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. Read more »

by Dwight Furrow

Is there such a thing as tasting expertise that, if mastered, would help us enjoy a dish or a meal? It isn’t obvious such expertise has been identified.

The most prominent model of tasting expertise is derived from the practice of wine tasting and has been extended to the assessment of cheese, coffee, chocolate, beer, spirits, and a variety of other products. These products are notably complex and exhibit flavors and aromas that are difficult to detect yet important to the quality of the product. The aim of expert tasters is to break the taste object into its component flavors, aromas, and textures so each element can be clearly identified and named with the help of flavor wheels that sort these flavors into categories. The expertise required for such analytic tasting is one of discernment—identifying hidden aromas or flavors that untrained tasters might miss. Analytic tasting is useful for assessing products, identifying the origin of a product, or training one’s ability to discern flavors. However, analytic tasting pays only cursory attention to how flavors and textures are then knit together to form a coherent whole.

By contrast, typical diners when enjoying a dish or meal are less interested in identifying hidden aromas or flavors and more interested in whether the elements fit together coherently. The enjoyment of complex dishes, as well as several dishes served as part of a meal, involves tasting relations between multiple taste objects rather than discrete, individual taste objects. But what kind of relations are we tasting? Part/whole relations would be the obvious type. For a dish or meal to be aesthetically successful, ingredients and flavors must be perceived as being fully integrated parts of a coherent whole.

In aesthetics, this relationship between whole and parts has traditionally been understood in terms of organic unity. Read more »

by Dwight Furrow

In a previous post, I began to articulate a conception of gastronomic pleasure loosely based on Aristotle’s view that pleasure is the natural culmination of unimpeded activity. I make use of such an ancient theory because it strikes me as true that when we exercise fundamental human capacities, and that activity proceeds without impediments or obstacles, we experience pleasure. When we don’t get pleasure from activities that engage basic human capacities, it’s because we’re not very good at them or some obstacle to completion was put in our way.

Eating, and its component activity tasting, is one such exercise of basic capacities that naturally aims at pleasure when the food is good, the company is right, and one’s sensory mechanisms are functioning properly. Tasting involves the basic skill of pattern recognition. When we eat, we build memory images of what various foods taste like and whether we like them or not. When the flavor/texture patterns in the food we are eating match, without impediment, the memory image of that food (which include hedonic responses), we experience pleasure.

One virtue of this conception of taste is that it accommodates a central feature of our enjoyment of food—familiarity is an important value. We are naturally reticent about taking something into our bodies that might be unpleasant or dangerous. Thus, we experience enjoyment when a present stimulus conforms to the familiar hedonic patterns of past experience. But of course, that memory image of what food should taste like is constantly being updated. We learn to taste new foods if only to avoid boredom since our sensory mechanisms are designed to experience repeated stimuli less intensely. Read more »

by Dwight Furrow

It might strike you as odd, if not thoroughly antiquarian, to reach back to Aristotle to understand gastronomic pleasure. Haven’t we made progress on the nature of pleasure over the past 2500 years? Well, yes and no. The philosophical debate about the nature of pleasure, with its characteristic ambiguities and uncertainties, persists often along lines developed by the ancients. But we now have robust neurophysiological data about pleasure, which thus far has increased the number of hypotheses without settling the question of what exactly pleasure is.

Part of the problem is that we have this word “pleasure” that seems to apply to any positive affective state, and we therefore think there must be something common to all the diverse experiences designated by the word. But that unity may be an illusion. There is a vast experiential difference between the pleasures of basking in the sun and the pleasure one experiences from having run a marathon. I doubt that Aristotle’s theory can explain the former; the latter seems more amenable to his focus on activities which would include the pleasures of the table. And so I will set aside attempts to define pleasure in general and focus on the pleasure we take in our activities, specifically the activity of eating. Read more »