Everything Is Miscellaneous is in some ways — but not ways that we’ll talk about publicly because we want to sell some copies — about the thorough death of Essentialism, the ancient (and continuing) idea that some special (and possibly eternal) property of a thing defines it. Essentialism has the advantage that it enables taxonomies: If the essence of a screw is that it’s threaded with a slot at the top (but the exact width of the threads is not essential), then it’s clear what property you’re going to use to place screws in your Taxonomy of Things. Essentialism captures something important about how we understand our world, since we want to call a mouth a mouth even if it has no teeth but don’t really want to call it a mouth if it has no opening. But, there are ways to account for that without having to say that there is a natural Essence of Mouth. Our world is more miscellaneous than classical Essentialism admits.

But, Michael Ruhlman makes a good point in The Soul of a Chef. While rhapsodizing about Thomas Keller, the chef at The French Laundry, Ruhlman says that when you eat his food, you have the sense that for the first time you know what the ingredients taste like: His carrot soup shows you what carrots taste like. It shows you the essence of carrots.

Taste is one of the places where we naturally (?) fall into talk about essences. In fact, we even create concentrated versions of some foods and call them the “essence of ____.” We don’t need a full-blown Platonic theory of essences to accommodate this proclivity. Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory works just fine: The sweet, tart and juicy taste of this apple is a prototype of what an apple should taste like. But we’ll still use talk of an essence to pare down the flavors and hues that are not prototypical. That’s not what an essentialist has in mind, but it is a “natural” and perhaps inevitable use of essences. [Tags: essentialism everything_is_miscellaneous prototypes cooking taxonomy]

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