by Dwight Furrow
One longstanding debate in aesthetics concerns the relative virtues of formalism vs. contextualism. This debate, which preoccupied art theorists in the 20th Century, now rages in the culinary world of the 21st Century. Roughly, the controversy is about whether a work of art is best appreciated by attending to its sensory properties and their organization or should we focus on its meaning and the social, historical, or psychological context of its production. The debate is similar in the world of cuisine. How best should we appreciate the food or beverages we consume? Should we focus solely on the flavors and aromas or does authenticity and social context matter?
Formalists argue that works of art are fundamentally vehicles for sensory experience. In painting, the arrangement of lines, shapes, and colors are the primary source of aesthetic pleasure. In music it is harmonic structure, timbre, and the arrangement of musical themes and variations that matters. Narrative, depiction, meaning, and historical context may be interesting but are superfluous to genuine aesthetic value and tend to distract us from the sensory properties which constitute the essence of a work, so claim the formalists.
Diners, chefs, and critics who think that flavor is primary and questions about the origins of food and its authenticity are secondary seem to be channeling the formalist argument.
By contrast, contextualism places great emphasis on the fact that a work is created and appreciated at a particular time and place and by particular individuals. Facts about the social and historical context of a work are essential to it, not merely contingent features. According to contextualists, works lack clear meanings and determinate aesthetic properties when the conditions under which they are created and experienced are not the focal point of attention.
The discourse around food appreciation has taken a decidedly contextualist turn. We are enjoined to know where our food comes from, to eat locally, and to pay attention to how animals are treated and crops are sown. Most importantly, authenticity matters. It is a concern for authenticity that motivates us to seek out hole-in-the-wall ramen counters, to go out of our way to make Italian dishes only from ingredients purchased from Italian grocery shops, to seek out only recipes that are true to the way they were made in the old country. If someone’s grandmother isn’t part of a dish’s history, it just isn’t as good. Of course, traditions have always been important in the food world but many in the world of cuisine have self-consciously adopted contextualism as a set of prescriptive, normative standards.
How is this debate in the food world to be decided?
Formalism in the arts was especially popular in the early 20th Century when abstraction in both painting and “serious” music was the dominant trend. But when philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto pointed out that Andy Warhol’s work Brillo Boxes is perceptually identical to a similarly arranged stack of Brillo boxes in a cleaning supply store, formalism seemed to have no retort. What made Warhol’s Brillo Boxes a work of art and the stack of boxes in the store a stack of boxes in the store had to do with the context of their respective creations. Warhol’s creation was intended to be a work of art and displayed in an art museum. The boxes in the store were created with a different intention.
Truth be told, formalism was never an adequate theory of art in general although it captured what was important about some modernist works. After all it was never very plausible to think that the artistic merits of Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding had everything to do with color and line and nothing to do with the fact it depicted a country wedding. More tellingly, should we discover that the Van Gogh painting we deeply admire was in fact an excellent forgery, would we not conclude the painting had lost some of its aesthetic value, despite the fact that our sensory experience of the original and the copy would be identical?
Contextualists of course grant that the perceivable properties of works give us access to their meaning. But they argue that those perceivable properties are the product of historically situated individuals working within genres and traditions, and those contextual factors constitute the meaning of the work. Forms detached from traditions, genres, or historical context cannot convey meaning.
Formalism’s travails created the conditions for the emergence of contextualism as a rival theory, and contextualism seems to have won this argument in the art world. Similar points might be made about cuisine. The discourse around food is almost always preoccupied with origins—it’s the stories behind food and beverage production that drive discourse. Dishes and bottles of wine are not merely patterns of flavors and textures organized to create pleasure but the product of communities with their own norms and histories. The flavors of home have special resonance because of their origin and history.
The formalist’s view of what is important in a work of art is no doubt impoverished. Art as well as cuisine is more interesting and important when viewed as a product of historically situated persons with intentions, thoughts, and feelings and who are communicating about a subject matter. Thus, given the role that traditions and familiarity play in food, formalism would seem not be a good fit for gastronomy.
However, as reasonable as this defense of contextualism sounds, it misses something crucial. Contextualism fails to explain a central feature of our aesthetic lives—there are countless instances of aesthetic experience that really are accessible via direct sensation, and we can enjoy them without knowledge of the context of the works production or its social function. In general, people are quite capable of profoundly enjoying a musical composition or painting without knowing the artist, following the score, or having a clue about how, when, or where it was produced. A walk through an art gallery or museum while ignoring the information videos and wall placards can be an invigorating experience as we respond to the works at a visceral level.
This is certainly true as well in the world of cuisine. Should I discover that the South Indian curry dish I adore at my local Indian restaurant was invented last month by their Korean chef I would find it no less tasty. For lovers of pasta carbonara, long thought to be an ancient recipe, does it really matter that it was invented in 1944 to serve Americans during WWII?
For the most part, the flavors and textures of food are available to us regardless of what beliefs we hold about them. Knowledge of how a dish is made may help us identify hard-to-discern flavors or direct our attention to various aspects of a dish that might otherwise pass unnoticed, but the flavors and textures are available to be experienced as long as our taste mechanisms are in good order. In other words, lack of knowledge about the significance of a dish, its social meaning, or conditions of production does not make its flavors inaccessible.
Of course, whether we enjoy them or not is a more complicated matter. One might be disturbed by cultural appropriation and wish to avoid the inappropriate adoption of products from another culture. Knowledge about a producer or beliefs about the historical accuracy of a recipe might enhance our enjoyment of a meal. Moral beliefs about the food we eat often influence our enjoyment of it. Some vegetarians dislike the taste of meat because of their beliefs about the treatment of animals. But in the absence of special moral reasons to dislike certain foods, the flavors and textures themselves are sufficient to provide a memorable aesthetic experience.
The problem with formalism was that its proponents were too extreme, insisting that only the formal features of a work are aesthetically meaningful. But contextualism has similar tendencies toward extremism when it discounts the possibility that perceptual experience alone can be deeply meaningful. A more moderate position would grant the importance of historical meanings as well as psychological and social conditions in making a work intelligible while arguing that there is, nevertheless, a distinctive domain of valuable aesthetic experiences based largely on sensory responses that can be had independently of these features.
In the realm of cuisine, we can be cognizant of authenticity when a dish or meal demands it while acknowledging that, in many situations, authenticity is beside the point. As with many philosophical debates, adherence to an ideology tends to limit our experience rather than enhance it. Both formalism and contextualism, when pushed to the extreme, make aesthetic experience less than what it could be.