A bout of top down thinking

The argument

An example of the interaction between top down and bottom up processing. In matters of taste, what gets decided by the tongue and what gets decided by the brain?

Setting the scene

Having been laid up with a dose of flu for the last few days, I have been off my tea, something which happens quite often when I am not terribly well. Sometimes even a smell of fish about it during the making, a smell which is sometimes the harbinger of the arrival of illness, before being its accompaniment.

However, noticing that we were getting towards the bottom of the caddy prompted me, for some reason, to inquire into the brand of tea, to learn that it was Clipper, rather than the Yorkshire (of reference 3) we had been using before that. With my understanding being, without having checked, that Clipper was a fair trade operation rather than a tea operation, more Oxfam than PG Tips.

I then decided that not liking the tea was not all down to the flu, some of it was down to not buying tea from a tea shop. As a result of which, I expect that the tea will carry on tasting wrong until I believe myself to be back on the Yorkshire.

At this point a little more background is in order:

• Having held out for longer than most, we have now long abandoned the teapot and make all our tea in mugs, with tea bags. Cups and saucers more or less gone too, although there is the occasional special need
• We do not go in for different kinds of tea for different times of day, different moods or different anything else. Just keep on pulling tea bags out of the caddy in which the ready supply is kept
• We have fussed in the past about the making of the tea, rather than the brand of tea. Worries about unsightly brown scums and hard water. See, for example, reference 1. These are not the concern here.

Brand trumps taste

Taste is a rather odd business, by which I mean the tastes we experience in the mouth, orally. Not the more cerebral business of preferring this coffee table to that, this picture to that or of being good at choosing the curtains for one’s living room – although, in the light of what follows, there is clearly a powerful connection between the two uses of the word.

In evolutionary time, it was clearly useful to be able to distinguish sweet which was generally good for one, from bitter which was apt to be very bad for one. Sugars are sweet while plant poisons (like lethal doses of barbiturates) are apt to be bitter – some plants being quite keen on not being eaten. But things have now moved on and evolutionary imperatives are not the force they once were.

So what difference does it make if one cup of tea does not taste the same as another? Apart from the water, the only active ingredient is the caffeine, so provided one makes the tea of the appropriate strength, there isn’t much else that really matters. So why do we fuss about such stuff so much?
So far, I count four elements to this:

• Dislike of change, certainly in the early part of the day. So one tries to insist on one’s tea tasting the same every time, particularly the first cup of the day, as important as the first fag of the day in the days of youth 
• The control thing, the man in charge thing. I want to be able to have a loud opinion about the right sort of tea. I want to choose my tea in a loud and authoritative way. To make a fuss if my choice is not available. Which particular tea I plump for not being particularly important: it’s being in charge that is important, not the direction of travel
• The status thing. Being able to converse about different sorts of tea confers membership of the celebrity-chef-following-middle-classes club. Gives one an edge over someone who can’t
• The herd thing. Wanting to do what everybody else does. Not wanting to get out of line. With the exception that proves the rule of occasionally making a great parade of stepping out of line for a bit.

And although one might be hard put to say why one tea is better than another, one can at least tell that one tea is different from another, and with a bit of experience you could hold forth about exactly which facet of the tea in hand was not right. In the case of cheese, about which I am better able to waffle, one could say that a real Lincolnshire Poacher has this or that colour, this texture, that sort of rind. One could be genuinely cross if the cheese in question did not exhibit all the right qualities. One knew how one liked this particular sort of cheese to be and one could hold forth on how this particular piece of cheese had the wrong colour, the wrong texture and the wrong sort of holes – all of which is fair enough but does not go far to explain why you like the stuff.

So what we do to put ourselves on a proper footing, is to establish a standard for our tea, a verifiable process for its preparation and take our stand on that standard. We stand ready to make a detailed attack on any particular cup of tea which does not meet that standard.

There can be general agreement about this process in general – although in the days of free-swimming tea leaves there used to be long debates about at what point the milk should be added – and about the importance of the choice of the sort of tea to be used. And the way to cut through this last one is to choose from a well-known brand, possibly a top-of-the-range tea from that brand, and then stick to that choice. I am then content to say that I like this particular tea, without feeling the need to further defend my choice. I am both in the game and ahead of the game; one of the chaps but also one of the leading chaps. This being part of the power of the brand; a reputable brand which can stand alone, it does not need elaborate justification.

So, a hundred years ago, I might have bought the tea sold by Sir Thomas Lipton. His blending team made very sure that the tea that they sold never changed; that is what blending is all about. And if, for some reason, they wanted to change the taste, they did it slowly, so that their customers never noticed. Perhaps his marketing team also arranged things so that you thought that you were buying into his lifestyle.

So then, when I drank my tea, my brain understood that the tea was from Liptons and all was well with the world. It could deal smoothly with most complaints from the tongue department. A bit of top down control: the tea actually did taste OK because the brain had already so decided and used to kick the upstream processes in the mouth into line. And we were conscious of no fix, we were not kidding ourselves; we were just conscious of the satisfactory taste of the tea.

And we didn’t mind paying Lipton to keep it all so. We didn’t mind the fact that a good chunk of what we were buying was actually the fancy yachts he was so keen on, for example ‘Shamrock III’, handsomely illustrated above. Just the sort of flashy outside activity that successful entrepreneurs of our own times like to go in for.

A brand which survived until my childhood, when we still had a branch of his grocery on the corner of the market square in Cambridge, a place where I sometimes used to buy the family cheese, in the days when pretty much all cheese was hard yellow stuff. Unless I have muddled him up with the International Stores – another tea outfit of yesteryear? What is now a large red-brick-with-fancy-stone-trim building of a hundred or more years old with Optical Express at the bottom. I don’t remember the building just yet, so perhaps memory defective, yet again. See gmaps 52.205182, 0.119452. But perhaps by this time tomorrow, today’s image of the building will have been assimilated to today’s rather limited memories of shopping there.

While Lipton’s tea is just the name of one of the many Unilever brands. Sir Thomas long gone.

Facts

I have now, after the event, taken a look at the Clipper website at reference 4, from which it seems that, once again, I have not got things quite right. Not exactly an Oxfam operation, but a supplier of teas for the healthy-orgo-veggie market, a supplier now owned by the same large, main stream people as own the peanut butter which was the subject of the post at reference 5. Just another brand name. But the fact that they were bought up suggests that while they may not one of the biggest players in the tea world, they have done quite well from a standing start in 1984. Well enough for the founders to take the money and retire into the sun; no more beans or tea leaves for them!

Conclusion

All of this has been triggered by a change of taste consequent on illness. A change which might or might not be regarded as a top-down process, but that is not the concern here.

What is of concern is that the re-evaluation of matters tea tasting which followed, clearly did involve a mixture of top-down and bottom-up processing. With the conclusion being that while the tongue is pretty good at telling us whether one taste is the same as another, we need the brain to tell us whether to like a taste or not.

I note in passing that the vagaries of choice suggested in the foregoing are just the sort of thing that procurement people try to work out of their processes. Not the sort of foibles one wants reflected in one’s purchase of a battle tank or anything much else. See, for example, reference 6.

PS: if you are keen on boats, you can go for a ride on one of ‘Shamrock III’s successors, ‘Shamrock V’. See reference 2, complete with the companion, atmospheric trailer on YouTube.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/kitchen-life.html.

Reference 2: http://shamrockv.com/.

Reference 3: https://www.yorkshiretea.co.uk/.

Reference 4: http://www.clipper-teas.com/.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/nuts.html.

Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/the-choice-model.html.