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. Read more »
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.