by Dwight Furrow
It is a curious legacy of philosophy that the tongue, the organ of speech, has been treated as the dumbest of the senses. Taste, in the classical Western canon, has for centuries carried the stigma of being base, ephemeral, and merely pleasurable. In other words, unserious. Beauty, it was argued, resides in the eternal, the intelligible, the contemplative. Food, which disappears as it delights, seemed to offer nothing of enduring aesthetic value. Yet today, as gastronomy increasingly is being treated as an aesthetic experience, we must re-evaluate those assumptions.
The aesthetics of food, far from being a gourmand’s indulgence, confronts some of the oldest and most durable hierarchies of Western thought, especially the tendency to privilege vision over the other senses. At its core are five questions, each a provocation: Can food be art? What constitutes an aesthetic experience of eating? Are there criteria for aesthetic judgment in cuisine? How are our tastes shaped by culture and identity? And what happens when we step outside the West and reframe the premises of aesthetic theory?
Is Food Art?
If food pleases the senses, moves us emotionally, and its composition requires skill and creativity, why not call it art? Well, the ghosts of Plato, Kant, and Hegel hover over our plates even today. For Plato, food was mired in the appetitive soul, a distraction from the real essences of things which could only be recognized by the intellect. Kant dismissed gustatory pleasure as a mere “judgment of the agreeable,” lacking the disinterestedness and universality that marked true aesthetic judgment. And Hegel, in his consummate disdain, excluded food from art on the grounds that it perishes in consumption.
But these historical arguments can’t accommodate recent developments in cuisine. Contemporary, creative cuisine, after all, exemplifies many hallmarks of artistic practice: aesthetic intention, technical virtuosity, formal innovation, and even thematic expression. When Ferran Adrià designs a deconstructed tortilla or a moss-covered dessert, he is not merely feeding; he is composing.
Nevertheless, many contemporary philosophers argue that food lacks representational content. It cannot stand for an idea in the way painting or poetry can. But this assumes that representation is the sine qua non of art. Must a flavor depict in order to delight? Instrumental music and abstract painting can be art despite their limited capacity to represent or tell stories. And so the skeptics retreat to the position that food cannot express emotion as a melancholy cello concerto might move us to tears. At the turn of the 21st Century, Carolyn Korsemeyer, set aside many of these objections to food as art by persuasively arguing that if we view food as a robust system of symbols, food is capable of both representation and emotional expression, although she contends, controversially, that food depends too much on ceremonial contexts or personal and cultural narratives to qualify as a fine art.
Perhaps the better approach is not to ask whether food “is” art, as though art were a fixed category, but to inquire how culinary practices function artistically. Some meals are more like concerts, some like folk tales, some like improvisational jazz. The range is vast, and the aesthetic modalities multiple. The point is not to treat food as something belonging in a museum but to understand it on its own sensuous, perishable terms.
Eating as Aesthetic Experience
The mouth is a site of encounter no less refined than the eye or ear. Eating is a temporally extended, multisensory engagement that synthesizes taste, aroma, texture, temperature, color, and sound—a choreography of the senses. And when approached with attention, restraint, and a degree of wonder, it can become a model of aesthetic absorption.
John Dewey, in Art as Experience, argued that aesthetic experience arises from continuity, development, and fulfillment—an experience that has a rhythm, a structure, and a resolution. A well-designed meal, with its arc of courses and interplay of sensations, can match this structure. We linger, anticipate, are surprised, and are sated.
Yet critics, echoing Kant, object: how can we be disinterested about that which we literally desire, hunger for? But this is a straw man. No one demands disembodiment to appreciate a sculpture. In practice, tasters do bracket appetite, especially in contexts of aesthetic eating—tastings, chef’s menus, or ceremonial meals are not catering to famished diners but to people who are looking for a different sort of satisfaction where hunger recedes and attention rises. As anyone familiar with 12-course tasting menus knows, hunger has departed long before the end of the meal. The act of savoring suspends the utilitarian function of food. We eat not to live but to perceive.
Is There a Standard of Taste?
The phrase “matter of taste” often functions as a conversation stopper. It suggests that taste is subjective and not up for debate. But aesthetic judgments about food or beverages are not pure whimsy. David Hume, in his essay on the standard of taste, argued that with experience and delicacy of sentiment, one can cultivate discernment. The trained palate, like the trained ear, learns to distinguish balance from excess, harmony from muddle.
In the culinary world, there are shared criteria—not fixed laws, but evolving conventions. Balance, contrast, vividness, clarity, complexity, appropriateness, creativity, and unity are among the criteria we use to assess food. A great dish might be judged by its interplay of sweetness and acid, its progression of textures, and its narrative arc. These are not reducible to chemistry or cultural preference but are aesthetic norms negotiated within communities of practice. There are of course individual differences. Cilantro tastes like soap to some people, like nectar to others. No standard can erase the physiological and cultural dimensions of taste. But this does not invalidate aesthetic judgment; it situates it. We might say that taste, like language, is a system of differences. It is not universal, but it can be shared across individuals and cultures. Disagreements are legion but no more so than the agreements.
Culture, Identity, and the Politics of Taste
Food is not just flavor; it is flavor shaped by history, memory, migration, and identity. Thus, aesthetics can never be wholly divorced from ethics. The valorization of authenticity, making fetishes of “exotic cuisines,” and the appropriation of culinary traditions by dominant cultures all raise questions about the politics of aesthetic value. When Western chefs elevate street foods into fine dining while ignoring the communities that created them, aesthetic innovation shades into aesthetic injustice. Who gets to be called a culinary artist? Who gets a Michelin star, and who gets called “ethnic”?
And the gendering of culinary labor haunts aesthetic discourse. Historically, home cooking has been feminized and devalued and is rarely celebrated as art. Meanwhile the male chef in the white jacket ascends the cultural hierarchy, although increasingly women such as Dominique Crenn are being recognized for culinary excellence. Feminist food aesthetics insists that we recognize the aesthetic importance of everyday cooking, the aesthetic labor of care. As dedicated home cooks know, it takes practical creativity to balance the competing demands of busy schedules, available ingredients, and shifting, opaque preferences of family members.
Non-Western Frameworks:
Although the Western aesthetic tradition has long been suspicious of food as aesthetic object, that view is not universal. The Chinese tradition in aesthetics embraces color, aroma, and taste as co-equal elements of beauty. And the Japanese tea ceremony embraces the preparation and presentation of tea as a ritual of attentiveness that embodies the aesthetic principle of wabi sabi. Indian rasa theory, while developed for the arts, takes “flavor” as its central metaphor, collapsing the distance between the aesthetic and the edible.
These traditions offer alternative models—not as exotic supplements to Western thought, but as full aesthetic philosophies in their own right. They remind us that taste need not be subordinate to vision or reason. That the perishable can be profound. That the artful is not always monumental.
A Pluralist Aesthetics of Eating
To take food seriously as an object of aesthetic inquiry is not to inflate its importance. It acknowledges that beauty is not limited to what is durable or unchanging. Neither must it be appreciated only with disinterest and be capable of representation. A plate of food when thoughtfully composed and savored offers structure, meaning, and connection as well as pleasure. An aesthetics of food must be pluralist and porous, accounting for the sensuous, the symbolic, and the social. It must embrace the contingency of taste while defending the intelligibility of judgment. It must move between tradition and innovation, between the table and the theory.
In the end, to savor food aesthetically is to engage the world not just with our mouths but with our minds. It is to say, without irony, that taste matters. Not because it is the highest art, but because it is distinctive in its everyday aesthetic resonance: ephemeral, embodied, and capable, in the right moment, of becoming something worth contemplating—a small, perishable sublime.