Leadership Quote by James Beard

Beard’s joke works because it turns the darkest taboo into a pantry problem. Cannibalism isn’t framed as moral collapse; it’s framed as a question of seasoning. That inversion is classic Beard: the man who helped professionalize American food writing also insisted that taste, pleasure, and craft deserved the same seriousness we reserve for “important” subjects. By dragging something unspeakable into the realm of kitchen practicality, he punctures polite pretension and exposes how easily sophistication can become a mask.

The specific intent is comic, but not random. Tarragon is a telling choice: a French-leaning herb with a distinctive anise bite, emblematic of mid-century aspirational cooking. Beard is winking at the era’s gourmet boom, when Americans were learning to perform cosmopolitanism with herbs, sauces, and the right vocabulary. The line suggests that, given sufficient culinary finesse, even horror could be made palatable - a satire of both foodie confidence and the human ability to rationalize anything once it’s presented as technique.

Subtextually, it’s also a manifesto against sanctimony. Beard often wrote about food as a democratic pleasure, suspicious of snobbery but fluent in its codes. Here he weaponizes that fluency: the refinement is so extreme it becomes grotesque. The laugh catches in your throat because it’s not only about taste; it’s about the slippery ethics of appetite, and how culture teaches us to aestheticize experience until the substance disappears under the garnish.