by Dwight Furrow
Does food express emotion? At first glance, most people might quickly answer yes. Good food fills us with joy, bad food is disgusting, and Grandma’s apple pie warms and comforts us. However, these reactions confuse causation with expression. We can see the confusion more clearly if we look at how music can cause emotion. A poorly performed song might make us feel sad but is not expressing sadness. Similarly, I might feel exhilarated listening to Samuel Barber’s serene yet sorrowful Adagio, but the work does not express exhilaration. Bad food might disgust us, but it isn’t expressing disgust, just as great food causes pleasure but doesn’t express it. Expression involves more than causing an effect; it requires communication, revelation, or the conveyance of meaning. Causation is related to expression, but they are not synonymous.
Philosophers have long been skeptical that food can express emotion. Elizabeth Telfer, in her seminal work Food for Thought, argues that while emotions can motivate the preparation of food, food itself cannot express deeply felt emotions. She writes, “…good food can elate us, invigorate us, startle us, excite us, cheer us with a kind of warmth and joy, but cannot shake us fundamentally in that way in which the symptoms are tears or a sensation almost of fear.” Similarly, Frank Sibley, a leading figure in 20th Century aesthetics, argued that flavors and perfumes, unlike major art forms, lack expressive connections to emotions such as love, hate, grief, or joy. According to Sibley, foods’ aesthetic qualities do not have the depth to engage with complex emotional narratives.
This philosophical skepticism seems at odds with everyday experience. Doesn’t Grandma’s apple pie express love? Doesn’t a Thanksgiving turkey communicate gratitude? Doesn’t macaroni and cheese sometimes convey comfort and security? Are philosophers missing something? Science suggests they might be. Research shows systematic connections between food and emotion. The brain’s olfactory bulb, which processes smells, is closely linked to the hippocampus and amygdala, regions governing memory and emotion. There is substantial evidence that the environment in which food is consumed plays a role in memory encoding, making settings and rituals especially evocative.
However, science doesn’t address the worry philosophers have about the nature of expression and whether food can express emotion in the way music or art does. Philosopher Carolyn Korsmeyer, in her book Making Sense of Taste, bridges this gap by explaining how some foods express emotion. For example, chicken soup is a symbol referring to comfort and restored health. But it also refers to its own properties—warmth, familiarity, gentle flavors, and an enveloping, soothing texture. The flavors and textures of the soup convey feelings of nurture and care because they exemplify those feelings—they show what they are trying to say. However, part of this expressiveness depends on the cultural tradition of using chicken soup as a restorative.
Foods often express emotion metaphorically, according to Korsmeyer. Sweet foods can metaphorically exemplify affection, joy, celebration, or prosperity. They obviously don’t literally have these feelings, but they convey them because they are suggested by their tastes or textures. However, these metaphorical associations typically draw on conventional associations and narratives embedded in rituals and ceremonies. Turkey expresses gratitude because of its association with the Thanksgiving celebration. As Korsmeyer points out, without the story of Thanksgiving, turkey is just another heavy meal. It is in virtue of foods’ participation in conventional symbol systems that it has expressive potential.
Korsmeyer’s view marks an advance on earlier dismissals of food’s expressive potential, but it confines expression to conventional contexts and metaphorical exemplification. I argue that food’s expressive role is broader, extending beyond ritualized meanings and metaphorical associations. Marcel Proust’s famous madeleine scene in his novel Remembrance of Things Past illustrates this more expansive expressive capacity. In this scene, the narrator, Marcel, is visiting his family home in the village of Combray. He tastes a madeleine dipped in tea which triggers a flood of involuntary memories and emotions. Initially unable to identify the source of these feelings, as he continues to savor the flavor, fragmented yet vivid images of his childhood come to the surface. This moment in the narrative illustrates how a simple food item can evoke subconscious memories, sensations, and emotions.
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze offers a compelling interpretation of this scene. According to Deleuze, the past is not confined to its original chronological moment but exists in a virtual state, preserved in the unconscious and awaiting activation by a sensory trigger. The taste of the madeleine collapses the distinction between past and present, enabling Marcel to re-experience his childhood through a lens shaped by his current emotions and desires. This act of involuntary memory is not a factual rendering of the past but a creative reinterpretation, a form of expression that reconstructs and reimagines reality.
Thus, the madeleine is not only a metaphor for Combray; it evokes a complex emotional and narrative landscape and catalyzes a profound re-experiencing of time pulling the past into the present and revealing its’ latent emotional and narrative significance. This differs from Korsmeyer’s metaphorical exemplification, as the madeleine’s role is not only symbolic but catalytic. It activates an interpretive process through which latent meanings and emotions are brought to the surface. In this sense, the taste of the madeleine expresses emotion by uncovering hidden connections and generating new insights, much like a work of art.
This understanding of expression also applies to everyday foods. Chicken soup may convey care and security through its warm, gentle properties and its cultural associations. But it can also evoke unexpected emotions, such as the anxiety from the remembered pain of a sore throat or fear of becoming ill again. Similarly, a Thanksgiving turkey might symbolize gratitude, but it could also recall familial tensions or unresolved conflicts from Thanksgivings in the past. These emotions are not confined to conventional meanings but emerge from the interplay of memory, imagination, and interpretation. An apple pie purchased at a bakery may remind you of your grandmother’s version, the aromas that permeated her kitchen, or a particular fall season from your childhood. But it might also evoke complex feelings of ambivalence, resentment, gratitude, and associations with images of other family members, many of which developed long after that remembered childhood. Food, when it provokes memory, pulls the past into an ambiguous present toward an open future that requires interpretation and creative insight.
This is not to deny that the warmth, texture, and flavor of chicken soup expresses feelings of security and being cared for. But chicken soup can exemplify care and security even when it isn’t generating such feelings. Its function as a symbol does not depend on occurrent feelings or emotions. Proust’s madeleine works differently. Although one might argue that the madeleine is a metaphor for the town of Combray since it refers to Combray and is historically and conceptually associated with it, it is also quite literally a sensory trigger—a concrete object that catalyzes Marcel’s memory and imagination. Unlike a purely symbolic metaphor, the madeleine has a functional role in the narrative as an actual experience that evokes Combray, not just an abstract representation of it.
The “Proust phenomenon”—the involuntary memories triggered by sensory experiences—demonstrates food’s capacity for emotional expression and has been widely studied by psychologists in recent years. Food does not merely symbolize emotions; it can reveal hidden dimensions of our past, connect them to the present, and anticipate multiple futures. It acts as both a cause and a medium of expression, bringing latent meanings into the open and creating new emotional landscapes. Like a work of art, food has the power to transform and reinterpret reality, making it a profoundly expressive medium.