by Dwight Furrow
We have slid almost imperceptibly and, to be honest, gratefully, into a world that offers to think, plan, and decide on our behalf. Calendars propose our meetings; feeds anticipate our moods; large language models can summarize our desires before we’ve fully articulated them. Agency is the human capacity to initiate, to be the author of one’s actions rather than their stenographer. The age of AI is forcing us to answer a peculiar question: what forms of life still require us to begin something, rather than merely to confirm it? The best answer I’ve been able to come up with is that we preserve agency by carving out zones of what the philosopher Albert Borgmann called focal practices—activities whose meaning lies in their doing, that integrate thought and action, that resist the drift toward frictionless consumption. Cooking and eating, when pursued as focal practices, are exemplary test cases. They can be (and increasingly are) colonized by devices and algorithms. Yet they also contain native antibodies to that colonization—rhythms, resistances, irreducible sensuous details—that make them stubbornly human. The task is to protect and cultivate those antibodies.
“Agency” is often misdescribed as the mere ability to choose among options. That definition flatters the marketplace and leaves us docile, turning us into consumers of choices rather than authors of ends. The more precise mark of agency is the power to set ends and learn through doing—to craft a trajectory, absorb the world’s feedback, adjust, and continue. This is what the crafts teach: not only that we can do things, but that the things we do can teach us back.
By contrast, the contemporary “device paradigm” (to borrow once again a concept from Borgmann) seeks to deliver goods while obscuring the world of engagement that once produced them. Central heating without a hearth; playlists without musicianship; complete dinners in boxes with QR codes. AI intensifies that device paradigm: it can now plan an entire week of meals, generate a shopping list, adapt to your nutrition targets, propose substitutes for your missing fennel, and teach you knife skills—without you ever acquiring a hand’s memory for the knife or a nose’s discernment for fennel. You can “cook” by executing the plan’s plan, outsourcing the learning that makes cooking more than caloric logistics. Read more »
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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.
The term “gastronomy” has no agreed-upon, definitive meaning. Its common meaning, captured in dictionary definitions, is that gastronomy is the art and science of good eating. But the term is often expanded to include food history, nutrition, and the ecological, political, and social ramifications of food production and consumption. For my purposes, I want to focus on the conventional meaning of gastronomy for which that dictionary definition will suffice.
