Since in eating pleasure and necessity go together, we fail to discern between the call of necessity and the seduction of pleasure.
—GREGORY THE GREAT
And now, a dramatic turn of events: the third mode of access to gustatory experience appears to be its negation. After pleasure and knowledge, we have to face indifference toward taste. In the architectonics of food aesthetics, this connects to our thesis: the mindful comprehension of eating experiences comes by way of understanding their entire ranges and processes. Tasting is an activity that is a counterpoint to other oral activities such as breathing, talking, and even eating without tasting. In other words, our experience does not consist of a texture comprising seamless gustatory acts. Taste experiences alternate with other, even more frequent non-taste-related ones, according to a rhythm that is discrete, not continuous,
even when they involve ingesting food. However, in the ecological and systemic perspective advocated here, these different experiences are related to one another and often intertwined.
By “indifference toward taste” I mean neither disgust nor abstention from food. In this chapter, the indifference will have nothing to do with ascetic aversions to food, or with the huge problem of eating disorders codified by medicine and psychology. Gustatory indifference is not the indifference to food so masterfully described by Kafka in “A Hunger Artist.” Here the main character practices the “art of fasting,” staging performances of hunger until the surprise ending, in which the hunger artist says that the real reason for his fasting is that he never found food he liked. Gustatory indifference is simply the experience of eating without any attention to the tastes of food or to the act of tasting itself. This is a mainly privative attitude, a nutritional passivity due to a lack of care and perceptive attention toward what is being ingested. It was this attitude we came across in Amélie Nothomb’s The Character of Rain, where Amélie kept eating the same food with complete indifference for the first two years of her life while feeling like a passive tube.
Looking carefully at this kind of carelessness, one can discover interesting facts and create new connections that allow overcoming old prejudices with respect to eating. The first prejudice calls upon Brillat-Savarin: according to his conception of gastronomy—which has become the most influential one—eating with indifference would seem to be characteristic of a certain animal attitude. For the author of
The Physiology of Taste, “Animals feed themselves; men eat; but only wise men know the art of eating” (Brillat-Savarin 2009, 15) and “the real enjoyment of eating is a special prerogative of man” (54). The “supremacy of man” establishes an anthropocentric doctrine of taste. And the French gastronome goes on, “[Man], king of all nature by divine right, and for whose benefit the earth has been covered and peopled, must perforce be armed with an organ which can put him in contact with all that is toothsome among his subjects. The tongue of an animal is comparable in its sensitivity to his intelligence. . . . Man’s tongue, on the other hand, by the delicacy of its surfaces and of the various membranes which surround it, proves clearly enough the sublimity of the operations for which it is destined” (54–55). In Western philosophy the difference between man and animal is characterized by various oppositions, for example, that between response and reaction (human language elaborates responses to external stimuli, animal vocalizations are only reactions). Within this strong and axiological hierarchy, we can also play the opposition between human taste as a social and cultural mark and mere animal nutrition. But the anthropocentric view about taste makes incorrect scientific assumptions and leads to philosophically incorrect theses. Today ethological and zoosemiotic research tends to prove the existence of animal taste preferences for some species (Martinelli 2010). Building upon Darwin, evolutionary aesthetics takes into account the existence of basic protoaesthetics, which includes not only the primary ability of being able to choose an appropriate object but also that of enjoying it.
The anthropocentrism of taste marks an erroneous ideology of gastronomy as good taste, which would radically distance itself from its nutritional bases, an exclusivist hierarchy that is not adequately supported. An aesthetics of taste that also pays attention to the experience of indifference adopts an oblique strategy to combat and overcome these hypostatized dichotomies. Taking care of our nutritional needs does not mean limiting these to the animal basic level. It is instead the first and necessary step to correspond to the original aesthetic input, even when it is not consciously fulfilled. If taste is not of interest, the eating experience happens differently. The food eaten is met differently than a “tasted object” is. Addressing indifference thus helps us cultivate awareness of a more open gastronomy, a gastronomy that is willing to accept differences in taste as outcomes of ecological variations rather than as radical oppositions.
Indifference to taste can take on different meanings and result in different attitudes. As we will see below, there is chronic indifference but there is also circumstantial and appropriate indifference—one could even call it “necessary”—to the unfolding of experience, so as to make it an aesthetically legitimate modality. I already stated that there is a very close relationship between indifference and nutrition in the fabric of everyday life. Before tackling the meaning of indifference to taste, then, I need to propose a few more specific considerations regarding the concept of nutrition.
We should first highlight that nutrition is not nutritionism. The latter corresponds to the paradigm according to which the individual nutrients in a food determine its overall nutritional value and (to many) its value in general. The underlying idea is that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts; to know the real essence of food, this position assumes, one should start from its single components. Instead, the position that I defend takes nourishment itself as a
value, restoring it to its rightful horizon of complexity and beauty, and not reducing it to a mere sum of nutritious ingredients. And yet, this almost trivial truth about the value of nourishment is often masked by the assumption that it is necessary to “dress” taste with the outfit of culture in order to give dignity to the alimentary act. To argue that humans do not only eat and that food is not only nourishment is certainly a truism, but it is equally a truism to remind ourselves that humans
must eat and that food is, first of all, nourishment. The only way to escape banality is to explore deeply the intrinsic philosophical value of nutrition and feeding. Emanuel Lévinas—highly influenced by Jewish thought, in which the importance and the enjoyment of food are fully legitimated, and in general play a more important role than in the Christian tradition—was the only philosopher of the twentieth century to have conceived nourishment as an essential structure of intentionality. According to Lévinas, the most appropriate image of the intentional structure of experience is someone eating bread. We have already mentioned the passage in which he states that we do not eat to live, but rather eat because we are hungry, and now we can connect it to our new acquisitions. This statement emphasizes how the primary nutritional expression corresponds to a
conatus, a vital impulse that is not “just” hedonic either, but even more basic; it is the desire for life, and life is relationship with the other. Ingesting food, that is, assimilating energy for maintaining biological balance and the functioning of the metabolic processes, thus means to desire, in a full and complete sense.
In the mid-nineteenth century another German philosopher, the well-known Ludwig Feuerbach, formulated a thought that has become almost a platitude in everyday language, but is hardly ever used by philosophers—“
Der Mensch ist, was er isst” (“Man is what he eats”). The phrase is a play on words that only works in German, between the verb
sein, “to be,” and the verb
essen, “to eat,” which sound the same in the third-person singular. The statement appeared in a review of the treatise
Lehre der Nahrungsmittel für das Volk (The theory of nutrition for the people) by the Dutch physician and physiologist Jacob Moleschott. In this work, Moleschott tried to explain the importance of eating and drinking for human beings in terms of psychophysical units on a materialist base. Feuerbach pointed out that the treatise provided philosophy with the tools for overcoming the Platonic, idealistic, and dualistic assumptions about reality, and that food provided the most important theoretical argument for proving the bond of mind and body on a scientific basis. Although Feuerbach’s suggestion remained largely ignored by the Western
episteme (Shapin 1998), it nonetheless shows that sometimes even philosophy has recognized the centrality of food, without falling back on elevation strategies. Again, the crucial issue here is to go beyond—or rather to deconstruct—the opposition between nature and culture. Food is even
philosophically important
before its fragmentation into social, anthropological, historical, economical domains, and the like, because food expresses a primary aesthetic (in the sense of
aisthesis) input. On the one hand, “man is what he eats” asserts the impossibility of reducing food to a purely immaterial good; on the other—and here lies the kernel of my argument—eating (
essen) does not totally correspond to enjoying or even tasting the food being eaten. The two perceptual experiences are different, as is easily observable from the point of view of the eater—from the “knowing from the inside” perspective we assumed from the beginning of this essay. According to our experiential and ecological approach, perceiving food does not correspond to perceiving the taste of food. These two different modes of perception represent different possibilities or
affordances because of the
ecological relationships between the human being qua organism (not a “higher being by divine right endowed with taste”), the food object qua additional organic system, and the context in which this relationship happens. If we accept this paradigm, the ontological hierarchy between taste and nourishment is rejected and, along the same line, the paradoxical and misleading position that tries to elevate food to the realm of “immaterial culture” is rejected. The political purposes of this elevation are clear and understandable: they intend to protect and value food cultures, against the risk of their collapse into mere material necessity. At the same time, we should also consider the reciprocal risk. Think of UNESCO 2010 awarding the status of “intangible” World Heritage to certain food “categories” such as the Mediterranean diet and French cuisine,
because they are immaterial goods. Just as culture is not the spirit
above the body, taste (that is, good taste, cultivation, the mark of civilization) is not
above nourishment. The “essence” of food consists in its
being for consumption and all that remains is the continually renewed relationship we have with it, in the great chain of energy transformation that unites biological, chemical, and physical facts, together with psychic and social facts.
I would now like to propose a pun. Let’s reverse the famous and immaterialist phrase coined by Bishop Berkeley at the beginning of the eighteenth century, “esse est percipi” (“to be is to be perceived”), making it “
essen (to eat in German) non est percipi” a principle that asserts the irreducible materiality of food. The pun then should mean: eating does not correspond to the act of being perceived, in the sense of
being tasted. If in the last chapter I argued that dressed taste coincided with a “going toward” the food experience in a deliberate and alert fashion, gustatory indifference confronts us instead with another situation altogether. Of course, food is
also symbolic as well as an object of imagination; try
not eating while thinking about it or imagining it, or while writing or talking about it. You will easily notice that it won’t satiate you. (When someone who prepares food does not eat it and insists on being satisfied only by cooking it, at times that person is only expressing a request for deferral—to eat later, when the tension has waned—and at other times she might actually be sated, but due to the satiety caused by the olfactory and aromatic stimuli that energized her while preparing the food.) In any case, it is unlikely that Bishop Berkeley had bread or fruit in mind when he formulated his thesis on the nonexistence of material objects and the independent existence of ideas! Irony aside, food really provides insurmountable evidence of the existence of an external world independent of our concepts, ideas, and paradigms, and this is maybe a reason that helps us understand why it has been excluded from most philosophical reflections; edible matter disturbs us because it is irreducible to any colonization by the mind. Beyond the crude spiritualism that refers to the possibility of a spirit that would not need matter, more sensible and sophisticated versions also need to be questioned. They distinguish between the level of “manifest” and ordinary perception and the level of testable scientific reality. Some of these positions, like the one proposed in the second half of the twentieth century by the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, offer a differentiation between the level of ordinary and sensitive experience, erected by way of conceptual schemes, and the level of scientific proof, grounded in scientifically proven theories. The first level corresponds to the perception of a table or an apple in front of us, the second one states that in front of us there is “really” neither a table nor an apple, but an accumulation of subatomic particles or of molecules with certain bonds and a certain spatial collocation. According to this theory, the “manifest image” of the world is “apparent” with respect to the second one, the “scientific image.” We can translate that debate to our issues: a link is possible with respect to the ideology of nutritionism, in which a food is nothing more than a compound of substances—a position that has led some people to think that it is possible to be fed directly through pills containing everything the body needs. It is widely known that such experiments were attempted with astronauts in space in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as with professional athletes, and the results were negative. Millions of years of evolution have literally made foodstuffs
indispensable to us in their complete, full, and manifest materiality, in their concrete
solidity,
not just their components. And one must add—although this does not directly affect our topic—that the same holds for the tables and chairs in front of us. The great scientific projects involving the
reduction of reality to a few simple essential components have all failed, leaving it to philosophical theories and scientific programs to understand and explain the
complexity instead. This is a key point for the wonderful problem of perception in general and for a food aesthetics in particular, because it undermines the nutritionist objection: the experience of food is not the experience of its components. We do not perceive molecules, but food,
even when we don’t eat it attentively.
The indifference to taste must now be placed in this theoretical framework. Normally, we eat and drink using perceptive capacities variable in intensity and attention according to the circumstances. In some cases, the level of attention is so low that it does not elicit an explicit gustatory intentionality, a “focus” on taste as such. Many everyday attitudes concerning food are characterized by what Walter Benjamin called, as we already mentioned, “reception in distraction.” Clearly, this is not an apology for indifference. The aesthetics of taste promotes the value of gastronomy and the attention to the cultivation of taste, through pleasure and knowledge. But since it does so while taking into account the environmental variations according to the ecological situation, it is right to integrate pleasure and knowledge into the general flow in which such devices emerge and develop. John Dewey illustrates this clearly: “We have
an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment. Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience. . . . Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency. It is
an experience. . . . For life is no uniform uninterrupted march or flow. It is a thing of histories . . . each with its own unrepeated quality pervading it throughout” (1980, 35–36). Dewey wants to emphasize the difference between the aesthetic experience and its indiscriminate flow, but within a continuous chain: if the aesthetic experience grows, it is because there is a vital flow, some kind of background material that makes its growth possible. As a follow-up to the Deweyan idea, we can see indifference to taste as a particular kind of
history: On the one hand, it does not belong to the indiscriminate flow of the vital process, since it emerges because eating requires a deliberate suspension of other activities. On the other hand, it still does not rise to the aesthetic experience of taste, but perhaps instead to an aesthetics of hunger. However, if indifference can express, as is often the case, chronic apathy, laziness, a general lack of critical perspective, and the passive lowering of standards, if it can refer to the infectious anonymity of
private lives—private comes from the Latin
privus, “lacking”—it is just as true that it can also have different and opposite meanings, and even play with the qualitative amplification of the experience as such (there is, in fact, a
taste of indifference or, in the words of Baudelaire, a
taste of nothing).
For all those reasons, the attitude of gustatory indifference is difficult to address explicitly. In fact, finding appropriate examples has not been easy.
The first chapter of Don DeLillo’s short novel
The Body Artist describes the Sunday morning breakfast of the film director Rey and his wife Lauren, a young performance artist. The dialogue is sparse. The atmosphere is rarefied and distressing and sets the stage for what will follow: Rey’s suicide and Lauren’s elaboration of grief through hallucinations. In this text, food is not addressed as such, but in the first chapter, DeLillo describes the small everyday actions involved in lovingly preparing breakfast: coffee, cereal, tea, blueberries, honey, butter, toast. This very short but extraordinary passage marks the growing tension: “She took a bite of cereal and
forgot to taste it. She lost the taste somewhere between the time she put the food in her mouth and the regretful second she swallowed it” (2001, 19, my emphasis). This striking remark describes an action of Lauren’s. A reflection by the narrator on reading the Sunday morning papers, an action that leads to imaginary conversations with the characters in those articles, precedes that moment, “until you become aware you are doing it and then you stop, seeing whatever is in front of you at the time, like half a glass of juice in your husband’s hand” (19). What does Lauren’s forgetfulness express? The care and attention put into preparing breakfast set the stage for its meaning; we are faced with a
contingent distraction, a sudden and nondeliberate inattention within the experiential flow. The perceptual attention to taste retreats for a few seconds because a new detail requires attention, yet with a lingering feeling of regret. The cereal is swallowed and its flavor is lost beyond recovery. Contingent distraction is a very common case of gustatory indifference in everyday life. It is not something to condemn, but to understand. The frequency of food intake, which rhythmically marks the course of our days, includes the possibility of distraction from the
quality of the substances. In all these cases, the perceptual experience is not aesthetic, yet it would be wrong to underestimate its importance.
Marcel Proust, the narrator par excellence, offers another telling example. It may seem bizarre to include Proust in this chapter on indifference, seeing that the French writer has become an eponym for great attention to food experiences, thanks to the well-known episode of the petites madeleines, the cakes that deliver extraordinary pleasure connected to childhood memories. To compensate for what might seem an insult, therefore, I will first quote the more famous excerpt, not only because it is so beautiful that it deserves to be read over and over again, but also because it will give further incentive to the reversal of perspective that follows. Here then the passage from Swann’s Way:
When one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, suggested that, contrary to my habit, I have a little tea. I refused at first and then, I do not know why, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump cakes called “petites madeleines” that look as though they have been molded in the grooved valve of a scallop-shell. And soon, mechanically oppressed by the gloomy day and the prospect of a sad future, I carried to my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had let soften a piece of
Madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake-crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. A delicious pleasure
invaded me,
isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately made the vicissitudes of life
unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precarious essence. . . . Where could it have come to me from—this powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected to the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it went infinitely far beyond it, could not be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it mean? How could I grasp it? I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third that give me a little less than the second. It is time for me to stop, the virtue of the drink seems to be diminishing. It is clear that the truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me. The drink has awoken it in me, but does not know that truth, and cannot do more that repeat indefinitely, with less and less force, this same testimony which I do not know how to interpret and which I want at least to be able to ask of it again and find again, intact, available to me, soon, for a decisive clarification. I put down the cup and turn to my mind. It is up to me to find the truth. But how? . . . I go back in my thoughts to the moment when I took the first spoonful of tea. I find the same state, without any new clarity. I ask my mind to make another effort, to bring back one more the sensation that is slipping away. . . . Then for a second time I create an empty space before it, I confront it again with the still recent taste that first mouthful and I feel something quiver in me, shift, try to rise,
something that seems to have been unanchored at a great depth; I do not know what it is, but it comes up slowly; I feel the resistance and I hear the murmur of the distances traversed. . . . And suddenly the memory appeared. That taste was the taste of the little piece of
madeleine which in Sunday mornings at Combray (because that day I did not go out before it was time for Mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my Aunt Léonie would give me after dipping it in her infusion of tea or lime-blossom. (2003b, 47–49, my emphasis)
This passage could be (and has been) the subject of endless comments, but we have to limit ourselves to the essential concerns. The gustatory pleasure that invades Marcel closely resembles the totalizing and pervasive experience that we have already come across in the selections from Amélie Nothomb, even though Proust adds a detail useful for our present purposes. Of the explosion of that pleasure, he writes, “it had immediately made the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory.” In that scene, in that specific context of the experience, taste becomes the main character banishing all the rest to indifference, to the anonymous and undifferentiated buzz that is the background of every vital process.
Quite surprisingly, then, in another section of the novel Proust gives us a totally different description of an experience with food: in the face of a strong emotional investment (falling in love with Gilberte) and turbulence, which absorbs all of his perceptual attention, taste is relegated to the background of the undifferentiated. We are in the first part of
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and Marcel, recalling an afternoon spent at the Swann’s home, writes: “[Gilberte] even asked me what time my parents dined, as though I knew something about it, as though the emotional upset from which I was suffering could enable any sensation such as lack of appetite or hunger, any notion of dinner or family, to survive in my
vacant memory and
paralysed stomach. Unfortunately this paralysis was only temporary; and there would come a time when cakes which I consumed without noticing them would have to be digested. But that moment was still in the future; and in the present, Gilberte made ‘
my tea.’ I drank huge quantities of it, although normally a single cup of tea would keep me awake for twenty-four hours. So it was that my mother had come to remark, ‘It’s a worry—as sure as that boy goes to the Swann’s—he comes home sick.’ But while I was at the Swann’s—I would have been unable to say
whether or not it was really tea I was drinking.
And even if I had known, I would have gone on drinking it; for even if I had been restored momentarily to proper awareness of the present, this would not have given me back the ability to remember the past or foresee the future” (2003a, 81–82, my emphasis). This passage masterfully describes the loss of appetite, but most of all the gustatory indifference that marks intense emotional states. We have already come across the connection between taste and emotion, but it was manifest in the opposite experience. In Calvino’s
Under the Jaguar Sun, Olivia and the narrator, on vacation in Mexico, explored the country and communicated with each other through taste. The quality of such taste perception, attentive and intense, all-encompassing and sophisticated—more generally, the “passion for food,” as it is quite tellingly called—is very common in long-term relationships, to seal, modify, enhance, or sometimes even exalt stagnant sentimental dynamics. The experience described by Proust, whose character is usually so attentive to the sensory and sensitive nuances of every vital element (even the food-related ones: Gilberte continues to prepare him “his tea” because Marcel has
his own tea, a tea to his taste, as all tea enthusiasts have), is therefore particularly significant. The contingent indifference is a suspension of attention, an involuntary paralysis of taste, just as it was for the performance artist Lauren, even though for different reasons. The point is that both attitudes are relevant, appropriate, and consistent with the overall ecology of the experience in which they grow and develop. Try imagining the comic, grotesque, and pathetic effect of a scene in which perceptual dynamics based on an evident emotional or sentimental situation persist. Think, for example, of a first date between two people in love, in which the distraction from the object of affection in favor of a dish or a wine was to cause inappropriate behavior. Or even—leaving our field, but with an example that, I think, hits the spot—think of the same distraction in favor of a ball game. This explains why so many women are disappointed by male attitudes whose objects of attention shift after the initial phase of falling in love. Unfortunately, this is not something done deliberately, because the objects of attention vary according to changes in emotional investment. If one objected that I am working here with a rigid definition of “appropriateness” and that I am using context as a regulatory term, I would reply that appropriate is what every
single experience finds to be appropriate, and this is not an a priori condition, but rather the outcome of processes that develop in a field of forces.
A different kind of gustatory indifference can be found in an early story by Italo Calvino, “Theft in a Pastry Shop.” It is the story of three poor petty criminals, in the starving postwar Italy of the last century, who one night rob a bakery. While the gang leader—dubbed Dritto (that is, Clever)—does not care about the wide array of sweets they find in the shop, the other two, Gesubambino and Uora-uora, cannot resist the temptation to gorge themselves on pastries, cakes, sugar, and candied fruit, thus jeopardizing the outcome of the robbery. Having just climbed in through the window, Gesubambino “flung himself at the shelves, choking himself with cakes, cramming two or three inside his mouth at a time,
without even tasting them” (Calvino 1984, 100, my emphasis). In this scene, the indifference is the unintended and almost paradoxical result of such a violent impulse for the cake merely as a sweet item, such that it becomes undifferentiated and produces the loss of flavor. It is a
compulsive indifference that can be caused by factors such as hunger or, in contrast, too much food. How many people do not taste anything anymore because they have already had everything and have tasted too much before? Here we have a very different kind of relationship with food from the one presented with Amélie Nothomb’s novels. Also there, in fact, the encounter with food led to an experience that focused only on one quality of the object, its being sweet, but the sweet encounter provoked intense pleasure and not undifferentiated assimilation. Of course, these different experiences can be explained in reference to the different contexts: whereas the three poor thieves of Calvino’s story are, in fact, destitute and hungry, Amélie is at home in a rich and comfortable environment and hunger is of no or little importance to her gustatory experience.
One might wonder about the extent to which indifference can be seen as an aesthetic experience. Until now, I have argued that taste experience is aesthetic in two distinct senses: the first inherent in hedonic impulse and pleasure variously declined, and the second inherent in knowledge as an intentionally acted upon perception. Both cases give rise to a multiplicity of performances and satisfying relationships. I called these systemic structures aesthetic relationships. How does indifference fit into the picture? As a matter of fact, the experience of indifference I described above is not an aesthetic experience
in the strict sense, but rather an experience that outlines and punctuates true aesthetic relationships. In the perceptual flow of human existence, the relationship with food is undeniably dominated by experiences of indifference. For this reason, they have aesthetic legitimacy. Even in a developmental and adaptive key, it would not be possible to always maintain a high threshold of attention. Reception in distraction thus seems to be a necessary condition of the “gustatory” experience, and in many cases distraction and attention alternate within the same environmental
scenario. Imagine, for example, being at a dinner attended by various people, some of whom are wine experts while others are not, and all meet for the first time. Everyone is sitting at the same table and, after having introduced themselves, the guests begin talking and getting to know one another. The conversation on different subjects is accompanied by the dishes and bottles of wine that receive varying attention. The experts will be more likely to perceive attentively than the nonexperts, of course, but this will also depend on their involvement in the conversation, on the level of interest generated by the food, and on other factors. Perceptual indifference is, in fact, a kind of setting, a background noise from which something can always arise, as in the phenomenon known as the “cocktail party effect.” This time imagine being in a room full of people and you are talking to a friend. Suddenly, someone who is in a distant corner of the room says your name. Now your attention is captured, and you might be surprised to have caught your name in the middle of all that noise. The “cocktail party effect” is explained by the sciences of communication with the notion of “salience,” that is, the perceptual filter that allows selectively paying attention to what emotionally or intellectually moves us (Burnham and Skilleås 2012). As becomes clear in these examples, indifference is also a useful device in ordinary ecological relationships. It is precisely for this reason that it is necessary to locate and understand this attitude with respect to the acts of eating; in everyday life, feelings or perceptions are rarely exclusive.
Here are two more examples to illustrate with new nuances the picture outlined above. The first comes from another contemporary American writer, Chuck Palahniuk, notable for a phenomenological and amoral attitude toward his characters and for his ability to avoid any distance between the everyday and the exceptional. In his novels this often takes on monstrous, unhealthy, and borderline features. A passage from his fifth novel, titled
Lullaby and part of a series (together with
Haunted and
Diary) that the author has called a “trilogy of horror,” sums up a context where food plays an essentially mechanical function and gustatory perception has no chance of emerging: “Nash is eating a bowl of chili. He’s at a back table in the bar on Third Avenue. The bartender is slumped forward on the bar, his arms still swinging above the barstools. . . . Somebody in a greasy apron is face down on the grill among greasy hamburgers. . . . And Nash looks up, chili red around his mouth, and says: ‘I thought you’d like a little privacy for this.’ . . . He digs the spoon into the bowl of chili. He puts the spoon in his mouth and says, ‘And don’t lecture me about the evils of necrophilia.’ He says, ‘You’re about the last person who can give that lecture.’ His mouth full of chili, Nash says, ‘I know who you are.’ He swallows and says, ‘You’re still wanted for questioning.’ He licks the chili smeared around his lips and says, ‘I saw your wife’s death certificate.’ He smiles and says, ‘Signs of postmortem sexual intercourse?’ . . . ‘You can’t kill me,’ Nash says. He crumbles a handful of crackers into his bowl and says, ‘You and me, we’re exactly alike’ . . . Nash jabs his spoon around in the crackers and red and says, ‘You killing me would be the same as you killing yourself.’ I say, shut up. ‘Relax,’ he says. ‘I didn’t give nobody a letter about this.’ Nash crunches a mouthful of crackers and red. ‘That would’ve been stupid,’ he says. ‘I mean, think.’ And he shovels in more chili” (Palahniuk 2002, 233–35).
This dialogue takes place in a bar where the narrator, the reporter Carl Streator, discovers some uncomfortable truths about a physician, John Nash, a necrophiliac murderer. During the confession, Nash is constantly eating. The continuous assimilation of food marks the rhythm of the story but no gustatory perception ever comes into play. Taste simply does not exist here. This attitude of indifference corresponds neither to contingent distraction as seen in the novel by DeLillo nor to the compulsive indifference in Calvino’s story, but to something that could be defined as
atmospheric indifference: the characters’ emotional states and behavior are swallowed up by a neutral and contagious environment that absorbs and discolors everything. The meal is consumed at a crime scene, and this is not without importance; in any case, a salient gustatory perception would seem inappropriate and out of place in this context. The entire novel is permeated by this atmospheric quality, and this is of exemplary interest here. The work of Palahniuk is exemplary also with respect to a certain type of food habit. It is no coincidence that the chili and hamburgers mentioned in the text represent typical ordinary food that is better suited to careless and distracted consumption than to dedicated and refined perceptions. In Palahniuk’s fiction food is often used in an “antigastronomic” relation, as we can see in his most famous novel,
Choke, in which the main character, Victor, stages numerous choking episodes in restaurants in order to obtain the money necessary to care for his sick mother from the customers who save him and are touched by his circumstances. But
Lullaby also contains references to food that go in a controversial direction. An exchange between a character called Oyster and Carl Streator is particularly interesting. Oyster is an orthorexic: he professes a militant and ethical attitude to taste, because he is a vegetarian who pays attention to the quality of food and its impact on the economy and society. “To me, Oyster says, ‘The only power of life and death you have is every time you order a hamburger at McDonald’s.’ His face stuck in my face, he says, ‘You just pay your filthy money and somewhere else, the ax falls’ ” (100). In the discussion, the narrator defends a point of view much more in line with the novel’s poetics and claims the right to a naked, uncritical, and even willfully ignorant pleasure: “Oyster and his tree-hugging, eco-bullshit, his bio-invasive, apocryphal bullshit. The virus of his information. . . . After listening to Oyster, a glass of milk isn’t just a nice drink with chocolate chip cookies. It’s cows forced to stay pregnant and pumped with hormones” (157–58). This case illustrates another aspect of food attitudes: laying claim to a noncultivated and uncritical pleasure that develops on the inside of atmospheric indifference. On closer inspection, this approach seems to correspond largely to the mass food habits in our society: the removal of any care and attention to food—from production to eating—due to disaffection brought about by too much food. The ensuing pattern of enjoyment related to the product as a pure
commodity, cheap and easy, always available, does not ask for any effort (note Streator’s contempt, in the passage quoted above, for the “virus of his information”). This has nothing to do with the naked pleasure that surprises and promotes change, psychic evolution, and meaningful relationships. In that case, the lack of information was part of an experience oriented to deepening enjoyment, restoring it to childhood strength. Something completely different takes place in these scenes, where the characters do not contemplate the taste of food as a device for creative exploration.
The atmospheric indifference to taste can emerge in still different contexts, where food plays a fundamental role as an instrument of quality performances associated with the body and its public representation, particularly in sports (bodybuilders and professional athletes, but also amateurs) as well as fashion and the entertainment industry (models, actors and actresses, public “faces”). Often in these experiences the approach to food is merely nutritionist. Eating is seen as the pure assimilation of substances and food is consumed—occasionally together with supplements and nutraceuticals—with great care with respect to its elementary quantities, but with total indifference to its taste (Parasecoli 2005). Eating becomes extremely important as a vector of the body’s desired development, in terms of physical appearance. In a seemingly paradoxical manner, however, here food is purely vicarious, it is subject to a “Promethean” determination that utilizes it at will, it does not benefit from the assignment of any value in itself and is wrongly believed not to have the least effect on the processes of pleasure, knowledge, and intellectual happiness. In this particular situation, atmospheric indifference to “gusto” becomes the apology of an instrumental and dualistic conception. The body, which is merely an external representation of “beauty” as appearance and adherence to the paradigms of a social consensus in use in a given context, needs food. The psychic and emotional interiority activated by the enjoyment of taste is removed with often devastating consequences.
The analysis of the modes of access to gustatory indifference brought to light numerous variants. However, they all have one common trait: indifferent experience to taste lies within an anonymous backdrop, a “generalized buzz” in which the foodstuff loses the sharpness of its qualitative outlines and turns into neutral matter. The category of the neutral has attracted the attention of many philosophers. The neutral is the expression of an elusive experience, very difficult to grasp and to define. For our subject, it is enough to recall two main interpretative lines, one that sees the neutral as a “horizon of meaning” indispensable to perception and even to living (this is the position of the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot), and one that sees it as a specific and historical determination of thought, provisional and to be overcome (although for different reasons, this idea was proposed by philosophers such as Emmanuel Lévinas and Luce Irigaray). Our perspective runs transversally across these two options, for in aesthetics of taste as relation all experiences have multiple possibilities and, consequently, they may express different values. Gustatory indifference is no exception. As the examples above have shown, there are cases of perfectly fitting and appropriate indifference, but also cases that manifest incoherent and deficient attitudes. Regarding food, we cannot endorse the idea that indifferent neutrality is the highest experience, because that would mean refusing the aesthetics of taste as the environmental perception of differences that promotes the capability of enjoying quality, through experiences of pleasure as well as functional and formed knowledge. At the same time, we cannot endorse the idea that—to put it bluntly—without tasting there is no eating. To give an example. The Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray argued, in a book with the same title, that “to speak is never neutral,” meaning that language and thought are outcomes of gender, theoretical constructs oriented by the constructors’ gender. In particular, Irigaray declared—thus presupposing that knowledge is the result of conflicts of forces, and then the expression of the prevalent power—that Western thought and language constituted themselves through male categories from which the founding hierarchies of classical philosophy derive. She mentions the advantage of theory over practice, of reason over passion, of the distal senses over the proximal senses (Irigaray 1985). The argument raised by Irigaray benefits our discussion regarding taste and gastronomy. Do they express gender rules? It is difficult to deny completely. But if, to paraphrase the title of Irigaray’s book, we were to ask whether “eating is ever neutral,” we could not give an answer in absolute terms. The relationship between food, cooking, taste, and gender cannot be denied; and this also explains the subordinate nature of home cooking as mainly women’s business, and the ennoblement of “artistic” gastronomy and cuisine as mainly men’s business, but that is another story I cannot tell here. However, the subject I propose here is not limited to this specific determination of the perceptual experience of food.
Observation shows us foods that lead to less marked gustatory approaches. These foods develop less oriented experiences, that is, experiences less committed to cultural taste and perhaps even to less intense pleasure, and more commensurate instead to experiencing the neutral. The most basic and simple foods such as water, bread, milk, wild herbs, and so on are of that kind. Obviously, I am not suggesting that these foods are without taste; neither do I claim these foods to be “simple” in ontological terms. Making good bread is anything but simple, and eating good bread can be a wonderful gustatory experience. When I write “simple” I refer to the perceiver’s perspective in terms of taste experiences. In other words, I only want to point out the greater propensity some foods possess for entering into a less oriented and marked relationship than other foods such as wine or fine dining creations
usually require. Please mind the italics; my aim is to remind us of the environmental occurrences of eating and tasting. Generally the qualitative parameters of taste are intensity, strength, flavor complexity, and their subsequent elaborations. It is within
this grammar of taste that the paradigm of gastronomy as value and culture has grown. A “new gastronomy,” however, stemming from an aesthetics of food as an ecological experience, can accept the challenge of
also embracing a less intense, less powerful, less complex taste in its domain. Let’s take water as maybe the most relevant example. According to the Chinese sage
Laozi, water comes closest to the “way,” the
tao (Jullien 1998). Water recalls neutrality as the background of immanence, as the possibility of life itself. On the dietary level, it refers to gustatory indifference, not because it cannot express different aesthetic and nonaesthetic properties—qualitative differences in waters regarding both chemical composition and sensory perception do exist—but rather as the vital element par excellence, the main component of our bodies and of the entire ecological system in which life on earth appeared. In a phenomenological sense, water easily induces an inattentive perception—remember “reception in distraction”—that does not focus on qualitative nuances. Water attracts an indifferent and nonaesthetic perception. In this sense, it is the exact opposite of wine, even if Barthes suggested the historically correct opposition of wine and milk, two liquids that have never been mixed. The recent fashion of water-tasting courses along the lines of wine-tasting courses was a bit of a stretch, and explains the reason for their failure, just as the existence of “water menus” in some gourmet restaurants often elicits indifference. If wine is a strongly culturalized artifact, the expression of choices and styles, as well as a dispensable adult beverage, considering water in the same way and turning it into a matter of
expertise and specific knowledge really seem irrelevant, by comparison, in most daily experiences—maybe even an offense to sensitivity. No one feels ignorant or inadequate for not being “proficient” in the taste of water. Only with a focused and finalized perceptive effort could we prepare ourselves for the gustatory and qualitative description of water in everyday circumstances. Again, this is not always true and de jure: there can be specific occurrences in which we realize the bad taste of one water or the good taste of another. And of course, this argument does not apply to professionals in water analysis for health, hygiene, or sales and marketing reasons. They have a different scope and another perceptive project.
The above reasoning does not underestimate water, rather the opposite. Water is a primary pleasure and can also be great when we are dehydrated. But the typology of this pleasure is different from that of wine or adult foods; it is a more neutral pleasure and less prone to specific attention. The pleasure of water is normally a
haptic pleasure, having to do with lips, throat, and tissues and only occasionally the recognition of specific flavors. Similar considerations that should always be evaluated case by case with respect to every single experience lived and to every single ecological perception may apply to “simple” and “basic” foods that refer to the deeper biological stratum of human evolution, such as milk, grains, and some vegetables.
An original elaboration of Chinese thought can be found in the philosophy of the French sinologist François Jullien. He developed an aesthetics of taste based on the category of blandness (Jullien 2007), which has some points in common with the perspective of indifference I propose here. According to Jullien, the bland (which in his system does not correspond to the neutral, but for our purposes we can ignore this difference) indicates the overcoming of every single radical inclination and is a kind of equalizer of all flavors expressed in its midst, where they stop opposing one another. In this sense, blandness is the most difficult “flavor” to perceive, because it is a backdrop, a vague, rarified, and faded sensation and its paradigm is water. As I have already mentioned, the grammar of Western gastronomy—a Eurocentric, Mediterranean-centric, even Franco-centric grammar until a few years ago—has instead been strongly bent on depreciating every “bland” perception, which is neither intense nor strong or complex. The Western gastronomic model is that of variety, diversity, and intensity. Whatever does not fit in it is usually considered less “interesting” and less “complex,” and, into this context, whatever is “less” converges on the neutral and its experiential relative, indifference. In Under the Jaguar Sun, “bland” was the epithet that Olivia used for her husband, accusing him of being incapable of feeling life’s nuances strongly and powerfully. (In Italian, when something does not interest us, or we are not passionate about it, we say that it is “tasteless.”) However, in the contemporary adventures of dressed taste, it is possible to come across a different and freer paradigm, in keeping with a more comprehensive evaluation of the neutral. In recent years, some new trends in fine cuisine and cooking seem to be moving in this direction with simpler dishes, easier ways of tasting them, and a more “relaxed” approach even to fine dining.
I feel that it is important to repeat once more that such a theoretical framework is not a defense of the neutral or the bland tout court; instead, it provides a clarification of the experiential
potential that might originate from the neutral and the bland in given contexts. In fact, the neutral often expresses the ideology of nutritionism: supplements and functional foods that have neutral taste since their synthesized components are without flavor. And this ideology is in turn tied to food production of very poor quality that delivers almost tasteless foods, badly grown or bred to minimize costs and maximize profits. Thus, in many cases indifference and neutrality do not represent an opportunity to be seized, most obviously with the expression of production and taste standardization. The aesthetics of taste as an ecological relationship therefore suggests paying careful attention and discussing each case individually.
The considerations regarding water and the neutral lead to the development of a broader meaning of pleasure. The pleasure I presented in the first chapter had a strong characterization in terms of inclination and exclusion since when the main reference is intensity some flavors exclude others. A different pleasure, though, is also possible. A pleasure experienced
around food and not
of food, that is, one where food can play the role of a supporting actor. It is appropriate to insert this kind of pleasure into the framework of the indifferent approach, for at this point, it will be easier to understand its legitimacy. Imagine a very common situation. You decide to go out for dinner with some friends and choose the place for reasons other than the quality of the meal, such as the beauty of the location, the people who frequent it, the friendliness of the owners, excellent live music, the convenience regarding the fact that afterward you may want to go see a movie. For a negotiated and deliberate reason, in one of these or other possible cases one decides to subordinate gustatory experience—in terms of both naked pleasure and dressed taste—to another overriding enjoyment, within which considerations of taste are then subsumed. Experiences like the one just described are perfectly legitimate, and they show once again the complexity and variability of our relationship with food. Loading all the weight of possible pleasure
around the taste
of food is, in fact, at best a naive and often very limiting attitude, which even runs the risk of missing the overall understanding of the ongoing experience.
In the second chapter, I mentioned the possibility of broadening gustatory pleasure through cultural awareness and the acquisition of expertise. Remember the words of Wendell Berry and Bertrand Russell; knowing more about the history of food, about its sources and criteria of production and so on orients and intensifies pleasure. Sometimes this is true. With respect to different cases, I have now arrived at the argument that the acquisition of knowledge is not sufficient, or more precisely, that “acquiring” is not the right term to be applied here. Since this point will be discussed more thoroughly in the next chapter, I will only highlight here that what we need is not an extension of the pleasure
of food, but rather
around food; occasionally, one can skillfully reduce the importance of (the taste of) food. With respect to this approach, which I propose to call “taste exclusivism,” the attitude of someone who thinks they have to appreciate food only and exclusively through taste appreciation, there are then at least two limitations. The first limitation has to do with the social nature of taste. If taste has an eminently social and mundane dimension, it becomes necessary to emphasize its necessarily discrete and intermittent essence. It is impossible to savor and taste
in continuum because our physiological apparatus cannot bear it, and also because we are not always together with others. The gustatory experience requires complementary moments—respites, reprieves, and frequent breaks. It is certainly possible to eat on one’s own and this is often associated today with the atmospheric indifference that characterizes entire lifestyles and behavior patterns. It is even possible to relish a lone meal, as experts, critics, and food professionals sometimes do,
tasting in solitude. But this practice often goes hand in hand with specific purposes and does not represent the ordinary and common model of the experience of taste, which, not by chance, requires sharing. Sampling is not eating, tasting wine is not drinking it, and there is nothing more evident than socialization to make this difference clear. Sampling and tasting are activities that cry out for concentration, and maybe even a certain amount of solitude. But how many people enjoy intentionally going to a restaurant alone, or opening a bottle of wine on their own? Again, I do not pose this question in order to establish an alternative rule; it depends. For example, wine tasting is a special case, due to the very nature of the object being storable. Wine allows repeated interruptions of the taste relationship within the same experience. For this reason, it could come close to a kind of quasi-illusion of suspension of the temporal dimension. It is, in fact, possible to drink a bottle of wine very slowly and for many hours, approaching that meditative and almost contemplative state typical of other experiences that we are easily willing to accept as aesthetic, because of the prevalent paradigm of visual perception based on contemplation (Scruton 2010). But this is not the case for most of our everyday experiences, in which taste, above all, develops in a relationship that includes communicative expression. From the mother/child relationship during nursing, to the apprenticeship that characterizes the establishment of a grammar of taste in adulthood, which takes place in social contexts, gustatory perception misses the necessity of solitary experiences. Generally speaking, expressions of pleasure and appreciation require community and witnesses. Even Michel de Montaigne wrote that no pleasure has any savor without communication. If, on the one hand, taste exclusivism forgets to place the experience of taste in its broadest context, and therefore neglects the possibilities resulting from the extension of pleasure, on the other it does not sufficiently consider that the taste experience should
in any case be a limited experience confined in space and time.
The second limit of taste exclusivism has to do precisely with the specific nature of the temporal structure of the taste relationship. Tasting is a rhythmic temporal experience with rather narrow and hardly expandable boundaries. In comparison with other aesthetic experiences—such as writing, reading, looking at that famous painting, meditating under a tree—eating, due to its process made of ingestion, digestion, metabolism, does not allow the perception of time annihilation (Telfer 1996). Even if we were experiencing the most intense pleasure, tasting the most wonderful food in an exceptional restaurant, we would be dealing with an active temporal consciousness, at least in the sense that, at some point, if we were to exceed the food intake our body would send us strong and clear signals. Think of the gastric torture of many wedding banquets or other rituals, where the time for food consumption is extended above and beyond any reasonable limit. This saturation signal is certainly also noticeable with other experiences, but in a different sense (one cannot get drunk by reading, writing, or meditating) and with much wider boundaries. It is possible to “get lost” in thought, imagination, and fantasy, while meditating under a tree for hours or looking at Botticelli’s
Primavera. Taste does not grant such possibilities, and it is for this reason that frequent ennoblings of the taste experience in fine modern arts pertain to
memory and memories—from Proust’s madeleines to countless other examples from literature.
This limit leads me to underline again a crucial point. In traditional aesthetics, aesthetic pleasure is associated with a certain idea of duration, based on the (visual) paradigm of contemplation from a distance. Instead, in gustatory aesthetics as a relational and ecological aesthetic, pleasure and enjoyment are considered to be aesthetic, but they depend on a different paradigm. One must free the aesthetic pleasure from the notion of duration modeled on visual contemplation and connect it to a haptic relationship. The aesthetic pleasure of food is a vital, interactive, and basically short pleasure bounded by a period of contact. Therefore, the second limit mentioned above does not involve a differentiation between aesthetic and nonaesthetic pleasures. It instead emphasizes the fact that human beings require different types of aesthetic pleasure, those pertaining to contemplation and distance, and those pertaining to physical involvement, proximity, and physical engagement.