Three
PETS, CATTLE, AND HIGHER LIFE FORMS ON TRUE BLOOD
Ariadne Blayde and George A. Dunn
“You know they can hypnotize you,” Tara Thornton warns Sookie Stackhouse, alerting her to one of the dangers of associating with vampires. “Yeah,” Sookie responds sarcastically, “and black people are lazy and Jews have horns.”
1 Sookie rejects intolerance with a wave of her hand, comparing prejudice against vampires with other detestable forms of discrimination, such as racism and anti-Semitism. But as we know, not all of the residents of Bon Temps have such an open-minded attitude. It’s no coincidence that the show is set in the Deep South, where only a few short decades ago the civil rights movement put an end to racial segregation and the disenfranchisement of African American voters, or that the first actual vampire we see on the show is Nan Flanagan, spokesperson for the American Vampire League (AVL), clamoring for equal rights. And, of course, the sign reading “God hates fangs,” which we see in the opening credit sequence, echoes the slogan of the blinkered bigot Fred Phelps, “God hates fags.”
Clearly, when vampires came out of the coffin, they brought with them the seeds of a whole new era of prejudice. Yet the prejudice against vampires is reminiscent of many other forms of intolerance and discrimination with which we’re all too familiar. On the AVL Web site, we even find a letter from Nan addressed to supporters of vampire equality, in which she signs off by explicitly evoking the memory of the civil rights movement with a quote from the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the universe is long. But it bends toward justice.”
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And Justice for All—Human Beings?
Throughout most of the long arc of human history, however, justice has been considered something we owe only to other
human beings. No doubt that’s one of the reasons the AVL has ads stressing how “vampires were people too,” featuring attractive vampires who are in every respect indistinguishable from ordinary human beings. These ads seem to be based on the gambit that if the rest of us can be persuaded that vampires are really just an exotic variety of human being—or at least close enough to be granted honorary human status—then we’ll be more inclined to extend to them
human rights. Although a vampire like Bill Compton’s neighbor Diane would surely sneer at this approach as a case of vampires wanting “to dress up and play human,” it’s not hard to understand why the AVL would adopt this strategy of representing vampires as human, more or less.
3 After all, vampires have been around for a long time, certainly long enough to have noticed that throughout history one of the chief justifications offered for depriving some groups, like women or racial minorities, of their rights is that they are supposedly somehow less than fully human.
We wish we could say that philosophers played no part in this shameful history of denying justice to certain groups deemed subhuman, but that’s not the case. Aristotle (384—322 B.C.E.), for instance, was one of the greatest philosophers of the ancient world—of all time, really—a genius whose thinking has shaped Western civilization in ways too numerous to count. He was also the author of the classical definition of human beings as “the rational animals,” our possession of rational intellects supposedly elevating us above every other species.
4 It was our superior rationality that Aristotle believed gave us the right to exploit all the other animals, who “exist for the sake of man, the tame for use and food, the wild, if not all, at least the greater part of them, for food, and for the provision of various instruments.”
5 Immediately after making this claim, though, Aristotle added that just as we may hunt nonhuman animals, we are equally entitled to “hunt” and enslave other human beings, such as the “barbarians” whom the Greeks regarded as their inferiors. The allegedly defective reasoning abilities of these non-Greek peoples reduced them to the same status as beasts and made them fair game for exploitation. And sadly, Aristotle offered a similar justification for the oppression of women, whom he judged to be wanting in reason, deficient in humanity, and thus naturally subordinate to men.
Notice that in both cases—slaves and women—the argument for denying their rights depended on denying their full humanity and lumping them in with other nonhuman creatures who, in the mind of Aristotle and his successors, existed only to be exploited by full-fledged human beings. Ever since, privileged groups have sought to justify the oppression of women and minorities by claiming that they are somehow less than human. When a Republican activist recently thought it was clever to quip that a gorilla who had escaped from the zoo was an ancestor of our African American first lady, he was only the latest in a long line of racists defending their privileges by insinuating that members of minority groups aren’t quite as human as them.
Aristotle believed that reason set us apart from our fellow creatures, crowning us as their rightful rulers and reducing them to the status of servants and instruments, whom we could use as means for whatever ends we choose. Other philosophers agreed that human beings occupied a unique niche in the order of things that gave us unlimited rights over other creatures, even if some of these philosophers have defined our distinctiveness in terms different from Aristotle’s. Christian philosophers, for example, were drawn to the idea that human beings were created in “the likeness of God.” Because we bear a divine image, we are connected in a special way to God and related to a super-natural or divine reality that transcends the merely natural world. We may be animals, but we’re also somehow
more than animals through our connection to the divine. In the opinion of many Christian philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas (1225—1274), this divine connection invests us with sovereign authority over the rest of the creation. “It matters not how man behaves to animals,” he argued, “because God has subjected all things to man’s power.”
6 Steve Newlin would undoubtedly cheer this sentiment and insist that it applies even more to our relationship with “soulless” creatures like vampires.
Immanuel Kant (1724—1804), one of the greatest philosophers of the modern era, also believed that we had the right to exploit nonhuman animals. And, like many of the religious philosophers who came before him, he believed that we enjoyed that right because we somehow transcended the limits of the natural world to which other creatures were subject. For Kant, however, our transcendence consisted of our
moral autonomy, our not being subject to the tyranny of those instincts and inclinations to which he believed every other creature remained enslaved. We were unique, he believed, in being able to follow the dictates of morality instead. Referring to the value of moral autonomy, he wrote that “morality, and humanity insofar as it is capable of morality, is that which alone has dignity.”
7 As creatures possessing dignity, we’re entitled to be treated with respect, as ends in ourselves whose happiness and well-being ought to matter to others. Anything else, however, is a mere
thing that exists only to be used by human beings as a means to an end. Lacking dignity, these things—including nonhuman animals—possess a different kind of value that’s conditional on the uses we make of them, a value that Kant calls their price.
How Much Is a Vampire Worth?
For centuries popular culture and folklore have featured vampires feeding on human beings, but
True Blood introduces the idea that human beings can exploit vampires as well. Vampire blood, or V, is what Lafayette Reynolds calls “pure, undiluted, 24-karat
life”—which is more than a little ironic given that it comes from the bodies of creatures who are ostensibly dead.
8 But regardless of its source, V has immense power as an aphrodisiac for human beings, stimulating the senses and connecting the user with a deeper, richer, more beautiful reality. Like the fur trade, which destroys animals with no regard for any worth they may have as conscious beings, dealing in V has ethical implications that are questionable to say the least. Because their bodies possess this desirable substance, vampires become a valuable commodity for human beings. When Denise Rattray meets Bill, Sookie telepathically hears her mentally calculate Bill’s monetary
price based on how much blood she and her husband can drain from him: “Holy shit, almost two hundred ounces ... that’s ten thousand dollars, sweet Jesus!” Horrified by what the Rattrays plan to do to this innocent vampire, Sookie is determined to save him. “It’s not like siphoning gas out of a car!” she explains to her brother, Jason.
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Amy Burley thinks otherwise. With Jason’s reluctant assistance, she kidnaps the reclusive, soft-spoken vampire Eddie Gauthier so that she can have a supply of V handy at all times. Eddie is burned with silver, denied nourishment, and chained to a metal chair with silver that prevents him from moving and causes him tremendous pain. For all intents and purposes, this is torture, but it’s not much different from the way millions of animals are treated every day on factory farms, where, like Eddie, they are viewed as mere things whose sole value lies in the monetary value that can be extracted from the tortures they undergo. On factory farms, animals are often confined for most of their lives in crates so small they can’t even turn around. Many of them never see daylight or inhale fresh air; and they are injected with a plethora of chemicals in order to prime them for human consumption.
10 Eddie, like the animals on factory farms, is exploited as a commodity with no regard for his suffering.
How can Amy justify treating Eddie this way? He’s more or less a regular guy—he has hopes and regrets, he feels fear and pain, and he likes to watch Heroes. Recognizing these simple and obvious facts, Jason refuses to continue using him as a means to an end. But to Amy, none of that matters. In her mind, there is one sacrosanct prerequisite to being treated like a valuable individual—being human. No matter how much evidence there may be that Eddie suffers just as greatly as any human being would in the same circumstances, no matter how incontrovertible it is that he regards his existence as no less an end in itself than does any human being, Amy is incapable of seeing him as anything other than a thing to be exploited, a disposable commodity. Why? For no reason other than that he’s a vampire and not a human being.
Although Eddie is clearly a sentient, feeling being, Amy is entirely comfortable torturing him simply because he is not one of her kind. This is a classic example of speciesism, the belief that only members of our own species are entitled to respect or moral consideration. And although there are no vampires to exploit in our society, attitudes and practices similar to Amy’s are common with respect to nonhuman animals.
Vampires as Higher Life Forms
Philosophers such as Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant all imagined a rigid partition running through the natural world. On one side stood human beings, the lone possessors of reason, divine grace, moral autonomy, or some other rare and precious attribute that entitled us to moral consideration. On the other side of the fence were crowded all of the other creatures, an extraordinarily diverse menagerie that included chimpanzees, gorillas, dolphins, donkeys, dogs, elephants, lizards, snakes, catfish, sharks, lobsters, spiders, termites, dragonflies, and sea anemones. Somehow this heterogeneous assortment of creatures was thought to comprise a distinct class separated by a taxonomic abyss from humanity, as though highly intelligent and gregarious chimpanzees and gorillas shared more in common with sea anemones than either shared with human beings, their close biological cousins. Even as evidence accumulates that some of these creatures possess many of the same traits that have traditionally been thought to be the sole preserve of our own species, such as the capacity for language and reason or a sense of fairness, the belief that moral consideration is owed to human beings alone persists.
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Given these attitudes, it’s no surprise that the AVL would want to persuade the world that vampires really are (or were) as human the next guy. The irony is that many—maybe even most—vampires actually regard human beings as lower forms of life ripe for exploitation, not much different from the way Aristotle and others regarded nonhuman species. Vampires may face intolerance and contempt from human beings, but the bad blood runs both ways, as both groups bandy about derogatory terms for each other—vampires may be “fangers,” but human beings are “breathers” and “bloodbags.” Many human beings may see vampires as soulless and morally depraved, but there’s also a strong sentiment among vampires that they are in fact the superior ones. Moreover, they appear to have considerable justification for this view of themselves. For starters, vampires are much stronger and faster than human beings. Bill, for example, destroys the Rattrays’ trailer with the force of a tornado, and he’s always doing that creepy thing where one second he’s across the room and the next thing you know he’s right in your face. But impressive as these abilities are, they wouldn’t be enough to upset the conviction of philosophers like Aristotle, Aquinas, or Kant that human beings are the crown of creation. These philosophers never based that claim on humanity’s physical prowess anyway. After all, much of the animal kingdom clearly has us beat in that department. By and large, philosophers have thought that humanity’s superiority lies elsewhere, in our supposedly unmatched cognitive talents, which afford us a richer experience of the world and maybe even, as many religious thinkers claim, a pipeline to some sort of transcendent reality.
On this view, the more sophisticated the mental equipment the greater the value of the life. For a measure of how prevalent this belief is, consider that even Peter Singer, the philosopher and animal rights advocate who first popularized the term
speciesism, has argued that human lives are worth more than those of other animals, because our richer capacity for experience means that something of greater value is lost when one of us perishes. “It is not arbitrary,” he writes, “to hold that the life of a self-aware being, capable of abstract thought, of planning for the future, of complex acts of communication, and so on, is more valuable than the life of a being without those capacities.”
12 Human superiority, in this view, lies not in our physical abilities but in the quality of our minds.
But here as well vampires leave us in the dirt. They’re not only endowed with extremely heightened senses, but their experience of the world is intense and complex in ways that far surpass anything ordinarily available to our dull and meager human faculties. Sookie discovers this for herself after she drinks Bill’s blood and gains some access to the world as he experiences it. Even a bite of sausage at breakfast becomes a revelatory adventure in which the underlying connectedness of things is experienced as something palpable. “It’s like I can see the farm the pig lived on, and feel the sun and the rain on my face, and even taste the earth that the herbs grew out of,” she reports.
13 One reason V is so popular is that it turns its users on to what they believe is a truer perception of reality, in which everything is experienced as connected and sensation is heightened beyond belief. This experience, which Amy Burley calls “the deepest connection to Gaia,” is, in her opinion, divine. “This is what Holy Communion is symbolic of,” she tells Jason Stackhouse as they dose themselves. “This is the real deal.”
14 If only a drop or two of vampire blood can awaken a human being to an experience of divine transcendence, we can only imagine the everyday experience of vampires with gallons of the stuff coursing through their veins.
In short, the assumption that human beings occupy the highest rung on the great ladder of being is challenged in the world of True Blood by the existence of a species that seems to be superior to us in every way, possibly even in their kinship with the divine. If, as many philosophers have argued, human “dignity” derives from our transcendence of the limitations of “mere nature,” then these immortal, almost godlike beings have us beat in that category as well. In our world, human beings are at the top of the food chain. Our rational abilities have put us far ahead of all the other animals, and for thousands of years we have been the dominant species. But in True Blood, we’re number two. We have to wonder why vampires would seek equality with human beings in the first place. Equality seems like it would be quite a step down.
But perhaps we can still claim a
moral superiority to vampires. After all, according to Kant, it’s not just any old cognitive talent that elevated us above every other creature. It’s our ability to recognize our moral obligations to other rational beings like ourselves and to allow morality, rather than wanton appetites and desires, to guide our conduct. It’s that capacity for moral autonomy that makes us genuine
persons, deserving of respect, as opposed to mere
things that can be treated any which way we please. The Fellowship of the Sun’s wholesale rejection of rights for vampires rests in large part on their belief that whatever else these creatures might be, they certainly aren’t persons capable of moral conduct. The issue comes up when Jason informs Sarah Newlin that he knew a vampire named Eddie whom Jason believed was “a real nice person.” Sarah corrects him. “He wasn’t a person,” she claims, since a person would never do something so foul as feeding on a human being.
15 (As she speaks, she gestures toward Missy, a recovering fang-banger whose neck and chest are dotted with bite marks.) Vampires may have abilities that surpass those of ordinary mortals, but, in Sarah’s view, they lack something vital to personhood, the capacity to exercise moral judgment and restraint. They’re not just inferior; they’re
evil.
But what exactly makes vampires evil? According to Sarah and the Fellowship it’s that they feed on and exploit other creatures whom they, with some justification, regard as inferior beings—the very thing that Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant all agree we human beings are entitled to do, as long as we’re exploiting animals that occupy a rung lower than ours on the ladder of being. The allegedly evil actions of vampires differ not one scintilla from what we ourselves do all the time to our fellow creatures who suffer the misfortune of not being human. If our superiority grants us the right to exploit creatures further down the food chain from ourselves, why shouldn’t vampires enjoy the same privilege?
When Bill stakes Longshadow in order to save Sookie, he commits a serious crime in the eyes of the vampire community, comparable to a human being committing a homicide to protect a nonhuman animal. “You murdered a higher life form for the sake of your pet,” the magister fulminates in a tone of profound moral outrage.
16 Those are not the words of someone who lacks any sense of justice or moral propriety. On the contrary, they express a moral outlook that isn’t significantly different from that of most human beings, except that we prefer to think of the “higher life forms” as ourselves.
Human Pets and Cattle
Most vampires on
True Blood are just as guilty of speciesism as human beings, having no problem treating human beings as a means to an end. Lorena puts it quite succinctly to Bill: “You are vampire. They are
food.”17 On other occasions, vampires describe human beings as animals. “You and your insane affection for stupid cattle,” quips Pam when Bill expresses concern for Jessica.
18 Lorena and Pam are both disdainful of Bill’s insistence on treating humans as equals. “Humans exist to serve us, that is their only value,” says the magister at Bill’s trial, using words that sound suspiciously like the way Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant describe the value of nonhuman animals.
19 And like animals in our society, human beings can serve vampires in one of two ways—as food or as pets.
“I was hoping I could keep you,” Pam tells Lafayette, as if he were a stray puppy, before releasing him from wretched captivity at Fangtasia. “You already have enough pets,” scoffs Eric Northman.
20 The politically correct term for a human being kept by a vampire for food, sex, and company is “human companion,” but to vampires, these human beings are usually little more than playthings to be possessed and exchanged. Vampires tend to think of their human companions in pretty much the same way we regard our pets—as useful, amusing, and even loveable, but never as equals. Ultimately, human beings are
property. “Sookie is mine!” Bill routinely growls anytime another vampire looks at her the wrong way—and this assertion of a proprietary claim usually does this trick, since, as we saw with the magister, vampires do have their own clearly defined sense of justice in their dealings with one another.
Eric presents a threat to Bill because he wants Sookie for himself, seeing her as a special kind of pet whose telepathic skills identify her as a member of a more select “breed” than run-of-the-mill humans. He asks that Bill “give” her to him as though she were a mere object.
21 Sookie is understandably offended by Eric’s suggestion. “He cannot check me out like a library book!” she protests when Bill allows Eric to “borrow” her. “Unfortunately, he can,” Bill explains.
22 Ultimately, Bill is right. Vampires are powerful beings who can exert their dominion over human beings even more easily than we can over nonhuman animals.
Pam calls human beings “pathetic lumps of temporary flesh,” apparently reflecting the attitude of most vampires, who view our species with pity and contempt because of our relatively impoverished experience of life.
23 To turn a human being into a vampire is to give her “the ultimate gift,” freeing her from the unbearable tedium of mortal experience and raising her to a higher level of consciousness. The human experience of the world is so far below that of vampires that many vampires consider human beings to be almost insensate by comparison. “Humans are quite primitive,” says the magister at Bill’s tribunal. “They are incapable of feeling pain as we do”—which is apparently what gives vampires permission to treat human beings however they please without any moral qualms.
24 A similar—and equally unwarranted—skepticism about the reality of animal pain had been used by the philosopher René Descartes (1596—1650) to justify the barbaric practice of vivisection, the dissection of live, unanesthetized animals to study the workings of their internal organs.
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We are right to feel indignant, even outraged, at the magister’s words, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that his attitude is really no different from the way many of us regard nonhuman animals. There’s no question that our rational capacities put us at a level far beyond most other species, and many of us take this to mean that these other animals should be treated as inferior beings with no rights we’re obliged to respect. Some people, such as Descartes, have even convinced themselves that nonhuman animals cannot feel pain or that their experiences are so narrow that killing these beings doesn’t even count as taking a life. Jessica, whom Pam calls a “cow,” is killed as part of a creative punishment designed for Bill, her death considered morally meaningless in itself simply because she’s human. As Jessica pleads for mercy at the hands of a mob of indifferent vampires, we can’t help but feel the injustice of her fate. Why should a vampire get to decide whether Jessica dies, when her life is obviously as precious to her as any vampire’s existence is to him, despite her more “primitive” cognitive and sensory abilities? But to the vampires, Jessica’s death means nothing. It is morally irrelevant because she belongs to an inferior species. And to millions of people around the world, the deaths of nonhuman animals mean nothing for this very same reason.
Our Civic Duty
The AVL prefers to make its case for vampire rights by highlighting how “human” vampires are or at least
were, suggesting that they therefore ought to be granted human rights. But Nan Flanagan’s letter to supporters on the AVL Web site actually describes the aim of her organization in much broader terms, referring to “the passage of landmark legislation guaranteeing a basic set of rights for all sentient beings.”
26 As a qualification for moral consideration, sentience is very different from the possession of rationality, a moral sense, or a deep and rich experience of the world. The latter are all
powers that many believe ought to command our respect when we encounter them in other beings. Sentience, on the other hand, is not only a power but, more importantly, a point of vulnerability, our exposure to the possibility of suffering. To make sentience the criterion for moral consideration amounts to replacing the question “What can you
do that might warrant my respect?” with the question “How might you be
harmed by my actions or neglect?” Or as the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748—1832) put it, referring to our duties to nonhuman animals, “[T]he question is not, Can they
reason? nor, Can they
talk? but, Can they
suffer?”27 If they can suffer, then what I do to them matters. It matters to them, obviously, but it should also matter to me.
When Bill asks Sookie why she came to his aid when the Rattrays were attacking him, she answers simply, “I was doing my civic duty.”
28 Generally speaking, there are two attitudes we can take toward animals and those who are more vulnerable than us—we can exploit their vulnerability and use them to suit our own needs or we can see their vulnerability as a call to protect them from unnecessary harm. Sookie’s attitude toward Bill represents the latter view, Denise and Mack Rattray’s the former. When it comes to the treatment of vulnerable human beings, almost everyone will acknowledge that Sookie’s attitude is more compassionate and virtuous. But is it really our civic duty to protect and respect members of
other species just as Sookie protects Bill? Our response is to turn the question around and ask whether there is any valid reason to
exclude members of other species from moral consideration. Basing their arguments on our species’ supposedly superior cognitive talents and capacity for a high quality of life, many philosophers have tried to make a case for restricting our moral concern to human beings. But
True Blood reveals how self-serving and questionable those arguments really are when it shows vampires reasoning along the same lines to justify the slaughter and exploitation of the species
they regard as inferior—us. True Blood lets us see what it would be like to be a member of an exploited species. In so doing, it asks us to reexamine our prejudices about what constitutes the value of a living creature and perhaps reconsider whether our “civic duties” might reach beyond the boundaries of our own species.
Of course, if we conclude that all creatures, human or otherwise, have some inherent dignity, not just a market price, we then face tough questions about what should go on our dinner plates and in our clothes closets. No one can make those decisions for you. But if Bill Compton can get by on TruBlood, it probably wouldn’t kill any of us to try a veggie burger.
NOTES
1 Episode 101, “Strange Love.”
4 Here’s how the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is reported to have responded to this claim: “It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.”
5 Aristotle,
The Politics and the Constitution of Athens, trans. Stephen Everson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), p. 21 (1256b).
6 Thomas Aquinas,
Summa Theologica, vol. 2, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Allen, TX: Christian Classics), 1981, p. 1080 (II, I, Q. 102, Art. 6).
7 Immanuel Kant,
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), p. 42.
8 Episode 105, “Sparks Fly Out.”
9 Episode 101, “Strange Love.”
10 For a deeply disturbing account of how animals are treated on factory farms, see “Down on the Factory Farm,” chapter 3 of Peter Singer’s
Animal Liberation, updated ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), pp. 95-157.
11 For a philosophical examination of how human language and reason are rooted in cognitive abilities we share with other animals, see Alasdair Maclntyre’s
Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2001), especially pp. 1—61. For an exploration of the origins of human morality in the sense of fairness and empathy displayed by nonhuman primates, see Frans De Waal’s Tanner Lectures,
Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2009).
12 Singer,
Animal Liberation, p. 20.
13 Episode 102, “The First Taste.”
14 Episode 107, “Burning House of Love.”
15 Episode 203, “Scratches.”
16 Episode 110, “I Don’t Wanna Know.”
17 Episode 206, “The Hard-Hearted Hanna.”
18 Episode 111, “To Love Is to Bury.”
19 Episode 110, “I Don’t Wanna Know.”
20 Episode 203, “Scratches.”
21 Episode 112, “You’ll Be the Death of Me.”
22 Episode 108, “The Fourth Man in the Fire.”
23 Episode 111, “To Love Is to Bury.”
25 For René Descartes’ skepticism about animal sensation, see his
Discourse on Method, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998), pp. 32-33; and
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 3: The Correspondence, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 99-100.
27 Jeremy Bentham,
The Principles of Morals and Legislation (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 311.
28 Episode 102, “The First Taste.”