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Welcome to Back of the Napkin, musings from Serviette for the cultured world. They say (in a taste exposure study) that 10-15 encounters with a novel food can increase liking and consumption. Doth it be time to consume our greens?
The most reliable way to expand our taste is to spend time with things that do not immediately reward us. Pleasure, when it arrives too quickly, has a way of leaving just as fast. This is not unrelated to the fact that we now live in an attention economy. The winners are whatever can arrest us in three seconds or less. Sonic earworms, formulaic books, films engineered for immediate comprehension—easy to grasp, easy to swallow. (A cultural Happy Meal, toys included.)
Around the rollout of her album Lux—which moves across 14 languages—Rosalía remarked, “the more we are in the era of dopamine, the more I want the opposite,” describing a desire to make work that asks for sustained attention rather than instant reward.
Susan Sontag made a similar case decades earlier. For her, difficulty in art was not a failure of communication, nor an elitist posture, but a form of self-defense. Modern culture, she argued, rushes too quickly toward interpretation—toward pinning a work down into a message. Difficulty interrupts that reflex, insisting that we feel something before we explain it.
Taste, after all, is not built through ease. It is built through difficulty. In the 1960s, psychologist Robert Zajonc demonstrated what later became known as the mere exposure effect—the idea that repeated encounters with something initially unfamiliar or even unpleasant tend to produce preference over time. What resists us at first is frequently what teaches us how to look, listen, or taste more carefully. What will you challenge yourself with next?
As Serviette gets deeper into our exploration of taste, we’re increasingly interested in restoring a little resistance to the experience. If it doesn’t feel easy to comprehend at first, that may just be the point. Should this resonate, or even irritate in a productive way, forward it to a friend who still believes taste is something worth working at.