In a documentary about Tonga, the kingdom in the South Pacific, a doctor says to the camera: «When people here eat the healthy food from our islands, sweet potato or taro, they count as poor. When they eat bread and imported meat from a tin, they count as rich.»

What stayed with me was not the sweet potatoes. It was the words «count as». Nobody in Tonga is poor because he eats taro. He counts as poor, and that is decided by others. In Zurich you count as something too. At the Gambrinus on Langstrasse, for instance, every table has Aromat and Maggi on it, the Swiss seasoning salt and the liquid seasoning, as it has for fifty years. In Zurich that has become a confession. Not to a taste, but to a class. The man who sprinkles Aromat on his fried egg does not have a different palate from the guest on the Zürichberg or the right shore of the lake who sprinkles his egg with fleur de sel. Seen from the Zürichberg, however, he has a different education.

At first I thought the sentence could simply be mirrored. In Tonga the imported is the expensive thing, with us it is the local, the farm shop, the small wheel of alpine cheese. Something like that. Then I remembered where Aromat comes from. From Thayngen, canton of Schaffhausen. And Maggi was invented in Kemptthal, a few minutes from Winterthur, where I run a place myself, and a quarter of an hour from Zurich. The fleur de sel, on the other hand, comes from Brittany. The doctor's sentence does not need mirroring at all. Here it applies word for word. What is ours makes you poor, what has come from afar makes you rich, and not because it tastes better, but because it has travelled further.

Though even that only counts as such. Knorr was a German company from the start, Maggi seasoning has come from Singen for over a hundred years, and Aromat is just now passing to an American corporation. The tin and the bottle on the Beiz table are no more native than the fleur de sel. They merely count as such, and that is enough to look poor with. What lies on the plate says less about how it tastes than about who you are. Food is a set of papers, and like all papers it is not read by the owner but by whoever checks them.

So the question is not whether Aromat is good. The question is who does the checking.

The first checkpoint is the guide. Michelin, Gault Millau, the toques, the points, the stars. An inspector eats before the guest eats, and the guest learns the verdict before lifting the fork. That is practical, and it was once honestly meant: a travel guide for people who do not know where to go in a strange city. Only the direction has turned around. Today the star does not stand at the end of an evening, it stands at the beginning. You taste what you are supposed to taste, and whoever does not taste it doubts himself sooner than the guide. I have seen guests in a starred restaurant praise the plate before it was on the table, and others in a village Beiz chew suspiciously because there was no sign hanging anywhere. Both had read beforehand. Both were eating second-hand.

The second checkpoint is the coverage. It grades less often than the guide, it tells stories. Regional, seasonal, nose to tail, fermented, the new pop-up in the old warehouse. What food journalism delivers is less a verdict than a vocabulary, and the vocabulary is the real thing. Whoever knows the words belongs. Whoever says «umami» at the table has shown his papers. Whoever says «it tasted good» has none. That the two might mean the same thing does not occur in the language. The guest at the Gambrinus has no vocabulary for what he eats. He has only the plate. In Zurich that makes him suspect, and in Tonga it would make him poor.

This does not work only with food. I recently had a chat in which the person opposite me held a position and typed three things by way of justification: the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the latest scientific studies, and that the Weltwoche, a weekly, practised agenda journalism. No argument of his own. No experience. Not one sentence beginning with «I have seen» or «I think». Only names one does not question, and one that one does not mention. Yet I had not invoked any of these papers, the Weltwoche included. I had only said what I myself had experienced, and what I made of it. That was all it was, and I claimed no more. When I then qualified my position, because I wanted to keep the conversation open, that got a name too: semantic retreat. It was the same gesture as the «umami» at the table. Whoever has the word no longer has to chew. There is then a label for everything, even for the other side's willingness to meet you halfway, and with the label the conversation is over. Whether the Neue Zürcher Zeitung was right and the Weltwoche was not was never the question. The question was who the empathy belonged to: the one human being I had told about, or the opinion you can read up anywhere. The person opposite me had chosen the opinion, and the human being no longer appeared in the chat.

The third checkpoint is new, and it is the most interesting, because it no longer needs any authority. No inspector, no editorial office, no name. Four point three stars, eleven hundred reviews, submitted by people nobody knows. Strictly speaking, that is democratic. Everyone has a vote, and the majority decides whether a house is good. The guest reads the result before ordering, and once he has eaten, he adds his vote. Nobody eats first any more.

You see him every day in the Niederdorf, the visitor with Tripadvisor open, walking through the lanes without looking left or right. The Beiz he passes smells of onions, and inside someone is laughing. He does not see it. He sees four point one and walks on to four point six. That the number comes from people he will never meet does not trouble him. There are many of them, that is enough. Doubt does not occur. Nor does his own experience, which would in the end be only one more vote.

You might think the old hierarchy had thereby been toppled, the star from Paris replaced by the judgement of the many. The opposite has happened. You can contradict an authority, it is even proper to do so. You do not contradict a majority, you are then simply wrong. And the majority is stricter than any inspector, because it never knocks off work. The inspector comes once a year. The reviewers come every evening, and they write down what they have learnt to see. Paper napkins. Aromat on the table. A landlord who does not ask whether it tasted good.

The astonishing thing is how little of all this has to do with the evening itself. An evening in a Beiz is more than the plate. It is the light, the room, the couple at the next table, the way you are greeted and the way you leave. What you take home from it was always half projection, and that is not the problem. Everyone brings his hunger, his mood, his history in with him. The problem is where the other half comes from. Whether it comes from yourself, honest and unguarded, or whether it was chewed for you before you opened the door. I have been in this trade long enough to know that Aromat on a fried egg does one particular thing and fleur de sel another. Both are taste. Both can be liked. Only one of them has papers and the other does not, and the papers are not issued in the kitchen. They are issued in editorial offices, in inspectors' reports and in the comment fields of people who photograph the plate before they touch it.

The doctor from Tonga said his sentence as a doctor. The imported meat from the tin makes people ill, the sweet potato does not, and he knows that better than anyone on the islands. But the sentence reaches further than medicine. It says that people know what would be good for them and still eat the other thing, because the other thing says something about them. Papers are worth more than a plate. That holds in Nuku'alofa, and it holds on Langstrasse, except that there we mistake the papers for taste and therefore do not notice that we are showing them.

The Beiz once had a quality that is easily forgotten. You did not have to know anything there. You sat down, you ordered, you ate, and whether it tasted good you decided yourself, at the table, without a reference book. The Gambrinus has kept this quality, perhaps out of inertia, perhaps out of defiance. The guest at the Gambrinus tastes. The guest from the Zürichberg tastes what he is supposed to taste. Which of the two is the poorer cannot be decided by the plate. Only by the papers.

At the end, the doctor in the film shrugged. It was the gesture of a man who knows that his sentence is right and will change nothing. I wrote it down anyway. Not because it holds for Tonga. Because it holds everywhere.