Interesting. This article and the book it reviews are expansive in their investigation of the determinants of taste, but I’ve been thinking over the last few years that aesthetics are probably more socially determined than I’d thought. Does that mean everyone in the same house will have the same tastes? Not necessarily. But it does mean what you judge as good or bad will be connected, probably inseparably, to some social group’s understanding (‘your people.’)
If you connect tastes to groups of people rather than to preferences in the characteristics of something, it follows that taste will have trends (as people have generations), that will tastes differ from one city to another, etc., which is what we observe.
In a lot of forums and imageboards[1] people definitely always have the "same taste", unless the forum is huge.
[1] From what I can remember, 4chan's music board users have their own "accepted" artists, though a smaller group of users go against them and choose to listen to more obscure, random music (I used to fall into this category—I was a silly 17 year old). But in general, you can assume a frequent users know and likes a set of albums.
Reddit might be the same, but the general subreddits are too large and the smaller ones are well, focused on a specific genre.
>Somewhere in America, there is a college professor who will never buy a Prius. The outlier is not extraneous to the type; the outlier is essential to the type.
sniff and theez iz the essence of the Hegelian dialectic, and so on and so on...
It's not accidental. See "The Tastemakers"[1], about food trends and how they're manipulated. Then there's the woman who introduced and named kiwi fruit.[2] Also passionfruit, spaghetti squash, starfruit, rambutan, tamarind, cherimoya and sunchokes. She runs a big produce distributor.
For fashion, this clip from The Devil Wears Prada says it best.[3]
The Color Association of the United States doesn't have the clout it used to, because brands have moved to China, but for years, they orchestrated the consumer electronics cycle from grey to black to white to off-white and back to grey again.
Frieda Caplan did not name all of the fruits you listed. Most of those are names dating from centuries ago. The article you linked says that she marketed them in the US, but I’m not sure how successfully; a lot of those fruits are predominantly sold in various “ethnic” markets, and are not especially well known or relevant in mainstream American culture.
If you connect tastes to groups of people rather than to preferences in the characteristics of something, it follows that taste will have trends (as people have generations), that will tastes differ from one city to another, etc., which is what we observe.