by Dwight Furrow
In philosophical debates about the aesthetic potential of cuisine, one central topic has been the degree to which smell and taste give us rich and structured information about the nature of reality. Aesthetic appreciation involves reflection on the meaning and significance of an aesthetic object such as a painting or musical work. Part of that appreciation is the apprehension of the work’s form or structure—it is often the form of the object that we find beautiful or otherwise compelling. Although we get pleasure from consuming good food and drink, if smell and taste give us no structured representation of reality there is no form to apprehend or meaning to analyze, so the argument goes. The enjoyment of cuisine then would be akin to that of basking in the sun. It is pleasant to be sure but there is nothing to apprehend or analyze beyond an immediate sensation.
Those who are skeptical of food and drink as serious aesthetic objects base their arguments on the claim that taste and smell are inferior to vision and audition in providing us with representations of reality. Those who defend the aesthetic potential of food and drink attempt to show that food and drink do provide us with structured representations of the world.
A representation is a mental state, such as a belief, that stands for, refers to, or depicts something else, such as an object in the world. In perceptual experience, a representation specifies the way the world appears to a subject having the experience. Vision is the perceptual modality that arguably gives us the richest representation of reality. To see an apple is to locate it in space individuated from but in relation to other objects in our visual field. And that ability to locate objects is facilitated by assigning properties such as roundness and redness to the apple which appear, not as free-floating properties, but as properties bound to the object. The representation is veridical when the world is in fact as it appears in the representation.
Thus, vision does not present us with a heterogeneous heap of properties; rather properties are part of structured wholes with objects appearing as solid, individuated entities. Vision then is enormously helpful to us as we navigate through the world because it represents the spatial relations between things as well as their boundaries.
Many philosophers have argued that tastes and aromas lack essential elements of a representation. Aromas especially lack the structure of solid, individuated objects as well as a precise location in space. Instead, aromas blend and merge in ways that preclude individuation, repeated object recognition, and re-identification which are all functions of an adequate representation of an object.
Furthermore, aromas aren’t necessarily bound to the object that emits them. They are often utterly disconnected from their source. The fish odor hanging in the air may be from a fish long ago consumed. Thus, it is probably more accurate to say that the object of olfactory experience is a cloud of air molecules rather than an ordinary, physical entity.
Finally, unlike visual objects, aromas are alleged to lack hidden aspects or profiles that differ depending on point of view. With vision, I can tell that an object is three dimensional even if it has surfaces that are hidden from view. Aromas, it is alleged, lack this feature of having hidden dimensions.
The upshot of this analysis of olfactory experience is that it lacks the kind of structure or complexity that makes standard aesthetic experiences possible. Because much of what we think of as flavor is really aroma, the absence of aromatic representational structure precludes taking cuisine seriously as a serious aesthetic object or art form.
There is an obvious flaw in this argument. It is implausible to argue that taste and olfaction tell us nothing about the world. In fact, both sensory modalities have evolved to enable us to identify what is safe and nutritious to eat, and olfaction warns us about dangers in the environment that are not visible—you might smell smoke long before you see it. Clearly taste and olfaction get something right about the world.
Furthermore, the view that we form no olfactory representations assumes that for a sensory mechanism to be representational it must form representations on its own. But why assume that? We know our senses work together and that many representations are multimodal representations. The fact that vision helps us locate aromatic objects in space does not entail that aroma lacks all representational content.
But these considerations aside, the claim that olfaction lacks the kind of structure and complexity that would enable deep and rich aesthetic experiences is simply false. In fact, the practice of wine tasting demonstrates why it is false.
Wine tasting among professionals, as well as among wine lovers with sufficient experience and expertise, involves the apprehension of various dimensions of a wine’s aromatic structure. Temporal structure is perhaps the most important dimension. Wines change over time while in the barrel when being aged, in the bottle while being stored, as well as in the glass or decanter as a wine is consumed. Wine tasters distinguish between primary, secondary, and tertiary aromas which roughly correspond respectively to fruit-derived aromas, fermentation-derived aromas, and aromas that come from aging. And these aromas tend to be emitted at different parts of the wine’s temporal structure. Their position in that structure influences how the aromas are perceived.
For example, a quality wine should reveal new dimensions over the course of an evening as it is exposed to air. A wine that fails to “open up” and reveal more secondary and tertiary aromas is perceived as lacking quality. Furthermore, the character of the primary aromas is shaped by the particular secondary and tertiary aromas to which they are bound as well as when they appear in this temporal structure. This is no accident. Winemaking processes are designed to develop this temporal structure, and the practice of wine tasting involves apprehending this temporal structure and drawing conclusions about wine quality from it.
In addition to temporal structure, wine also displays spatial structure. In describing a wine, tasters will often point out that some aromas appear to lurk behind other aromas thus exhibiting the phenomenon of occlusion that skeptics have argued aromas lack. Wines are also described as having layers of aromas that create a sense of depth, and some aromas are full and round, others thin or angular—all of these are spatial concepts. Furthermore, contra the skeptics, wine aromas display aspects—a wine might be described as fruit forward but tinged with an earthy quality or have powerful, intense herbal notes that share space with a delicate floral aspect.
Granted one might argue these spatial descriptions are metaphorical. But the fact that a structure is best described using metaphor does not mean it doesn’t exist as even a cursory understanding of literature would show.
Thus, wine aromas have temporal and spatial structure, and this structure will change depending on the variety of grape the wine is made from, the geographical source of the grapes, and the techniques of production employed in viticulture and winemaking. This aromatic structure creates expectations that wine tasters use to evaluate what is in their glass. The sense of surprise when a wine does not conform to expectations is one source of wines’ aesthetic appeal.
As to the claim that a wine’s aromatic structure requires vision to help it form rich representations, assessments of a wine’s aromatic structure are often conducted via blind tasting in which the taster is prevented from knowing the producer, grape variety, or region from which the wine hails. In other words, the representation of the wine is formed using almost exclusively olfaction (and retronasal olfaction) as the means of identifying and assessing the aromatic properties of wine. Very little can be known about a wine from its visual appearance except its color, which is an unreliable guide to aromatic quality.
Furthermore, wine tasters understand these aromatic properties to be properties of the wine itself rather than properties of a cloud of air molecules. Tasters use aromatic structure to draw inferences about how the grapes were grown and processed into a physical object—ultimately the wine in the bottle. In other words, they are constructing a representation of an object using primarily aroma and flavor that are understood as features of the object. However, this point seems to apply only to expert wine tasters who are concerned to demonstrate that the aromas they are experiencing are really in the wine. Questions about whether the winemaker succeeded in making a balanced and complex wine and what was done in the winemaking process that explains that success or failure underwrite the task of grasping the wine as an independent object. However, this kind of analysis requires expertise that casual wine consumers lack.
The conclusion to draw from this is that it is false that aromas lack sufficient structure to provide a foundation for rich and structured aesthetic experiences.
However, the example of wine tasting by itself doesn’t quite get us to a more general conclusion regarding the aesthetic potential of cuisine. The fact that one must undergo considerable training and experience to acquire expertise in wine tasting shows that our “natural,” uneducated, aromatic representations are indeed weak, and the obstacles to forming robust representations of smell are formidable.
So where does that leave aesthetic appreciation? If considerable expertise is required to recognize and appreciate aromatic form and structure, then genuine aesthetic experiences of food and beverages are available only to those with extensive training. This would make cuisine unlike painting or music of which genuine aesthetic experiences are presumably available to an untrained audience.
Furthermore, even after acquiring expertise in wine tasting, our representations of aroma are relatively weak. Olfaction is a “chemical sense” relying on volatile molecules that have been released from substances and that enter a gaseous state. Thus, compared to vision and audition, aromas are short-lived and ephemeral. As a result, they are difficult to distinguish and identify and hard to remember. Biologically there is a good deal of individual variation in our ability to detect aromas, and aromas are deeply affected by minor differences in molecular configuration as well as environmental conditions, which means that as representations they lack the constancy of objects encountered in our visual field.
Training, experience, and the kind of community-wide pedagogical regime we find in wine tasting can mitigate some of this ephemerality giving us a descriptive vocabulary and set of practices that can reinforce our ability to identify and remember aromas. But even in the upper echelons of wine tasting ability, mastery is tenuous and subject to repeated failure. Blind tasting is humbling even for experts.
The problem of weak aromatic representations is even worse with respect to cuisine because it is more complex than wine. Wine is a single product consisting of one or sometimes two main ingredients—fermented grape juice sometimes influenced by oak barrels—that is often tasted in isolation from other products, especially when rigorous description and evaluation are required. By contrast, dishes and meals consist of multiple products with complex chemical interactions that result from the processes of cooking and eating. Although wine is complex—it is estimated there are 800-1000 distinct aromatic compounds that can be found in wine—the number of aromatic compounds that can be found in global cuisines is exponentially higher with virtually an infinite number of possible combinations. Yet, there is no established, community-wide practice of a tasting regime in cuisine as we have in wine tasting. Neither does such a pedagogy seem possible given the fact there doesn’t appear to be a global similarity space that enables all aromas to be distributed in a hierarchy analogous to color or harmonic structure.
Thus, those who argue that taste and aroma lack sufficient structure to ground aesthetic judgments are mistaken. The correct view is that taste and aroma have prohibitively complex, ephemeral structures for which we lack a pedagogy that can reliably reveal them. It may be that the most talented chefs possess such skill but there is, at this point, no widely disseminated, shared social practice for the development of that skill. (See Flavorama by Arielle Johnson for one attempt to develop such a practice.)
Such is one of the challenges in developing an art of cuisine.
However, my argument has been based on a fundamental assumption that should be questioned. We began with the assumption, advanced by critics of cuisine as a serious aesthetic pursuit, that aesthetic appreciation is anchored in accurate perceptual representations. There are reasons to think this is at best an incomplete account of aesthetic experience.
To be continued…