Taste as Experience: The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Food

Knowledge

I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of Han Dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kaniska introduced them to India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word “apricot” is derived from the same Latin source as the word “precocious,” because the apricot ripens early; and that the A at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter.

—BERTRAND RUSSELL

The second way to taste conceives of taste as knowledge and awareness of culture. In this perceptual experience, taste operates as the conscious fabric of a person’s biographical and cultural identity, a progressive acquisition. Here taste is “dressed,” controlled, and dedicated to appreciation as the capacity of understanding over time. Calling this experience “taste” does not connote the predominance of a hedonic impulse but that of reason, reflection, and balance. There are many ramifications along this mode of access to taste because, unlike the experience of naked pleasure, which tends to lack the capacity to reflect and is therefore less articulated, it develops on many different levels of awareness—from the novice’s curiosity to the most sophisticated connoisseur’s expertise—and it provides many consequent options. The curious person, the enthusiast, the gourmet but also health fanatics and vegetarians fall into this category because they all express a gustatory appreciation from qualitative and esteeming criteria that arrange an aesthetic judgment. If naked pleasure is basically the realm of unreflected and often tacit desire, dressed taste is the land of explicit, conceptualized, and often verbosely expressed knowledge. Please note that I am not proposing again here a dichotomy that I aimed to deconstruct before (desire/knowledge, nature/culture, and the like)! Instead, I propose to observe different modes of experiencing food from the perceiver’s perspective, as I have previously noted, from inside the perception. To give examples that have already been discussed, wine in this case will not be appreciated simply as “wine” or alcohol, or chocolate as a generic sweet or sugar bearer. Rather, particular wines or chocolates will convey constitutive values of appreciation through taste. Gustatory perception is consciously oriented toward such an exploration in order to obtain pleasure intensified by knowledge and culture or modeled on it in a sort of intellectual enjoyment. However, expertise is not always necessary for dressed taste: its domain is not only about recognition and awareness of one’s identity but also just as much about the approximation to otherness and exoticism. A plate of tortellini or arancini can be appreciated because of the memories they stir, fried grasshoppers can be appreciated because they are exotic, Sauternes can be appreciated because of its nobility and its production method. Connection to the past, open-mindedness, and broadening cultural perspectives are all ways in which the subject, armed with projects, horizons of expectation, and particular interpretative schemes, approaches the object on a scale that ranges from primary, basic curiosity to the most sophisticated connoisseurship.

LEARNING ABOUT QUALITY, CULTIVATING TASTE

My experience as a teacher and wine taster, an activity I have practiced for several years at a professional level, has taught me a good deal about the development of learning and cultivating taste. Using my personal background, I will now start to sketch some lines that can be useful for understanding a number of basic processes regarding the access to food via dressed taste. My skills were clearly formed through practice (tasting many different wines, building an archive for the recognition of some recurring features, and making comparisons as a habit), study (reading books and journals, keeping up to date on new products, and so on), and trips to vineyards, wineries, and meetings with producers and winemakers at their places and at fairs and events. During this apprenticeship, I was “promoted” to taster and educator of the tastes of others. The quotation marks are there because there is no “school of taste,” there is no institution certifying that someone has “good taste” for wine or food, just as there is no school that guarantees a degree in good criticism or—to look at the issue from the side not of judging, but rather of making—no school one can graduate from as a good writer. This impossibility is most revealing; neither the fields of taste and criticism nor the fields of creating artworks or artifacts are subject to general and abstractly computable certifications. There are of course schools of tasting and sensory training, as well as those of literary criticism, journalism, and creative writing, but they provide the basic tools for understanding the backbone of the functioning of these activities. Success—becoming a good critic, a good taster, or a good artist—is an entirely different story. That is up to individual talent, to a personal process and development of something that is recognized as good. Such evaluation is made ex post by the same communities of affiliation—the critics, the tasters, the artists—and by the public, the general audience (Shapin 2012).

As a wine-tasting teacher, I have taught many courses for both beginners and advanced students who in vivo helped me to understand the difference between the expression of individual naked and immediate pleasure and qualitative evaluation. Educating taste aims first at teaching words, a grammar, and a syntax of quality that express a reasoned appreciation of what is ingested and assimilated (Smith 2007). This process develops through various stages. At the first step, the beginner acquires the tools for building a value-oriented reference system. But how does this acquisition occur? Instead of “acquisition”—a word that underlies the idea of gathering knowledge as it was “already given”—it would be more correct to speak of interaction, active correspondence, and negotiation (Ingold 2013). In fact, masters are the authorities that teach a system of values. They provide examples and, thanks to their persuasive and seductive ability (seduce comes from the Latin se ducere, “to lead a person toward oneself”), convince the novices of the “truth” of the system proposed. The language of taste here is under construction. Let me give a personal example: Many years ago, I wanted to verify a particular fact about this process. In an introductory wine-tasting class, I proposed to focus on quality in wine through concepts and perceptions expressed by words like flavor and acidity. Was it a neutral gesture? Clearly not, because from those features I stressed a certain idea of quality based on values like drinkability, elegance, lightness. I recommended a whole language of wine, which depended on that initial move and convinced others through gestures, postures, and facial expressions that a quality wine had to have exactly those characteristics.

Before finishing my direct evidence, let me offer an important clarification. Around the middle of the twentieth century, the distinction between so called nonaesthetic properties and aesthetic properties (or qualities) was introduced into aesthetics to explain how qualitative values are established in works of art. In short, the nonaesthetic properties correspond to the characteristics that define an object or work of art in physicochemical and quantitative terms. These properties are easily discernible and measurable: color, shape, weight, volume, and composition. Aesthetic properties, on the other hand, are those attributions that involve a very problematic area, namely, that domain of qualitative perception called aesthetic perception where properties such as harmony, finesse, elegance, appeal, and balance are taken into consideration (Sibley 2007). Now the problem is to discover whether there is some kind of a relationship between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic properties. If so, what is it? Without entering into the merit of the many possible answers offered by scholars, I would only like to point out that the question applies perfectly to our case as well. In the tasting course, in fact, I wanted to convince the students that flavor and acidity—nonaesthetic properties, subject to measurement and quantitative analysis—were closely linked to certain aesthetic properties such as drinkability, lightness, and elegance. Now that this has been made clear, and keeping it in mind, I can conclude my story. In another introductory course with a different group of novices, I proposed focusing on quality in wine through completely different concepts and perceptions, expressed by nonaesthetic properties such as alcohol content, fruitiness, and sweetness. I then connected these properties to the same aesthetic properties of the previous course: drinkability, elegance, and appeal. In both courses, I obviously justified my value system, not only by way of seductive and rhetorical strategies, but also with reasonable arguments taken from wine production. With an audience of beginners, in two “experimental” courses, I obtained the same outcome—a good measure of pleasure and new wine enthusiasts—by constructing two diverse and in a certain way opposite paradigms of taste as value and qualitative appraisal.

My little experiment is not supposed to suggest a skeptical conception of taste. I do not intend to argue that taste is just a matter of private preferences in the line of “de gustibus non est disputandum.” This motto refers to taste as naked and immediate pleasure, to instances where impulses encounter flavors, that terrain where the gustatory perception exhibits our uniqueness, our unwavering signature. Taste cannot be discussed here, it can only be reported. This is a good thing, as we argued in the first chapter; there are aesthetic encounters that need to be seen in this light. From a different angle, however, taste is the chosen topic of discussion, a true “social negotiating table.” We are also social and often sociable beings. For this reason, dressed taste is what is most debated and demands criteria, values, and judgment. It requires knowledge and culture, shared through socially coded patterns of behavior and a corresponding grammar. The example of the wine-tasting courses helps us understand how aesthetic knowledge concerning aesthetic properties comes about through negotiation, a comparison of perspectives that does not have a causal foundation, but instead contingent motivations and hence historical, anthropological, and social ones. Harmony and elegance, beauty and finesse, personality and character are not caused by a wine’s physicochemical components; rather, they depend on them in a different way. They are perceived by virtue of specific training that produces an ability to perceive the second degree, diverse from standard perception, which is therefore defined as taste. Taste is the mark of aesthetic perception (Levinson 2005). Aesthetic perception, however, is not a definitive and fixed stage. It changes and develops in accordance with the historical significance of the values it captures, but also with respect to every single experience and environment in which it occurs. If the first gustatory aesthetic relationship we have analyzed in terms of naked pleasure corresponds to the vital impulse and delight, in the transition toward cognitive and cultural stages aesthetic appreciation becomes even more specialized and articulated.

The historicity of gustatory aesthetic perception affects both individuals—tastes change, and they change because experiences, perspectives, and more generally the values attributed to objects change—and society as a whole. The values associated with wine substantiate this well. My personal experiment showed two different systems at play, one typical of the 1990s, according to which wine had to be structured, dense, soft, and fruity, the other, which is currently popular, according to which wine has to be crispy, light, fresh, and mineral. Those novices and unwitting victims of my basic tests, who continued to broaden their knowledge and developed a greater tasting capacity, might have begun to harbor certain doubts about the paradigm imparted by me in retrospect. Maybe someone has transformed their initial curiosity into true expertise, and in this process their perceptual amelioration, their ability for discernment and judgment, has increased. With those former students, I can no longer draw up grids of value to my liking, but instead I would have to face them and negotiate as between peers.

If education and training play a crucial role in the constitution of adult gustatory perception and are the way toward dressed taste, it is furthermore impossible to ignore the basic conditionings that structure our perception, an involuntary legacy that cannot be done away with. Explicit projects and conscious purposes to establish one’s style and identity are one thing; the background of individual biographies, memories and social environment in which one has grown up and been raised are another (Auvrey and Spence 2007; Burnham and Skilleås 2012). In the example above, the project that the beginners chose by enrolling in the wine course was to learn a perceptual ability and the appropriate language skills to describe a sensory perception and its subsequent qualitative assessment. This is normally what people attending a wine-tasting class expect, but since I happened to be their teacher, I gave them something more to learn, aesthetic perception. In fact, I have been arguing that taste perception comprises two different levels, sensory perception and aesthetic perception. This assumption needs to be discussed since it is controversial.

According to a certain view—shared, for example, by some sensory chemists and analysts who are more in tune with the “hard” sciences and statistics than with philosophy and the humanities (Noble 2006)—the only possible and “objective” gustatory perception is standard perception. This perception, as we said above, refers only to nonaesthetic properties such as the levels of acidity and tannins as well as the presence of certain aromas rather than others. In this context, training taste would mean learning to perceive, recognize, and appreciate standard characteristics, similarly to what occurs when a child learns to recognize colors and shapes of objects and the letters of the alphabet. In this conception, beyond standard perception, taste “non est disputandum.” The defenders of such a position claim it is the only reasonable way to discuss and to share judgments about food and wine. On the contrary, they argue that adjectives such as harmonious, elegant, and vibrant would express only individual preferences. Words such as balance, finesse, power, or grace would not denote anything real and would only correspond to pure personal idiosyncrasies, exempt from any reference to the tasted object. It is easy to refute this concept. First, it works with the subject/object paradigm that we already put into question, replacing it with the relational and ecological paradigm. According to the latter, taste perception is a complex skill, aimed at different purposes and projects. In this framework, recognizing quality is recognizing values rather than mere facts, as the former paradigm would affirm. In other words, we are freer. It is entirely legitimate, and for some purposes even useful, to enhance the sensory practice of flavor and aroma recognition by training taste and smell aesthetically, as these senses are generally underestimated and therefore not used to the fullest of their capacities. But—and this is the second point—this does not imply that standard gustatory perception (flavors “as such,” aromas “as such”) is neutral and not itself biased. It’s just another game, as has been argued also by historians and social scientists (Perullo 2012b; Shapin 2011). Third, sensory perception does not cover everything that taste allows one to do: it is perfectly possible to distinguish between two wines with a similar sensory profile but dissimilar final qualities, different values. Think of the different prices of two wines belonging to two adjacent but diverse vineyards that cannot be explained just by sensory features. If the price differential is warranted, it calls for other arguments, both perceptual—standard and aesthetic—perceptual and nonperceptual. These arguments compose the domain of aesthetic. Aesthetic sensibility is the capacity to ecologically correspond to the intertwining of facts and values; it does not pertain to the complexity of the reasons that temporarily and historically justify certain value orientations. Learning about quality and cultivating taste, therefore, means facing our inescapable relationship with food, making it an integral part of our experiences. It also means consciously exercising one’s perceptive ability in the direction of the complexity of embodied knowledge, leaving the environment around us to interact with our psychophysical system.

TASTING THE WORLD

Experiencing food while traveling is one of the most deliberate, appreciated, and popular ways of approaching the culture of new and unusual places. Wine and food tourism is on the rise, in particular with regard to the aesthetics of traditions and their territories. The encounter with “other” food in contexts differing from the usual ones is also an extremely rich topos, from Montaigne to Stevenson, from Twain to Chatwin. The travel writer John Foster Fraser describes the discovery of a fish in Burma in his book Round the World on a Wheel (1989), which narrates a bicycle trip that lasted over two years: “We investigated how the food was prepared. First of all the fish were caught and laid in the sun for three days to dry. The fish being then dead, though moving, were pounded in plenty of salt. Then they were put into a jar, and when the mouth was opened people five miles away knew all about it. Nga-pee, I soon saw, was a delicacy that could only be appreciated by cultured palates. The taste is original; it is salt, rather like rancid butter flavoured with Limburger cheese, garlic, and paraffin oil. The odor is more interesting than the taste. It is more conspicuous” (265). This passage makes clear how taste can serve as an active probe for the discovery of the world, in direct experience as well as in academic research: much of cultural studies today is about food as a marker for multicultural complexity (Counihan and Van Esterik 1997).

In a well-known story originally published 1982 with the title Sapore Sapere (Taste Knowledge) (which in 1986 was changed to Under the Jaguar Sun), Italo Calvino described some itineraries of taste as knowledge and culture in great depth. In the Italian edition, the story opens with a long epigraph from Niccolò Tommaseo’s Dizionario dei sinonimi,¹ which provides further clarification about the original meaning of taste. This is what the Italian linguist wrote in his famous work published in 1830: “Tasting, in general, exercising the sense of taste, receiving its impression, even without a deliberate will or without thought. The sampling becomes more determined in order to taste and to know what one is tasting; or at least it denotes that from the first impression comes a reflected sentiment, an idea, the beginning of an experience. Therefore, to the Latins, sapio in translation meant feeling correctly; and therefore the sense of the Italian sapere [to know], which in itself stands for the right doctrine and for the prevailing of knowledge over science” (Calvino 1988, 23). Tommaseo distinguished between a direct impression, before any intention and reflection, and a reflective exploration, aimed at recognition and intellectual appreciation. Then he referred to the etymology of the Italian verb sapere (to know), from the Latin sapio (originally “to have taste” and, by extension, “to know”). Tasting, therefore, means correctly perceiving a substance’s immediate taste, but also its subsequent recognition following an investigation. According to Tommaseo, taste is a double ability, related to the same double nature and meaning of the sense. This word in fact denotes both the immediate sensation (the instant “epidermal” sensation) and good sense (“to have good sense”), something that helps us choose and orient ourselves. A few decades before Tommaseo, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin had already offered a similar and even more precise definition of taste. According to him, taste is a combination of three elements corresponding to three consecutive steps: direct sensation (the immediate introduction of a food item into the mouth, with the activation of all receptors responsible for the recognition of chemical stimuli), complete sensation (the first and the subsequent perception, obtained by the mastication and oxygenation of the food in the mouth, which allows capturing the aromatic and tactile nuances), and reflective sensation (the final appreciation and the act of judgment after the ingestion of the food item—a process that can take a long time, if it is true that we are sometimes undecided in evaluating whether we really enjoyed something or not) (Brillat-Savarin 2009). Taste in Calvino’s story is a complex system that presupposes these articulations.

Under the Jaguar Sun tells the story of a couple, the writer and his partner Olivia, on vacation in Oaxaca, Mexico, the city of chocolate. Europe’s interest in this product, which was initially used as a drink and brought to Spain by the church (Schivelbusch 1992), began here in the sixteenth century. Chocolate, the ambivalent food par excellence, symbol of pleasure and sin, so much so that it appears everywhere in literature and cinema, is not the key player of this story, however. Instead, the story revolves around different foods, seeing taste as a complex device for exploration and as an internal travel compass through Mexico. Here, taste is mostly dressed and related to cultural forces, an adult version of the relationships one bears to oneself and to others. The anthropological trip through food in Under the Jaguar Sun leads to reflections and new elaborations on identity and the redefinition of relational strategies. During their travels, the two main characters try many traditional dishes and come to recognize the signs of a highly developed culture: “Olivia remarked that such dishes involved hours and hours of work and, even before that, a long series of experiments and adjustments . . . imagining entire lives devoted to the search for new blends of ingredients, new variations in the measurements, to alert and patient mixing, the handing down of intricate, precise lore” (Calvino 1988, 6). This approach leads to food through an explicit interest in its social and anthropological meanings that precede or follow the act of ingestion and assimilation. The transmission of the art of preparation and the patient alchemy in the transformations, as well as the conflict between the Spanish and the American Indian civilizations and the regional differences in edible material and vocabulary, are all elements that come before or after the perceptual experience. The experience is constituted by an approach toward taste, by anticipating it along horizons of expectation and information, the acquisition of historical and anthropological data, and their explicit intellectual elaboration afterward. The trip Olivia and her husband made is a cultural project that lives the experiences of taste as aesthetic experiences. It reflects an attitude toward food that differs highly from naked pleasure as it was discussed in the first chapter. Naked pleasure was, above all, an aesthetic relationship stemming from a “simple” sensory stimulation taken in its relative “narrowness” in an environment. Dressed taste, on the other hand, emphasizes the constructive and poietic role of the aesthetic relation. This difference in attitudes does not denote any hierarchy but, pragmatically, different relevant contexts of experience and appropriate narrative processes.

In the following passage, Calvino defines such an aesthetic program with words that are often quoted: “The true journey, as the introjections of an “outside” different from our normal one, implies a complete change of nutrition, a digesting of the visited country—its fauna and flora and its culture (not only the different culinary practices and condiments but the different implements used to grind the flour or stir the pot)—making it pass between the lips and down the esophagus. This is the only kind of travel that has a meaning nowadays, when everything visible you can see on television without rising from your easy chair. (And you mustn’t rebut that the same result can be achieved by visiting the exotic restaurants of our big cities; they so counterfeit the reality of the cuisine they claim to follow that, as far as our deriving real knowledge is concerned, they are the equivalent not of an actual locality, but of a scene reconstructed and shot in a studio.)” (1988, 12). Calvino’s aesthetic perspective sees in the journey the most radical search for experiential authenticity, and therefore it redefines the hierarchy of the senses as in Nothomb’s novels. Instead of a bare perception, however, here we find a semiotics of culture: tasting, the “only kind of travel that has a meaning nowadays,” means assimilating “between the lips and down the esophagus,” ingesting and physically consuming the object, and this perceptual process can be neither substituted nor replaced, in contrast to what may well happen in visual perception. Taste is the embodied experience that permits the most appropriate knowledge of the other, the perceptual ability that allows a true contact with things, exactly because it does not only touch the matter, but merges with it. Taste establishes a carnal twine between perceiver and perceived. If in the Platonic-Hegelian tradition this mixture expresses the epistemic limit of the so-called minor sense, Calvino instead adopts an alternative paradigm. According to a minority in Western thought, taste guarantees an even higher level of truthfulness: “it informs us in a perfect way concerning the nature of things” because “the entire substance of the tasted object comes into contact with the tongue and penetrates it directly,” as an anonymous medieval commentator claimed (“Summa de saporibus” 1991, 231).

Calvino provides a radical meaning to the access to food through dressed taste. In the words of the anthropologist David Le Breton, taste here is the taste of the world because it is knowledge of the world (Le Breton 2006). It is a knowledge that fuses sharing and bonds, but also lacerations and conflicts. If, with naked pleasure and prereflective enjoyment, sharing, struggles, or guilt feelings occur with respect to infantile behavior or to regression in adulthood, in Calvino’s story the context is different. We are faced with a rational conflict between cultivated human beings in whom dressed taste acts as an amplifier or mirror of the discomforts that lie outside the planned management of existence. The perceptual difference between the narrator and his partner surfaces, for instance, in a pragmatics of taste: “Olivia more sensitive to perceptive nuances and endowed with a more analytical memory, where every recollection remained distinct and unmistakable; I tending more to define experiences verbally and conceptually, to mark the ideal line of journey within ourselves contemporaneously with our geographical journey” (Calvino 1988, 11). While Olivia cultivates a gustatory knowledge geared toward intense perceptual attention and tacit memory, the narrator for his part tries to translate the living experience into words and concepts. This difference harks back to the hierarchy between men and women with respect to the kitchen. The domain of taste, of smells, of the body, of practical gestures is a woman’s assigned social prerogative; the domain of theory, of conceptualized language, and of ideal design is a man’s. Far from being an obsolete prejudice, this still holds true today. Think of the distinction between so-called traditional and creative cuisine, commonly seen as a sharp distinction between the mechanical execution of coded recipes and creative inventive design, and now consider the predominant gender associated with each. There is a French word that expresses this axiology, that is, chef. The chef, according to the definition by the French historian Revel, “is a man capable of inventing that which hasn’t already been eaten at home” (Baugé 2012). The chef is therefore a chief, that is, primarily a head, a mind. The space of the chef is outside of the house, the space of the woman cook is at home. Women should stay in the kitchen: this thought expresses the ideology of a precise social structure that involves all aspects of human life (Cooper 1998). The autonomous space of women is carved out within the domestic walls and, above all, expresses itself in cooking and in other tasks that are done in the absence of men, who go out to work, produce, create, and fill public roles. The mouth symbolizes this hierarchical prejudice well, at the same time denoting its ambivalence. It is the opening through which food enters and words exit, a medium of the physical and the mental together, and it differently serves sensitive, perceptual, and intellectual needs.

Through taste, Olivia emphasizes haptic and tacit perception; the narrator, on the other hand, emphasizes verbal and conceptual perception, exploring the object and then putting it back at a distance. Olivia lives taste as a harmoniously twofold instrument, “pleasure that knows, knowledge that enjoys,” as defined by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (2015). Knowledge and culture do not weaken but rather enhance pleasure. Instead, for the narrator taste is a problem. He recognizes its potential, but he lives it within a dramatically dualistic frame—tacit, haptic pleasure on the one hand, explicit, theoretical knowledge on the other—whose only solution is a complete translation of taste into conceptual language. Calvino’s story therefore provides a good example for dressed taste to be expressed in different manners.

Let’s return to the gender issue. The conflict between male and female is repeatedly evoked in Calvino’s story, but more generally it can easy be established that, in the Western tradition, the neglect of gustatory perception has always accompanied emotional, erotic, and sexual problems. From the condemnation of physical pleasure and its excess by the more radical versions of the Christian tradition—where gluttony and sex are united by the same interdict—to the opposite glorification of gluttony as a mark of Eros/Thanatos recounted by so much literature and so many films (think of La grande bouffe), taste always has a gender connotation, both in physical and in psychic characterizations. Taste as a psychic glue is an interesting variation on the theme for understanding some of the prevailing attitudes in the experience of food: cooking can be a vehicle to seduce, to call back those who are gone, to be forgiven, but it can be also a survival strategy. Olivia and the narrator leave for their trip to Mexico during a marriage crisis, and food is the medium chosen for their attempt to reestablish a true sensual relationship. It is not difficult to bring fiction back to real life. At times, the development of the dominance of gustatory experiences in couples is the supplement to, or substitute for, the sensual decline in long-term relationships. This finding is not irrelevant to our theme. We have to know how to frame taste experience in this context with the possibility of an alternative or supplementary performance. This allows us to understand these gustatory attitudes and not condemn them.

DRESSED TASTE, IMAGE, AND REPRESENTATION

In the first chapter, I discussed the fundamental relationship between pleasure and images. The image is the sensory form of every living action, and therefore also of taste perception. A specific triangulation emerged from that mode of access: perceiver and perceived were connected through a medium that intensified, clarified, or let pleasure express itself as “naked.” Taste as dressed and codified knowledge has an equally stringent relationship with images, although expressed differently. Just think of the education of taste, of recipe books, or of the endless articulations of the expression “taste is culture” in the mass media (websites, blogs, and television). Gustatory perception is the direct experience of food, therefore a strategy that boosts the aesthetic relationship by drawing on one’s embodied capacity and expanding it, but, as with pleasure, the triangulation with images and representations is unavoidable.

In Calvino’s story, the relationship between taste perception and visual representation is explicitly advocated. Even though it only points in one direction, thirty years after its first publication, it still contains many useful insights and deserves to be discussed. The savory, aromatic, and haptic experience is seen as a viable and concrete alternative to the static nature of the visual image as it is commonly misunderstood and lived in ordinary experience. Calvino compared the “real” journey to the visited country, as physical ingestion through taste, to the technological and reproducible image-simulacrum of television. However, the issue is not as simple as it seems, and it is the author himself who reminds us of this in another passage of Under the Jaguar Sun: “I concentrated on devouring, with every meatball, the whole fragrance of Olivia—through voluptuous mastication, a vampire extraction of vital juices. But I realized that in a relationship that should have been among three terms—me, meatball, Olivia—a fourth term had intruded, assuming a dominant role: the name of the meatballs. It was the name ‘gorditas pellizcadas con manteca’ that I was especially savoring and assimilating and possessing” (27). This passage clarifies that the image is not reducible to its bloodless stasis. The bond between taste and language refers here to the acoustic image of the name “gorditas pellizcadas con manteca,” but its power holds also with respect to visual perception.

In television and cinema, and especially with the explosion of the web over the last decade, we have become witnesses, on the one hand, to a proliferation of food- and taste-related content, conveyed by the visual image, and, on the other, to its progressive virtualization. Food has become a commanding and almost overpowering presence in communication as an expression of the most diverse meanings. And this fact is accompanied by its symmetrical counterpart, the growing interest in visual cuisine and cooks corresponds to the decrease in active cooking. It is as though what Heidegger said about the destiny of modern metaphysics were true for gastronomy too. To paraphrase “The Age of the World Picture” (Heidegger 2002), I would say that today we live in the age of the Food Picture, of food reduced to image and simulacrum. Thus, every day we experience the risk—as was already exposed by Roland Barthes (Barthes 1997)—that the gustatory haptic experience in vivo could move to the visual field and be replaced by it. We live in a paradox; while pictures, news, and even food objects proliferate, we are losing our grip on real things, we are losing experiential and life awareness. With respect to taste, this process derived also from what Walter Benjamin named—referring to works of art—reproducibility. According to Benjamin, art has lost its “aura,” its uniqueness, its hic et nunc (Benjamin 2008) as a result of advanced reproduction technologies. Benjamin’s thought developed from a reflection on the “new arts” of that time, photography and film. Similarly, one may argue that the experience of taste has lost the uniqueness of its unrepeatable experience as a result of being reproduced in increasingly sophisticated ways in photos, videos, and movies. However, it is undeniable that there is a fundamental difference between gustatory and (mere) visual perception of taste, due to the material incorporation and assimilation of food. How do things really stand here? The relationship between the experience of eating and its narration through images cannot consist in either a reduction or an adaption of the former to the latter. Instead, we should speak of a translation, even more precisely of an active correspondence between two ontologically different yet intertwined levels. Nothing is more different than eating as compared to watching others eat or contemplate dishes, but since taste is a multisensory perception, sight is a very important influence. That said, it is also undeniable that in everyday life the risk of a virtualization of taste exists and produces different bad practices, such as criticizing and condemning cuisine and chefs using “hearsay” and things “seen,” especially online, as well as the power of marketing trends, which produces a trivialized uniformity in judgment and appreciation.

A positive dialogue between taste experience and visual experience does not ignore the necessity of a pictorial dimension of gustatory perception, from naked pleasure to dressed taste. Along these lines, gustatory imagery was compared to theater, as a scene comprising many heterogeneous elements such as muscle movements, gestures, facial expressions, and words. It is very telling that some authors have compared this need with a prosthesis that weakens the importance of taste with respect to sight and hearing, those autonomously symbolic and expressive senses (Leroi-Gourhan 1964–65). But now, on the contrary, also from recent cognitive and psychological research, we can see this as an asset: taste always confronts us with a complex multisensory field, so much so that other scholars have even tried to establish correspondences between the gustatory and the visual qualities of a dish.

The representational need of taste can be understood both as a mental induction to taste and as its condition of access. For instance, a name or a word may produce—or bypass—the taste of food (the name of the meatballs in Calvino’s story) because words have to do with the mouth. Words and writing condense taste and image into the imaginary, of course without reducing the real meatball to its sound or its description. Taste perception always signals a surplus of the signifier (food “in itself,” while we assimilate it in the concrete relationship) with respect to the signified (its expression and its expressibility). But words and, even more, visual representations have great power. They induce and arouse revulsion and prevent access to certain experiences, as demonstrated by many experiments regarding the conditioning of perception (Taylor 2004; Gueguen 2010). Each verbal or figurative sign refers to a specific horizon of gustatory expectation that activates channels of attention. Chefs are clearly well aware of this, and they sometimes devote much time to the multisensory construction of their dishes, with particular attention not only to appearance, but also to names.

Real gustatory experiences possess a regenerative potential for human existence, having to do with a cultivation of the awareness of one’s body and sensitivity. Taste as embodied knowledge can be an effective critical instance for a renewal of deeper experiential modalities. Exploration via dressed taste and the development of specific codes of expression is a thrilling way to access aesthetic experience according to Calvino’s Under the Jaguar Sun. But, simultaneously, taste can be an ally of the superficial leveling of a vilified feeling devoid of meaning, as the increasing power of media shows us every day. During the same period of Calvino’s story, the philosopher Michel Serres issued a warning in his essay “The Five Senses”: “The victory of reason: the only taste an apricot has is the taste of the word ‘apricot’ passing over the lips” (Serres 2008, 233). Taking the approach of taste as knowledge and culture should promote critical and wise attitudes, but that, unfortunately, is not always the case.