Public Displays, Private Gestures, Design Thinking, Doing the Work, and Deconstructing Taste

This week’s favorite stories about food, wine, and culture

The Salt is my weekly curated collection of essays, articles, and marginalia at the intersection of wine, food, and culture.

All the Little People, 2021, oil on canvas, 36" x 36"

Do the work of noticing

In The End of Taste as Currency, art director Zoë Yasemin laments how “Taste, in 2026, has become almost entirely performative.” When we recapitulate the same cultural artifacts across myriad forms of production—ads, Instagram stories, Pinterest mood boards—the effect is to empty them entirely of their original significance. They get hollowed out, transformed into recursive patterns of themselves, which we re-absorb and regurgitate performatively without pausing to evaluate their meanings to us personally. As a consequence, “The subcultures that gave taste its texture, the small scenes where references travelled slowly and meant something specific to the people inside them, have been collapsed into a single global pool where everything surfaces at once.” The antidote is actually straightforward: Do the work. Notice what clicks. Trust your discernment. Build your sense of taste the way it’s long been done: slowly but inexorably.

Doing the work of noticing

Clothing designer Ken Sakata shares one of his techniques for doing that work. He carries a film camera on his peregrinations around his new home city, Tokyo. The medium limits him to thirty-six shots a week, and once the film’s back he’s got a suite of images that constitute a subconscious mood board. He’s purposely not making photographs; instead “the idea is to be spontaneous, random, impulsive.” He summarizes these ideas further in another Note on his theories of subconscious design. An example: he noticed he’d captured many images of solitary men caught in private reverie as the busy cityscape whorled around them. These images made him think about what happens when we carry our private selves into public spheres, both physical and digital, and the pressure we all feel now “to be online, transparent, and palatable to a mass audience.” And that made him think about how his clothing designs can grant some privacy back to their wearers: adding details only available to them: interior pockets, hidden zippers, sensual hardware that feels good when a wearer clicks it closed. “None of this will translate on photo or video. It’s only for the person wearing it.” And none of this would have emerged had he not done that work of noticing and letting his mind go to work on the results.

Village in Mist, 2021, oil on canvas, 30" x 40"

Noticing what you’re not supposed to

Alya Abourezk, an exhibition designer at the Guggenheim, has taken to Substack with Object Labels, inviting readers behind the velvet cordons and temporary walls to see the machinery of the museum at work. In The Anatomy of an Exhibition, she diagrams (literally) every facet of an exhibit, from floor plan and traffic flow to placement, lighting, wall color, pedestals, vitrines, platforms, wall text, and more. It runs to almost four thousand words, heavily illustrated, and she finishes, breathless, realizing, “I ended nearly every section with some version of: I have so much more to say about this, but I’ll save it for another post. So let’s just say… there is plenty more where this came from, and I am so excited about it.” You’ll never look at an exhibit the same way again.

Hello, mini-tini

In The New Yorker, Hannah Goldfield writes about so-called intentional drinking, the rise of the half-sized cocktail, and drinks lists ordered by ABV. We’re in a “very honest” moment, one bar owner tells her, where patrons are aware of the wellness claims against alcohol but don’t want to give up on the ritual. Goldfield feels this. “Not long ago, after a civilized mezcal tasting left me with an earth-shattering migraine, I considered giving up alcohol entirely,” she writes. “The prospect filled me with surprising sadness. I was more attached than I realized, not only to the way that a cocktail makes me feel—chatty, sentimental, hopeful, expansive—but also to the sensual and ritualistic aspects of drinking. I appreciate the beauty and the gravitas of the drinkware and the bar tools, and the sense that there is a right time for the right drink: an austere gin-and-tonic to be nursed after work, a pour of sweet, earthy amaro following dessert, eggnog spiked with rum at Christmas. Drinking is rooted in tradition—it’s no accident that every generation since Hemingway’s has revived the Martini—but it’s also thrillingly captive to personal preference: for me, one Martini is not enough, two is too many, and three half sizes is just right, with plenty of olives to line the stomach.”

Incoming, 2021, oil on canvas, 36" x 36"

Good food writing is only partly about food

—as evidenced in this New York Times piece by Matt Goulding that’s nominally about pasta and ultimately not about pasta. Goulding and videographer Sam Youkilis traveled to Sardinia to document one of Italy’s rarest pastas, su filindeu, “threads of God.” The dough is hand-stretched and turned eight times to make a skein of 256 strands that get mounted on a rack for air drying. Only a handful of people remain who can make it. “It’s not a recipe that can be read and recreated by enterprising cooks in kitchens abroad,” he writes. “[T]he technique must be felt in the flesh, learned through repetition and error until the fingertips know the difference between just right and just wrong.” Yet its significance is inestimable to local culture, served at the annual feast welcoming Christian pilgrims who have trekked overnight through the mountainous terrain to reach the church of San Francesco di Lula. “For three centuries, the pasta and the pilgrimage have been inexorably connected,” Goulding says. “The power of the pilgrimage is found in the balance between solitude and community, sacrifice and hospitality, pain and pleasure.”

Expert ≠ Elitist

I attended college in the mid-1980s, and even at my so-called elite university the anti-intellectualist foment was so prevalent you could practically declare it as a major. Every generation thinks it’s the first in history to be subjected to elitist tropes, and popular backlash generally runs in one of two directions. Healthy communities decide the problem is behavioral and shrug it off, acknowledging the history while pursuing their own aesthetics to create novel cultural moments. And thank god. Unhealthy communities decide the problem is structural and the only remedy is to demolish all intellectual hierarchies, especially those rooted in longstanding tradition. That latter impetus is destructive rather than creative, and depending on scale, erases inestimably valuable aspects of the original. Expertise is not necessarily elitist; it’s only elitist when it’s performed to belittle rather than elevate. And so we arrive at the current hand-wringing about elitism in wine, and the conversation about how to get twenty-somethings to tune into the category. Bodhi Landa offers a characteristically clear-eyed take. “In an effort to appear democratic, parts of the industry now speak to younger consumers as though they are incapable of seriousness altogether,” he writes. “Expertise gets apologized for before it is even expressed.” The remedy is not to flatten complexity but to celebrate it, and hospitality plays a key role. “The best sommeliers I know understand this intuitively. They do not dumb wine down, nor do they perform expertise like a dominance ritual. They create permeability. They make it possible for people to move upward into greater fluency without pretending the fluency itself is meaningless.” Thirst for complexity is part of what makes us human. Stay thirsty.

See you next week.

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Images ©2026 Meg Maker