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The arguments were over human taste and had little to do with the bulldog. Hence the problem of trying to lay out, in a written standard, an animal's looks or essence. The judging organizations are well aware of the problems of standards, their guidebooks filled with cautionary advice. As a preface to the Cat Fanciers' Association show guidelines booklet declares, “
The standard does not describe a living cat. It is an artistic ideal that is never completely attained.”

Consider the Persian cat, one of the most striking examples of what happens when the shifting prerogatives of human taste are combined with the necessary vagaries of breed standards. The Persian is the Ur-animal in the fancy world. It was a Persian that took top honors at the Crystal Palace in 1871 at the first cat show. Queen Victoria herself owned a pair of blue Persians. One famous Persian, a chinchilla called Silver Lambkin, had an obituary in
The New York Times
(“
in every country where cats are bred his progeny holds a leading position”). His remains are stored to this day in the British Museum.

But those Persians would not have been recognizable in Paris. To look at a Persian from the last century and one of today is to barely register the same animal. As Moormann told me, the whole cat had become “cobbier,” cat-world talk for stocky. Its face is flatter, its nose much shortened, the whole package often squished into a small area, like an owl.
It is not the image most of us would picture if asked to draw a cat. The worst of the lot, the so-called brachycephalic cats, are, as the
Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery
admonishes, a “
bastardisation of all the things that make cats special.” Remarkably, these are not birth defects or aberrations but attributes that have been carefully selected throughout for generations of cats. And as much as the Persian has “undergone some remarkable changes,” as Moormann wrote, the
“written standard has not changed much over time.”

So what happened? How did the cat in the flesh change so much more than the cat on paper? Talk to judges, and they struggle to explain it. “There are subtle changes,” Vickie Fisher, the president of the International Cat Association, told me. “There's always this debate
over whether breeders are leading the change, or is it what the judges are picking that leads to change?” Back when she was breeding Maine coons, “there were some cats that had come out with extremely tall ears. The standard says that the Maine coon is supposed to have a large ear.” What is large? Ears are not measured to the millimeter. So big kept getting subtly bigger. Judges call it “overtyping”—taking a few characteristics of a breed to their extreme, to the detriment of the overall cat. Breeders can suffer “cattery blindness”; so enamored are they of their own cats that they fail to see how far they have strayed from the standard.

But if the standards per se were not encouraging the new-look Persians, what was?
Was it their childlike, “Lorenzian” cuteness? Perhaps it was Lieberson's “ratchet effect” at work—an accidental mutation taking on a life of its own as a change in taste. Perhaps it was simple novelty. Louise Engberg, a Danish breeder of “traditional Persians,” suggests that as these cats began to appear in show halls in force in the 1980s, “suddenly everyone wanted one.” The fact that they were winning prizes, she says, implies that the “judges must have made quite a radical jump in the way they judge cats.”

But cat breeds can change dramatically in a few generations. Why such radical change in a few decades, after a century of relative stasis? It could have been the continued influx of new breeds entering the show halls; the more breeds, Engberg told me, “the more people will say we need to distinguish our breeds compared to the others.” As Vickie Fisher told me, the movement of people toward short-nosed Persians was not “something they do on purpose to hurt the cat. They just kind of keep going. They don't pull back.”

In the language of Tversky, the anchor has shifted. The cat with the smushed face gradually becomes the “referent” against which other cats are judged. The first Persian with the shorter nose catches the eye of a judge and wins a prize; another breeder selects for a slightly shorter nose. The more the judges see of the new Persian, the more they get used to it, the more it no longer seems the new Persian.

Ironically, Persians have plummeted in popularity in recent years, as if all that extreme typing were too much a fleeting fashion trend. “A few years ago, at shows, 70 percent of cats were Persian,” Moormann told me in Paris. “Now they are only perhaps 30 percent.” Why? “It's the zeitgeist, what's in the mind. People didn't want to have this
artificial thing anymore; they want to have more natural-looking cats.” Persians, with their grooming regimens, among other things, are, in Fisher's words, “not for the faint of heart.” One exception to this trend toward more natural cats, Moormann pointed out, is Russia. “In Russia, they love bold cats with strange ears or short legs. Very eccentric cats, not average. Because in Soviet times it was all average.”

When I suggested to him that some of the cats, to my eyes at least, seem to have gravitated hopelessly far from those first enterprising mousers in the granary—far beyond the dictates of natural selection—he shrugged and said, “But what do you think about models in the fashion world? The gaps between the legs, where the upper leg is as thin as the lower leg. Do they look natural?”

The problems of standards are not limited to the excitable and noisome arenas of the animal fancy. Consider, for example, the seemingly sleepier world of soil judging. Admit it, you probably did not know there was a “world of soil judging.” But soil judging is a common, and important, exercise used to assess the characteristics and quality of soil anytime it is used in great measure: to determine if a roadbed is sufficiently strong or if an agricultural plot is best for wheat or barley. At the collegiate level, there are teams, coaches, and even a national championship for soil judging; Virginia Tech and Kansas State University are the perennial powerhouses. A touch regrettably, to my mind, the contest is not known as the Dirt Bowl.

As James Shanteau, a retired professor of psychology at Kansas State University who has studied soil judges, among other types of experts, described it to me, sending soil samples to a national laboratory to be analyzed by machines is expensive and time-consuming. So a soil judge is brought in. Typically, the judge employs what is colloquially known as the “feel method”—sifting through the soil, patting it in his palm, spreading it around with water. The judge is trying to place it on the so-called soil triangle, a categorization of twelve soil types. Some judges, taking the concept of
terroir
to its limit, will actually put the soil in their mouths. “Not to taste it,” Shanteau told me, “so much as to work it with their tongue and teeth, to feel for clay and sand.”

You might similarly have seen a judge perusing an animal at a county fair and wondered just what he was looking at. The answer:
a lot. Previous studies of experts have noted that their decisions were made on the basis of one to six “dimensions” of information. Shanteau's research has found that livestock judges assessing gilts, or female pigs, use some
eleven
dimensions of information about the pigs, ranging from “ham thickness” to “freeness of gait.” Crucially, unlike novices, they also know what information to leave
out
. And all this in a muddy ring of fidgety pigs. An attempt to create a computer model to mimic what judges do was foiled because, as he put it, “those damn pigs wouldn't hold still.”

This is not to say judges are not prone to biases or irrelevant information. Shanteau was told by one livestock judge that certain judges seemed to like a curly tail on a pig. “Does a curly tail matter?” he asked. “He said, ‘It just looks like what some people imagine a pig should look like.' ” Some judges, he noted, admitted to finding “cuteness” in certain pigs. This brings to mind Edmund Burke's contention, in his essay, “Of the Sublime,” that mere “fitness” is not sufficient for beauty. “
On that principle,” he wrote, “the wedge-like snout of a swine, with its tough cartilage at the end, the little sunk eyes, and the whole make of the head, so well adapted to its offices of digging and rooting, would be extremely beautiful.”

While livestock judging, unlike the animal fancy, is theoretically not prone to shifts in taste—this is food, not fashion—the standard of the ideal pig has in fact shifted over the years as a result of human preferences. People now prefer much leaner pigs (to eat). The fattier hams seen in Shanteau's 1970s study are, as he put it, now “out of date,”
just as certain notions of desirable human shapes, as depicted in magazines, have fallen from favor over the years.

What makes a good judge? Confidence, for one. An expert, in Shanteau's view, is someone good at convincing others he or she is an expert. Good judges may make small errors, but they will “generally avoid large mistakes.” When they encounter exceptions, experts are good at making “single-case deviations in their decision patterns.” Novices, meanwhile, tend to stubbornly stick to rules, even when they are inappropriate.

The most important skill of a good judge, Shanteau told me, is extracting information. This, rather than some sage discriminatory ability, is the key to judging. Shanteau found that when novice judges were given detailed information about an animal, their judgments were
virtually as good as the experts'. “The difference,” he noted, “was that expert livestock judges could see patterns of information that novices could not.”

As a simple example, I remember the astonishment I felt the first time a graphic designer pointed out to me the “vector,” or arrow, in the FedEx logo (between the
E
and the
x
). I had never noticed it before; now I never fail to notice it. Was it always there, in my subconscious, making me think of the swiftness of FedEx? If an expert designer were to look at the logo, he could certainly tell me many things about its design, each broken down into established categories: the kerning (the space between the letters), the weight, the strokes.

We categorize things to help shape the world, but those categories in turn shape us; experts judge by criteria, but experts can, in effect, be judged
by
the criteria. The more we know, the more we categorize things; the more we can categorize things, the more we will know. The way an expert judge is different from you and me is that he sees and organizes the world—at least his particular part of it—differently.

Most of us operate most of the time at a fundamental threshold of abstraction that psychologists term the “basic level.” When we perceive something, we tend to use these basic-level categories:
That store has a friendly cat. Did you see how fast that car was going? Would you like a glass of the red or the white?
But when you show a picture of a bird to the average person and then to an enthusiastic birder and ask them to identify it, chances are you will get two different answers: “a bird” and “a black-capped chickadee.” The birder has gone to a “subordinate level” of classification. A judge would take this even further, examining the quality of the various points.

It is striking just how ingrained this way of looking at the world is.
As the psychologists James Tanaka and Marjorie Taylor have shown, experts, in their area of expertise, do not seem to dwell much at the basic level. They can access subordinate knowledge
as fast as
basic categories. Veteran birders, for example, would know as many things that distinguished crows from robins as they would the things separating birds from dogs, and they could more quickly tell you a picture of a robin is not a sparrow than they can tell you it is not a
dog
.

Seeing the world informs their knowledge (and vice versa). But it is not enough. They need to talk about it.

Quick, what does a carrot taste like?

Admit it, you probably had a hard time describing it. You might say it has a “bright” taste, though brightness per se is not an actual taste sensation. “Crunchy” might have crossed your mind, but that refers to texture. The color orange probably popped into your head. Again, this has nothing to do with its actual taste (and some carrots, of course, are not orange). You might say “vegetal,” which could also describe many dozens of other…
vegetables
.

In the end, you may simply declare that it tastes “carroty” (and, just to reiterate the lessons of chapter 1, the
flavor
is carroty, not the taste—which is simply some proportion of sweet, salty, and so on). But this is not necessarily a cause for shame. For when one looks at the results of a number of studies in which expert panelists, trained in the sensory evaluation of carrots, have been asked to identify flavor attributes of carrots, sitting prominently on the list is
carroty
.

Sure, they go a bit better, adding descriptors like “piney” or “earthy” or “cloves.”
But even trained experts cannot seem to get around the idea that a carrot tastes like a carrot.

We have trouble talking about taste. Long before this was on the minds of people in the food industry, it vexed philosophers like John Locke. In his early
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
, after first noting how many smells “want names,” he notes, “
Nor are the different tastes, that by our palates we receive ideas of, much better provided with names. Sweet, bitter, sour, harsh and salt are almost all of the epithets we have to denominate that numberless variety of relishes.”

At least some of this paucity, the historian of science Steven Shapin has argued, stems from the low regard with which taste was historically held. Taste was less an avenue for refined understanding of the pleasures of food than a mechanism for ensuring that what one was eating was palatable and safe.