should not be a surprise to any of us. Take any national or regional cuisine, and you will invariably find that there is much academic debate about where it originated. “Did pizzas really originate from Naples, when ancient Greeks and Egyptians all ate unleavened flat breads with various toppings from as far back as we know? All cuisines are an amalgamation of local food availability, external influences, and historical evolution, and this evolution continues today. Cultural influences such as films, fashion, even health messages, affect what we choose to eat. Culture is not frozen but evolving, and we are all part of this evolution,” notes Lukehurst.
That evolution explains contemporary Italian teenagers’ preference for American-style beer over Italian wines. Wine has strong traditional roots in Italy and is unlikely to disappear from Italian menus, but the choices that Italian teens make are affected by cultural influences, including those from American pop culture, says Lukehurst. Italian teens increasingly drink beer in situations where their parents would have drunk wine or water. As the demand for American-style beer expands in Italy, beer companies have moved in to satisfy it. “It may or may not be fair to say that [beer makers] are aggressively pursuing the teen market, but they are definitely ensuring that they meet demand.” It is worth noting, however, that in many European countries millennials and the up-and-coming Generation Z are drinking less alcohol than their parents overall, including beer and wine. “They are not acquiring the taste for alcohol in their teenage years or early twenties and do not feel the same need to drink that we saw in earlier generations,” says Lukehurst.8
In China, something that was once an almost completely alien beverage, coffee, now represents a fast-growing, competitive market.9 Homegrown companies are also aggressively taking on US powerhouses such as Starbucks.10 Likewise, the potato chip market in China, once nonexistent, has grown exponentially in the last twenty years as China’s means of production have become more sophisticated and consumer tastes have broadened.11 Frito-Lay, a major player in China’s chip market, is known for developing unusual flavored chips, often with a regional twist (New England Lobster Roll, Cajun Spice, etc.).12 It’s doing the same thing in China, layering popular flavors onto its chips, including that of durian, a prickly green Southeast Asian fruit.13
In the United States, the most significant restaurant food trends in 2018 included African and Peruvian flavors, uncommon herbs such as lovage and lemon balm, ethnic-inspired breakfast foods such as chorizo scrambled eggs and coconut milk pancakes, and ethnic condiments including sambal, an Indonesian hot sauce, and zhug, a Yemeni cilantro sauce.14 Of course, food producers often alter the flavor profiles of these and other ethnic foods to make them more palatable or accessible to culturally different markets. Those of us who have been to Rome are familiar with the differences between the sauce on the pasta you get in that city and the red sauce on spaghetti you order at an Italian American pizzaria. The food you buy on the streets of Shanghai is quite different from what you would find at a Chinese buffet or takeout in the midwestern United States. However, there are enough markers or codes and recognizable flavor profiles for us to identify these foods by taste for what they are—even if they lack the authenticity of flavor, texture, and appearance. For example, when we see a picture of a chili pepper on a packaged food, we may think immediately that it is spicy or that it might be Mexican inspired. Images of ripe plum tomatoes and pasta suggest we are buying something prepared in Italy.
Information and education also create new desires for different flavors and foods. For example, consumer demand for more natural, organic, and local foods—the farm-to-table movement—has been driven by a deeper understanding of the effects of industrial foods on our bodies and a growing ability to tell the difference between foods that are marketed as “natural” and those that actually taste, look, and feel natural.
How food is processed also has an effect on what flavors we crave. Real or “whole” food consists of proteins, fats, fiber, water, and carbohydrates in varying amounts (although unprocessed animal products have no carbs). When foods are processed, these components are modified or altered in some way: concentrated, increased, or decreased. Foods processed with added sugar and salt can be addictive,15 and food manufacturers know it. They have figured out how to bypass the body’s regulators that tell us when we are full and to stop eating and instead increase desire for mainly sugary and salty foods. This has changed the way we interact with and respond to flavors. Many of us (remember, most of us aren’t “supertasters”) need more of what we identify as sugary and salty tastes16 to satiate our desire for them. And we are often not satiated until we’ve eaten multiple “servings” of a given food—a result of food and flavor manipulation.
Since there has now been a great deal written about how much sugar and salt are added to processed foods, consumers have become more aware that these additions manipulate what foods they crave—and they say they don’t like it. But it also works: the sweetness of foods has increased while other flavors, like bitterness, have almost disappeared.17 Rediscovering taste sensations like bitterness (Campari on the rocks, arugula salad, sautéed rapini) is one more way of awakening our senses and expanding our awareness (and appreciation) of varied taste sensations.
Every one of the ways in which we experience food and flavor, including the assumptions we make about what we eat, how it tastes, and how to react to the experience, is informed by everything I’ve just discussed as well as other factors, such as our mood, the weather, where we happen to be when we get hungry, and even whom we are with.18 Many factors are at play in the process of developing taste, and you should certainly become aware of the most important factors.
What follows are profiles of some food industry entrepreneurs and how they used and applied their individual tastes—and leveraged their particular aesthetics—to launch new companies and transform their marketplaces. Other than being in the food business, these founders have very little in common with one another. Their products are sold through different retail channels and use different marketing strategies. But each has used aesthetic intelligence to differentiate the sensorial experience of their brands. This has to do not just with the actual tastes of foods but with everything that surrounds them—how they evoke memories, ideas, and fantasies powerful enough to register with consumers. Moreover, these entrepreneurs’ aesthetic tastes were based not on common standards of beauty and delight but on original, differentiated, and authentic preferences.
Today you can go to the grocery store, farmers market, or local ice cream parlor and easily find all kinds of bespoke, artisanal, and small-batch ice creams and gelatos packed in charming pint packages with flavors that range from High Road Craft Ice Cream’s Bourbon Burnt Sugar19 to Gelato Fiasco’s Wild Maine Blueberry Crisp20 to Van Leeuwen’s Kalamansi and Melon Sorbet21 to MilkMade’s Pine Needle.22 These companies (and the ones named are but a small example of the entries into the exotic and small-batch ice cream market over the last ten years) have pushed the conventional limits on the normally sweet flavors of ice cream and forced the big players to up their games (even though the big boys still control the frozen dessert market).23 So although Turkey Hill’s Party Cake24 and Breyers’s Butterscotch Blondie25 may not be as exotic as roasted turmeric and candied ginger ice cream26 or rolled Thai ice cream,27 new and maybe even risky flavor combinations from major producers also signal a sea change in the ice cream market.
It wasn’t always that way. There was a time when Häagen-Dazs was the ultimate luxury ice cream brand. Its name sounded (and, thanks to the umlaut, looked) sophisticated and exotic—vaguely Scandinavian—even though it was founded by two Polish immigrants, Rose and Reuben Mattus, in the Bronx.28 Its Vanilla Swiss Almond29 was a rich and creamy escape from the ubiquitous chocolate and strawberry flavors in traditional half-gallon brick containers lined up along the frozen food aisle. Sold only in pints initially, Häagen-Dazs seemed special and indulgent, and it was.
Then, in 1977, along came Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, childhood friends from Long Island, New York, who wanted to start a business. They thought about bagels, but the equipment proved too costly, so they opted for ice cream—in Vermont no less, with its remarkably short summers and long, frigid winters. That year the two friends completed a correspondence course on making ice cream from Pennsylvania State University Creamery (also known as the Berkey Creamery). Since childhood, Ben Cohen had had severe anosmia, meaning he had no sense of smell, so going into the food business presented certain challenges for him.30 In reaction, Cohen has said, he relied on “mouthfeel” and the texture of food to differentiate among various food sensations—and that proved to be pivotal in how the two created flavor profiles for their ice cream.
They didn’t intend to go head-to-head with the big ice cream makers (although the company’s sale to Unilever in 2000 helped secure its status as a major player in the frozen treat market), but the way they differentiated the brand caught on with consumers. Originally a small parlor operating out of a former gas station in Burlington, Vermont, by 1980 the company had rented space in an old bobbin factory in town and started packaging pints and distributing them around New England. By 1984, Häagen-Dazs had taken notice of the upstart and wanted to stop it from encroaching on the Boston market. Ben & Jerry’s had to file suit against its parent company, Pillsbury, not once but twice, in 1984 and again in 1987.31
So why was the ice cream so good—and so disruptive to its competitors? Well, Cohen’s condition prompted him to add big chunks of flavor and color to it. He turned the traditional look, mouthfeel, and taste standards of ice cream upside down by adding unusual ingredients to the base ice cream and by creating unusual combinations of tastes (salty and sweet; superchunky, crunchy, and smooth). The company created textures that were, at the time, unique and gave them unusual names with references to pop culture and political causes. Cherry Garcia, Chunky Monkey, and Triple Caramel Chunk seemed to almost guarantee you were going to have a good time eating the stuff. The package design was (and remains) folksy and hand drawn.
Cohen applied his personal voice to packaging, advertising, marketing, and merchandising through the choice of words, colloquial expressions, and juxtapositions to elicit a fresh and unexpected set of emotions from ice cream consumers. The “homemade” and “made in Vermont” promises also conveyed an idea that has come full circle today—a product that is made by small, local farmers in small batches with whole, high-quality ingredients. Even well after the company was sold to Unilever in the year 2000, the brand still evokes a homespun, kooky feel through its unique flavor descriptions, marketing campaigns, and packaging.
Hamdi Ulukaya’s father was visiting him in upstate New York, where the young Kurdish immigrant was enrolled at SUNY Albany. It was a circuitous route the young man had taken from Turkey, where he had grown up raising sheep and goats on his family’s cheese-making farm.32 But politics were heating up in his homeland, and he felt it was best to go elsewhere. The United States seemed a natural choice.
During one particular visit in the early 2000s, Ulukaya’s father tasted some of the local feta cheese and hadn’t thought it was very good. As a longtime cheese maker, he suggested to Ulukaya and his brother, who had also emigrated to the United States, that they could do better. Perhaps they could start importing high-quality cheese. That idea proved to be expensive and impractical, but Ulukaya was from a cheese-making family. He knew how to make the stuff. Why not use Old Country techniques in the New World? In 2002, he and his brother started their own cheese company under the brand name Euphrates in Johnstown, New York. Within just a couple of years, the company had become a successful small cheese producer.33
Ulukaya wasn’t done yet. He also thought that American yogurt needed help. Thin, watery, and filled with enough sweeteners that it could pass for pudding, conventional American yogurt was far from the fresh yogurt he knew from his childhood. It was also quite different from the yogurt produced in the United States thirty or forty years before, which had been sour and creamy and much closer to what Ulukaya thought of as yogurt. Americans’ taste for sweetness, developed by design, had altered the yogurt market, and Ulukaya wanted to take it back to its roots. In 2005, during an economic downturn in upstate New York, Kraft Foods closed a factory in South Edmeston, New York, about sixty miles away from Johnstown. The fully equipped yogurt factory had been put up for sale. The closure of the factory had been devastating for the town, but the recession also made it possible for Ulukaya to buy it and start making yogurt using the local workforce,34 who were already trained in dairy manufacturing.
Ulukaya used Old World techniques to create a product that was notably thicker, creamier, less sweet, and more sensuous than anything that was on the American market (save any small-batch yogurt you might lucky enough to find at a local farm or farmer’s market). The Greek-style yogurt redefined the yogurt category by introducing a new, thicker texture, offering a more natural (less sweet) flavoring, and featuring images of natural ingredients such as pineapple, mango, and cherries on its clean white container. The brand, Chobani, became one of the most successful food start-ups ever to hit the market, netting more than $1 billion in its first five years of operations.
The story of Daniel Lubetzky, the founder of the fruit and nut snack food Kind, is instructive. The son of a Holocaust survivor, Lubetzky founded Kind in 2004 in an effort to bring more kindness to the world in the form of a healthy snack. The company grew quickly; out of the approximately two thousand products in the nutritional bar category, six of the top ten fastest-selling products are Kind bars. In fact, Kind has become the fastest-growing energy and nutrition bar brand in the United States. In 2017, the world’s biggest snack company, Mars, invested in Kind, valuing the company at $4 billion.
Kind’s success was built in part on Lubetzky’s original mission, to spread kindness—a concept that not only differentiated his brand from more conventional competitors but also helped drive the awareness of and spark meaningful dialogue with consumers. One of the strategies was for company employees to distribute plastic cards meant to reward random acts of kindness. If they saw a person engaged in a kind act, such as giving up a seat on the subway or helping an elderly person cross the street, they would give the do-gooder a card. In turn, Kind sent the Good Samaritans two Kind bars and another card to pay the kindness forward to someone else. The company, which cleverly refers to itself as “not-only-for-profit,” has pledged thousands of dollars to customer-generated projects that give back to communities. But Kind has differentiated itself beyond its marketing messages and tactics. Its packaging is designed for maximum transparency, with its clear plastic wrap, so consumers can see the basic ingredients—chunks of nuts or dried fruit—and can easily imagine the taste and texture of each bar before taking a bite.
Kind was also able to capitalize on Americans’ changing eating habits. That wasn’t just luck on the brand’s part; it was about using aesthetics to increase sensitivity to customer preferences. In the 1990s and early 2000s, energy and nutrition bars were considered a specialty product purchase and were heavily marketed to athletes and dieters. Now a more general customer is looking for healthy, convenient snacks made from real and minimal ingredients, without a lot of preservatives, and transparently labeled. About twenty-seven million more Americans ate health bars in 2013 than did so in 2003. Kind fills their desire by creating a product that uses natural ingredients and then by creating packaging and messaging that reinforces that aesthetic. I don’t believe that Kind bars are much healthier than any other snack bar—they have a lot of sugar in them. But they manage to associate themselves with words that reflect health, such as pure and whole.
Kind looks like what it is made of, and the jeweled configuration of nuts, fruit, and chocolate in the bar is appetizing looking. The bars are filled with ingredients you can both see and pronounce. You have a pretty good idea of what the almonds, cranberries, and chocolate bark are going to taste like before you open the package. That’s the idea behind naming the bars, too—unlike Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, which comes up with funny names that conjure up the counterculture, Kind names its bars simply after their ingredients. If a bar contains apricots and almonds, it is called an “apricot and almond bar,” not “apricot crunch.”35
It is possible to train ourselves to be more mindful of what we eat—or more broadly experience—and how we feel about such sensations and why. The more you are engrossed in an experience, the more aware you will become of the important elements that make an eating experience good or bad. You may eat out quite a bit, but how often do you pay attention to all the details? In my Harvard class, I assigned my students a restaurant review, choosing any restaurant and describing their experience dining there in such a way that a reader who might never eat at the restaurant could experience it vicariously. I encouraged them to focus their write-ups on the elements that were most distinct and notable with as much specificity as possible. My students were surprised by how much more they noticed during the dining experience—what a particular venue was doing right (and wrong)—and how nongustatory stimuli (such as the quality of the lighting, ventilation, and even acoustics) shaped their perception of the food.
In preparing to write the review, I suggested, the students should do what I call a “sensorial audit,” in which they would take a few minutes to immerse themselves in the restaurant environment while jotting down as many sensorial cues as they could. Too often, I noted that the students relied on words, concepts, and narratives to describe their experiences rather than taking the time to feel and embrace their environment and understand the effect that it had on each of their senses and their bodies overall. Only after they had taken inventory of their sensorial responses would they be prepared for the next step: to codify and prioritize the sensorial effects according to their relative impact on the dining experience (both positive and negative) as well as other key factors, such as whether the effects were particularly memorable, distinct, and/or surprising. With clarity about the most powerful drivers behind the experience, they could focus their narrative within the constraints of a one-page paper.
Once they had written the first draft, I directed them to put it down for a day or two or at least a few hours. Coming back to the review, they then should ask themselves whether there was anything that should be added. Had any of their impressions or opinions changed? Was there anything they had noticed in the course of writing the review that they might have missed on previous visits? What did they learn about how and what they noticed when they tuned in to their senses?
Interestingly, less than 10 percent of my students thought to add visual imagery to their reviews. The majority wrote conventional business school reports, with carefully chosen words and well-structured sentences, but lacking in all forms of nontextual communications such as pictures, color swatches or references to color, descriptions of sounds, and so on. In providing feedback, I encouraged them to communicate their experiences using visual tools, perhaps even selecting a particular font to correspond with the restaurant’s ambience or incorporating a photo of the most prominent facet of the restaurant (e.g., the crowd, the space design, or the cuisine). I encouraged the students (and I encourage you, too) to apply this approach, the art of noticing how one sense has an effect on another, in evaluating other aspects of life and business, and in communicating beyond words.
Just as we can expand our aesthetic horizons through attunement to taste, we can do the same with the way we dress and how we cultivate personal style. You may be a person who thinks a lot about what you wear each day, someone who keeps up with trends or creates a “look” that is unique to you. Or you may subscribe to a form-follows-function philosophy, opting for a “uniform” as a way of dressing for ease and convenience (think Steve Jobs’s black mock turtleneck and blue jeans or the late author Tom Wolfe’s iconic white suit). It doesn’t matter what kind of fashion you choose: understanding and learning how to refine your personal style will give you access to broader sensorial knowledge, or AI.