Good Taste

"Good Taste" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in a limited edition book of the same name by Apocalypse Press in 1976.[1] It subsequently appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction (Fall 1977)[2] and in the 1983 collection The Winds of Change and Other Stories.

Plot summary

Chawker Minor returns from his 'Grand Tour', including a visit to Earth, to his home on Gammer, one of several artificial satellites orbiting the Moon. The introverted society of Gammer specialises in artificial computer-designed food flavourings much in demand in Earth, to the point of shunning "natural" food grown in "dirt", and Chawker is inspired to enter the annual competition for flavouring, using something new and radical.

Despite the disapproval of his parents and elder brother, Chawker Minor does design a new flavouring which wins the competition. Asked by the Grand Master, who can taste and analyse flavourings to the smallest detail, to explain his successful and intriguing entry, he reveals that he has not used artificial computer-designed molecules, but an actual raw ingredient, garlic, maintaining that no assemblage of molecules may duplicate the complexity of a living organism.

The Grand Master, and all Gammer society, are revolted by this breach of good taste. Chawker Minor is disavowed by all and exiled from his home.

Relationship to other works

This story has links to three of Asimov's works, and ties together with the history of the Spacers. The Orbital Habitat, Gammer (a corruption of the Greek letter Gamma), is one of "51 Colonies" making up an O'Neill Halo in Earth Space. More of the society of the colonies is explored in "The Nations in Space."

The 51 Colonies are imagined to be independent but united, a space borne analogy of the United States of America. Not only this, but the emergent Spacers on the colonies are engaging in technology and lifestyle changes that mark them afterwards – dependency on Robots, use of Micro-foods, and an enhanced immune system.

The colonies later engage in interstellar exploration, and retain an antipathy for Earth and its ways; this is explored in Nemesis and the Robot series.

The mastery of microfoods, explored in this story, becomes the mainstay of the survivors of the Spacers, when they settle in Mycogen on Trantor (Prelude to Foundation).

gollark: ```Structured Markup Processing Tools html — HyperText Markup Language support html.parser — Simple HTML and XHTML parser html.entities — Definitions of HTML general entities XML Processing Modules xml.etree.ElementTree — The ElementTree XML API xml.dom — The Document Object Model API xml.dom.minidom — Minimal DOM implementation xml.dom.pulldom — Support for building partial DOM trees xml.sax — Support for SAX2 parsers xml.sax.handler — Base classes for SAX handlers xml.sax.saxutils — SAX Utilities xml.sax.xmlreader — Interface for XML parsers xml.parsers.expat — Fast XML parsing using Expat```... why.
gollark: There is no perfect language.
gollark: ```Internet Data Handling email — An email and MIME handling package json — JSON encoder and decoder mailcap — Mailcap file handling mailbox — Manipulate mailboxes in various formats mimetypes — Map filenames to MIME types base64 — Base16, Base32, Base64, Base85 Data Encodings binhex — Encode and decode binhex4 files binascii — Convert between binary and ASCII quopri — Encode and decode MIME quoted-printable data uu — Encode and decode uuencode files```Mostly should be libraries outside of the python core, and why are they not under file formats?
gollark: ```Concurrent Execution threading — Thread-based parallelism multiprocessing — Process-based parallelism The concurrent package concurrent.futures — Launching parallel tasks subprocess — Subprocess management sched — Event scheduler queue — A synchronized queue class _thread — Low-level threading API _dummy_thread — Drop-in replacement for the _thread module dummy_threading — Drop-in replacement for the threading module```Not THAT bad, since they mostly do different things.
gollark: Right beside each other.

References
  1. ISFDb
  2. ISFDb
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