Taste as Experience: The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Food

Children of a Lesser Sense?

Taste as an Aesthetic Relationship

Do you think it is the part of a philosopher to be concerned with such so-called pleasures as those of food and drink?

—SOCRATES, Phaedo, 64D

For me there is no radical distinction between the grand discourse on “the task” with all its dignity, and the reasons for wanting to go out to dinner with someone. They are not homogeneous questions, but I would not mark out a true opposition.

—JACQUES DERRIDA, A Taste for the Secret

THE PROJECT

This essay stems from a long exercise of observing the ways in which people encounter food and perceive it. This is a particular project that I need to clarify from the outset: the main topic of these pages will be how food is absorbed and assimilated according to an aesthetic approach. The meaning of “aesthetic” in this framework will become clear along the way, starting with this introduction. Allow me to anticipate a bit here by exclusion. My concern in this essay will not be food as an object in itself (for example, I will not inquire into the quality of food with regard to sensory profiles), but rather the experience of food—in a comprehensive and articulated sense. Condensed into a short and somewhat arcane formula, the essay’s basic thesis could be put as follows: taste is situation, circumstance, and ecological experience. An ecological experience is what I call here an aesthetic relationship. The title of the book refers to this formula even more synthetically: Taste as Experience, an explicit homage to John Dewey, who is one of the most important points of reference in this book and, in particular, his Art as Experience. I shall use taste here and not tasting as experience, as one would normally expect, for reasons I will explain along the way. So, what does it mean to say that taste is properly understood through experience, or rather that taste is an aesthetic relationship? Such a question cannot be answered with a pithy statement or a short definition. One needs patience and a spirit of observation. Understanding taste is a matter of learning to observe: to observe others but also oneself, because taste concerns everyone. Taste is not just a sense, nor is it only an emotion or an opinion. Above all, taste is not a thing. Taste needs to be tried and tasted.¹

Taste, like theater, involves many actors and its procedural and dynamic nature comes together in scenes of particular meaning, as in a theatrical scene. I have my “primary scene” from which this idea has grown. A behavior I have always been attracted to and which still fascinates me is the facial expression of people ordering croissants and other pastries for breakfast at a coffee shop in the morning. There is hardly ever a neutral facial expression. Very often, the facial mimicry anticipates the satisfaction of a craving, by way of a vaguely complacent look cast on the object to be eaten, accompanied by the mere hint of a self-satisfied smile. Sometimes this mimicry is joined, in a single inseparable moment, by a shadow of guilt or dietary discomfort, which that interlocutory glance always reveals. This simple and everyday act caught my interest and I started comparing it with similar expressions such as that on the face of someone choosing from the menu at a restaurant, or of people ordering an inexpensive meal at a fast food restaurant after having stood in line for a long while. Over time, I put together an archive of images, made by differences in intent, in intensity, in tone, or in gesture. This now well-seasoned archive is the original source that sparked my thoughts on taste. It is the backbone of this book, grounded in the participation in and fascination for everyday and ordinary life.

In two previous works, I endeavored to reconstruct a genealogy that would establish a link between modern philosophical aesthetics and gastronomy, and organized a specific topic that could comprise this space theoretically (Perullo 2006, 2008). The present essay represents my own proposal, stemming from those two previous studies, within the viewpoint of relational aesthetics that characterizes taste. I will offer here a critical reflection on gustatory attitudes as aesthetic encounters—or at least as the most common and important ones—onto which my comprehensive theoretical proposal is grafted. It assigns an important and unexpected role to the experience of taste for food, but not in an exclusivist sense. This is not a book in praise of gastromania. It is not about praising the experience of taste as something exceptional and rare, or about understanding it as an instrument of power for individual claims of superiority or narcissistic exhibitions of skill. My proposal to value taste as an aesthetic relationship goes in a different direction. Drawing on the work of philosophers such as Epicurus and Montaigne, I intend to promote a more flexible and comprehensive approach, one that aims to be open, nimble, and nonspecialist, an approach that strives toward wisdom, as I explain in the last chapter. Believing in the value of food and taste does not mean subscribing to an exclusive lifestyle, nor does it imply becoming a food fetishist or a finicky “food extremist” obsessed with greed and gluttony. Rather, believing in the value of food and taste means having understood how it becomes possible to explore at least a large part of the sphere of everyday and ordinary human relations from a vital and fruitful perspective through the experience of food. This ambitious project aims to define a philosophy not of food, but rather with food, interpreted above all as aesthetics of taste: experiencing food and drink is ipso facto the comprehension of our ecological situation, how we face the environment, how the interconnections between us and the objects we eat, taste, and incorporate affect our being.

In the first place, I will try to answer two basic questions: How do we perceive food and drink? What are the presuppositions, the potentialities, and the limits of such perceptions? In addition to the primary scene mentioned above, I must add that many years of convivial, professional, and theoretical practice within the gastronomic scene have provided me with a plethora of different approaches to eating and drinking. Furthermore, many years of teaching wine tasting have allowed me to verify and also to directly experience the expectations and intentions that produce such approaches, as well as people’s ensuing tics and aberrations. I found several of these aspects philosophically interesting and worthy of closer reflection. Two other factors also stimulated me, one professional and one personal.

First, we live at a moment in which Western society seems particularly interested in food, and we do so amid a series of complex and contaminated models, ideologies, and attitudes that go beyond the specific area and involve other aspects of culture and civilization. Conceptually tidying up this universe while at the same time offering a theoretical perspective on taste felt like a useful operation to me. In recent years, various insightful philosophical books on taste and the philosophy of food and wine have been written (Scruton 2010; Smith 2007; Korsmeyer 1999; Telfer 1996), and of course I am indebted to these authors. If my essay takes such references for granted, I have tried to explore a different way of looking at the philosophical appreciation of the experience of taste.

The second reason is personal, almost intimate. Jacques Derrida maintained that every system of thought—and, in general, every act of writing—stems from an autobiographical impulse. In this sense, he declared philosophy to be an egodicea, that is, an attempt to justify the course of one’s life with rational arguments that transcend individual experience. Therefore, this essay is also the egodicea of a gastro-thinker, someone who for many years has needed to justify his passion for food and wine in a philosophical way. I experience gastronomy as a continuous and complete process of theoretical existence, inseparable from the search for meaning, thought, and effects. Food is my means, the refractive angle from which I interpret life, my search for humanity. All this is in line with Montaigne’s dictum “we reach the same end by discrepant means.”

I stated above that taste is not merely a sense; why? According to the mainstream of Western thought, taste is the simplest and the least interesting sense of our physiological apparatus, because it responds to a rather limited series of stimuli in comparison with the other senses. In truth, taste cannot be reduced to the chemesthetic sensations of the receptors in the oral cavity. Its process of sensorial elaboration in fact always involves the sense of smell and from time to time—depending on the specific type of function or purpose—all the other senses. This process is completed by the brain, on the basis of editing sensory data deriving from chemico-physical stimuli together with other pieces of information (cultural, educational, and contextual). Taste constitutes—to use a phrase coined by the psychologist James Gibson, who carried out pioneering studies in this field in the mid-twentieth century—a complex perceptual system. In other words, taste and smell are conventionally defined as chemical senses, because the stimuli to which the organs of the nose and mouth are first subjected derive from chemical compounds and are then processed by receptors. Yet taste and smell as organs of perception cannot be reduced to chemical senses. The process leading from a stimulus to its elaboration as sensation (that is, the immediate impression that corresponds to the quality and intensity of that stimulus), and from the sensation to its elaboration as perception (a higher-level modality organized into spatial and temporal information), is very complex and highly nuanced. Very simply put, like all the other senses, even taste does not occur within a physiological apparatus alone. Gustatory perception is a complex one, involving functions such as memory, recognition, and appreciation (Beauchamp 1997). Taste is therefore an intertwining of bodily and mental processes in constant interaction with the surrounding environment.

Acquiring such theoretical awareness gives great potential to a philosophy of food, but it is also a necessary step for a philosophy with food. If understanding taste as an aesthetic experience requires the knowledge of how the entire process works, if scientifically speaking taste is not a simple sense that can be reduced to a mere mechanical device consisting of a few basic flavors (scientists today count five: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami, but new ones may join the list soon), then taste cannot be simple philosophically either. Rather, taste is a function of many individual, cultural, and social variables; but this fact produces valuable differences in every respect. And these differences require philosophical investigation, attention, and receptiveness in order to be clearly understood and experienced.

In the meantime, let us continue observing the customers at the coffee shop having breakfast. This scene is open to a wealth of interpretations regarding the meaning of experiencing food: the relationship between nutrition, pleasure, and enjoyment; the different life experiences of the actors being observed; the geographical and historical contingencies in which the scene takes place; as well as the quality and the final destination of the raw materials consumed. By playing detective in a coffee shop in the morning, one can collect much information about taste in terms of value, which cannot be simply reduced into quantitative and numeric factors. Because of this, I argue that a correct understanding of taste requires a qualitative dimension that calls for a specific narrative of every single experience, each with its own situated story and structure. The notions of value and quality are not exhaustive, but they form the backbone of the experiential and relational dimension of taste. So the present essay presents a combination of aesthetic reflections on the main theoretical problems regarding the narration of taste experiences. It goes without saying that this strategy is deliberately unsystematic: taste lies on the sidelines of systematic theorization, bound always to specifically biographical and autobiographical dimensions. Food is ingested and represents the only portion of the world we materially incorporate on a daily basis. It also constitutes one of our first, most relevant, and repeated relationships with the external world, and this is certainly enough to prevent us from treating it as a trivial object, or something to consider at a distance.

There are several positions regarding the theoretical status of taste. According to some scholars, taste can be objectified and systematized like any other object of study. According to others, however, its very characteristics prevent any possible systematization and produce a certain elusiveness, something that is considered as a limit to a serious treatment of taste. In my perspective, both positions are mistaken. On the one hand, taste represents a phenomenon unique to human experience, because the rapport we have with food is absolutely specific. It is for this reason that I believe that food philosophy is fully legitimate. On the other, one may explore that elusiveness or the marginality of taste with respect to our optical frame as a resource. The predominance of vision in the constitution of our grammar of thought is a serious issue. I do not think indeed that Western philosophy has typically neglected to take taste, cooking, and gastronomy into serious consideration merely because of a contingent ideological removal. The fact is that eating and drinking, like all daily activities, are at once very concrete and very fleeting activities; in fact, they appear more concrete and fleeting than many others, as they are necessary and subject to mechanisms of repetition, which tend to rob them of their meaningfulness. They are therefore sentenced to systematic marginality and theoretical transience. If we go back to the roots of the aesthetics of taste, however, it is true that gustatory taste has historically met with a twofold subordination. The first concerns the senses that are generally considered subordinate to the intellect. The second concerns the specific subordination of the so-called inferior senses (touch, taste, and smell) to the higher ones (sight and hearing). Both issues were questioned by the birth and growth of modern aesthetics in the eighteenth century, intended as “the science of sensible knowledge,” according to Baumgarten’s definition (from the Greek word aisthesis, “sensation,” “perception”). The original project of aesthetics aimed to redefine and contrast them to a certain degree, by creating a space for a legitimate sensitivity, irreducible to an intellectual level. Historically, aesthetics and gastronomy share a common ground, a slightly rough terrain from where they began. But the neglect of taste can also be seen differently, as being linked to the very methods utilized in philosophy (at least in the Western tradition), as has been clearly shown by Korsmeyer (1999).

The domain of an aesthetics of taste, that is, a philosophical reflection geared toward understanding taste as an aesthetic experience, lies in this context: historical on the one hand, structural on the other. A historical vindication of taste is possible today only if understood with a profoundly philosophical acceptance of its marginality. The aesthetics of taste is therefore marginal because this sense cannot be understood exclusively through formulations and theories, yet its marginality should be embraced as a theoretical challenge. We live today in an age that could favor a similar train of thought. Of course, such conceptualization remains specific, exactly the kind specific to aesthetics as the science of singularities: taste as experience refers to specific cases, to empirical observations that become stories in a more hospitable and relaxed but no less real or compelling philosophical space. In other words, reflecting on taste also means reflecting in taste. If one lacks adequately lived experiences, it is difficult to come up with anything interesting to say on the subject.

Taste as experience must therefore be understood in two connected ways: experience as in having an experience in the world, as experiencing things of the world (as in becoming an expert), but also experience as living an experience, an inner experience, something that internally changes or enriches us. (In philosophy, these two meanings of experience are distinguished thanks to the German language, which has two distinct words, namely, Erfahrung and Erlebnis.) The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, while explaining his interest in movies, once claimed that in order to find new ways for interrogating the world, philosophical thought ought to reflect not on but in the objects to be understood and dealt with. In other words, it should enter into a vivid and direct relationship with those objects, with that film seeming to offer that opportunity. This is even truer with taste, where there is a tight and very personal relationship between subject and object, a bond where the object is consumed in the body in order to sustain or transform the subject. Subject and object are not separate entities, but rather become a totally intertwined, dynamic, and complex in-between organism. The aesthetics of taste is therefore an aesthetics of relation and implication, an aesthetics that attempts to overcome the stiff and hypostatic resistances and dichotomies that exist between the entities of mind and body, subject and object, or nature and culture.

The multimodal and embedded character of taste—a blend of natural and cultural features—will be examined on various levels in the four chapters of the essay. For taste as an experience of pleasure, knowledge, and indifference espouses a dynamic conception of aesthetics, namely, the idea according to which there are gradual differences but not qualitative separations between the “lower” functions and simpler processes, such as those related to nutrition, and the “higher” and more complex ones, reflective thinking and the arts. Within the frame of this gradualist position, nature and culture are expressions of an environmental continuum with different and interacting players: humans, animals, plants, minerals, and everything elaborated and built by or with them. One of the main ideas underlying my proposal is that taste is always ecologically situated. Saying ecologically instead of culturally marks a difference: ecology refers to the environment, and according to Tim Ingold, whose position I totally agree with, an environment is a field of forces in which lively beings (as well as artifacts) grow (Ingold 2000, 2013). Human taste is therefore part of this continuum; it does not occupy a privileged position for being cultural with respect to the natural taste of other living beings. If anything, it is just a more elaborate structure. It makes no sense to oppose taste to nature and to claim that it is culture any more than the opposite makes sense. Taste is a relationship because it evolves: the childish pleasure we take in certain flavors or foods, which we retain or which suddenly floods back in adulthood, proves this all too well. As we will see especially in the first chapter, nature and culture are differential polarities, procedural articulations, and not static and objectified entities. Precisely for this reason, the approach to food and drink still practiced by some gastronomes, according to which the only way to appreciation lies in technical tasting skills possessed by a handful of experts, is questionable because it is—in an apparently paradoxical manner, as I’ll attempt to show along the way—tied to a formalistic and abstract vision. A parallel can be drawn here with the conceptual shift in cooking, that is, that approach according to which the only thing that matters—for food and taste to be catalysts of values—is the ideas that transform food into what it becomes (Perullo 2013). This is neither a nostalgic suggestion nor an unlikely return to the so-called taste of origin as a natural pleasure; nor is it related to other charming but ideological simplifications. The point is rather to recognize and highlight the appropriateness of each single gustatory experience for the different ecological contexts in which it takes place and unfolds. There is no rule of thumb for how to taste, or for how to appreciate and enjoy. There is not one way to taste correctly. In other words, in certain circumstances a kind of pleasure I will define as “naked” could be the most appropriate access to taste, regardless of specific cultural paradigms or ethical justifications. In other circumstances, however, this may not be the case.

Here the notion of context plays a decisive role. For example: lunch in a three-star restaurant is a very different experience from a quick bite at a roadside diner while on a trip, but it would be hasty to claim that only the first experience can offer gastronomic delight. In the first case, the pleasure offered and the attention required are of an intense and refined nature. But even everyday lunch can also be enjoyable. Not only are there sandwiches and sandwiches, some are very good indeed. There is also a more subtle reason related to the situation in which food is eaten. In fact, the sandwich itself might not be satisfactory, and one may feel culturally and sensorially far from fine dining, but this is not enough for rejecting such an experience or for denying its pleasure In fact, as one knows well there is also negative pleasure: in this instance, I can take pleasure even in recognizing that that sandwich is not good, yet I am hungry and I eat it. And satisfying my hunger is exactly what gives me pleasure here. Furthermore, I can derive enjoyment from being in a beautiful and hence satisfactory situation (for example, I am in the company of the person I am in love with) in such a way that the taste of the sandwich is completely charged with my amorous energy. Nonetheless, context does not play a hypostatic role here: it’s not the deus ex machina of the whole story or, at least, not in a simple way. There are no rigid and absolute contexts indeed, as the notion of context is an open and variable one. Context is a set of connections established in a given scene, in a given theater of meaning; it is neither a foundation nor a fence, rather—to use a concept coined by Gibson—a net of affordances.

Addressing taste as an aesthetic experience also means understanding the dynamics of those affordances inserted into experience. I think a particular philosophical approach can offer a great help for this task. In this essay I have chosen to conduct my discussion in clear language and without the use of jargon, but the professional philosophers who read me will identify my approach as an eclectic combination of deconstruction, pragmatism, and anthropological approaches.

This book contains four chapters. They are stages in a process that is neither a straight nor an upward path, but rather a zigzagging one. The first three chapters—“Pleasure,” “Knowledge,” and “Indifference”—recount three different modes with which we can approach gustatory taste. Stemming from these three modes, the fourth chapter—“The Wisdom of Taste, the Taste of Wisdom”—is an elaboration of the experiential and existential attitude that captures the theoretical significance of the taste relationship with greater accuracy. This final attitude does not revoke any of the previous approaches but rather expands them into a wider framework. Each chapter explores the territory of gusto using different material, especially that derived from literature, philosophy, and personal experience. Only a few sources are explicitly gastronomical. There are two main reasons for this. First, I like to use every source I think may prove useful for analysis and reflection, without privileging any one genre. Second, I have sometimes found that my personal outlook is better represented by authors from other fields of learning rather than only gastronomy. Every chapter contains sections that investigate particular aspects of the approach taken into consideration.

The concepts of pleasure and knowledge are very complex ones and, obviously, are so broad and general in themselves that they cut across every field of human comprehension. In this essay, they almost become umbrella terms and are used exclusively as heuristic functions, to help map the whole possible spectrum of the experience of taste—at least as far as it can be put on paper, that is, modeled into a theory. In fact, pleasure and knowledge almost always intersect to a varying degree in concrete experience, modulating themselves along a spectrum from less to more, without absolute interruptions. A reflection on taste that starts from pleasure does, however, have one strong justification: our first contact with food is modulated by pleasure, a deep pleasure with its roots in the biocultural sphere of primary human drives, a sphere where pleasure and knowledge, need and desire, nutrition and taste are all one. One of our first aesthetic relationships with the external world is one where food is a source of both nourishment and enjoyment. There is a strong and precise connection between aesthetics and childhood (Dissanayake 2000) and food and taste can play an important role in evolutionary aesthetics. Even though a pure or naked pleasure is theoretically possible—at least from the perspective of the gustatory experience of the perceiver—it is very difficult to exclude more complex cognitive processes in the appreciation of certain foods and the rejection of others. Need, sensual pleasure, and knowledge often constitute a knot that is hard to untie. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben defined taste as “pleasure that knows, knowledge that enjoys” (Agamben 2015). Accordingly, the separate treatment of these first two points of access—pleasure and knowledge—has a mainly descriptive and explanatory purpose, satisfying certain architectural constraints. This sketchiness will be extensively amplified through the use of examples and discussion.

If these first two modes of access to taste are, after all, obvious—it is always said that food is culture, and sometimes also that food is pleasure—the third is the dramatic turn of events in the aesthetics of taste as an aesthetic experience. Why should an essay promoting the aesthetic value of taste and defending the legitimacy of gustatory expertise also contain a thorough discussion and defense of indifference? All this may seem slightly bizarre. In support of the methodology of active observation underpinning my approach, experience has convinced me that it is also necessary to consider indifference in order to fully understand the experience of taste. Indifference to taste is not simply a lack of something (thoughtfulness, attention, or ability); it can also express feelings appropriate to the context and even necessary criticism. Furthermore, gustatory indifference is part of everyday life. Our perceptual apparatus, stimulated by food several times a day, does not always guarantee adequate levels of attention. Even indifference can thus serve as a resource for the overall experiential blueprint from which that procedural build-up called taste emerges. Indifference does not grow simply from static routine and is not always a trivial negation of values and ignorance. Together with pleasure and knowledge, it is part of a fluid experiential fabric, in which contaminations, entanglements, and multiple accesses are possible. Furthermore, indifference is necessary for achieving the concise and comprehensive attitude that is introduced in the last chapter of this essay with the concept of gustatory wisdom. Being a wise taster means having attained the realization of evolutionary change, of the finite and partial nature of experience, of the impossibility of severing ties with the deepest layers of our being that also emerge through taste and thus claim their rights. Gustatory wisdom is a flexible and elastic attitude that follows from the acquisition of the capacity to perceive differences, contaminations, and the complex dynamics inherent in taste experience. To put it in other words, here taste stands for a device that generates diplomatic skills and, at same time, that can improve our art of living.

Two more clarifications are in order. First, for reasons of competency, perspective, and space, I will not discuss any behavior directly associated with eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating, nor I will discuss, except marginally, extreme behaviors such as fasting or cannibalism. I will instead focus on ordinary and everyday ways of gustatory perception: eating a donut, enjoying a piece of chocolate, drinking a glass of wine, exploring the local cuisine while traveling, or trying a traditional dish at a restaurant. Of course, I know that boundaries between normal and pathological may be slippery, and the description of certain experiences will touch upon areas that belong to the realm of pathology and are studied in psychology and medicine. But I have decided to leave any further exploration of these themes to the reader. The second point concerns a stylistic choice: although what follows is specifically and directly focused on taste and gastronomy, readers with a background in philosophy will be able to discern several theoretical references. Some are mentioned explicitly in the text, whereas others are not, so as not to weigh down the text. But I hope such references may also be of interest to readers who are not professionally engaged in the area of philosophy. I am convinced that taste is an open and wonderful topic in the practice of philosophy and, for this reason, I think that it can be taken as a quintessential case for contributing to contemporary thought and especially to aesthetics.

DIFFICULTIES AND RESISTANCES

Food studies has developed in the Western academic world since the 1960s mainly thanks to anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas), history (Marc Bloch, Jean-Louis Flandrin, and Massimo Montanari), and sociology (Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, and Claude Fischler). Philosophy joined the group a little later through gender studies and cultural studies in the United States. The first groundbreaking and highly praiseworthy works (Curtin and Heldke 1992; Kass 1999) opened up possibilities for research in many areas. A few years later, books like those by Elizabeth Telfer (1996) and Carolyn Korsmeyer (1999) brought to light the full potential of food as a topic for philosophical inquiry. I believe that while the analytical approach of these works—especially Telfer’s—point out very clearly the topic’s theoretical issues, they nonetheless fail in two different aspects. First, because they still treat food as an object of analysis among others, regardless of its singularity, which makes it not only an object of study, but rather a systematic set to be incorporated. This methodology leaves out many things. Second, they do not develop a general perspective on what one may do with gustatory experiences in order to achieve alternative possibilities for a better quality of life. The transformative power of taste is therefore left out. These two issues are precisely those at stake in my essay. Before considering the heart of the matter, I ask you to bear with me a little longer while I sum up some very well-known difficulties and conflicts of a philosophical nature about taste. It is necessary to clear the path we wish to take of at least the major obstacles.

How is philosophical reflection on taste and gastronomy feasible? This is not a rhetorical question. Already Plato—in his dialogues Phaedrus, Gorgias, and Phaedo—refused to assign cookery the status of a science or an art. Plato compares cookery to rhetoric with respect to the false and seductive pleasures it provides. Cooking is an empirical activity aimed at seduction, since it only satisfies a basic need. It has nothing to do with knowledge because it does not proceed from general axioms, or with art because it does not satisfy any true and intellectual enjoyment. Its pleasures are physical, ephemeral, and unworthy of rational man: “Do you think it is the part of a philosopher to be concerned with such so-called pleasures as those of food and drink?” Socrates asks in the Phaedo. Here taste is at stake. In most of Western thought, the sense of taste—together with smell—is considered minor and inferior because it is more than proximal: its accomplishment is its intake. According to this view, which runs all the way through the history of Western culture, senses are divided into higher ones (sight and hearing) and lower ones (taste and smell). Touch usually stays in the middle, in an ambiguous position. In the Greek and the Christian tradition, sight—together with hearing, which is instead dominant in the Jewish tradition—is the noblest sense, because it is distal and, therefore, objective. Sight explores, knows, and measures entities in the distance. Controlling from a distance seems to be one of the main bases of objective knowledge: the seen entities become objects. Visual perception is the basis for much of our understanding of reality and for most of our relationships with things (Korsmeyer 1999), so much so that knowledge, as well as faith and beauty, is often depicted using visual metaphors: the word idea (mental image, etymologically derived from the Latin video, “to see”), the notion of light (which refers to beauty), and man as an image of God. Reading and listening are the true or at least the deepest accesses to knowledge, to faith, and to art. When aesthetics turned into philosophy of art, it mainly dealt in fact with visual and auditory arts, even less with touch (the decline of sculpture starting in the eighteenth century is telling), and not at all with taste and smell. As I already mentioned in this hierarchy, touch is in an ambiguous position, since it is evidently a sense of contact and proximity, but not of ingestion. According to some scholars, this difference is enough to grant touch a cognitive status, because it can explore the surface and the shape of things, without blending with them. In some modern philosophical systems—such as those of Descartes and Spinoza—touch is even a privileged sense. For Descartes, for example, all senses are attributable to touch on a physical basis (as the Greek philosopher Democritus maintained); taste is therefore a tactile sense. This position—a minority view in modern aesthetics—is very interesting in light of this book.

In a famous passage at the beginning of his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Hegel states that “the sensuous aspect of art is related only to the two theoretical senses of sight and hearing, while smell, taste, and touch remain excluded from the enjoyment of art. For smell, taste, and touch have to do with matter as such and its immediately sensible qualities—smell with material volatility in air, taste with the material liquefaction of objects, touch with warmth, cold, smoothness, etc.” (Hegel 1975, 38–39). Hegel is radical and also excludes touch from the realm of art; only sight and hearing produce aesthetic knowledge and pleasure. Taste and smell produce a pleasure that is physical, at least because it has developed by material processes that occurred into the body. Hegel and Plato completely agree on this point, and so does Kant, for whom a judgment of taste—an aesthetic judgment—is only given if the taste in question is a metaphorical one, that is, taste for beauty. Only artistic beauty and natural beauty allow for universal appreciation, tied to a pure, selfless, and necessary feeling, free from any material need and any urgent corporeal necessity. Much of modern aesthetics in the West took up these positions, perhaps varying them slightly, but often confirming the fundamental assumption of the exclusion or the subordination of taste and smell.

Of course, alternative positions occurred. Authors from the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and modern times have been willing to allow gustation into the realm of phenomena worthy of philosophical reflection, occasionally even using it for an alternative paradigm of knowledge. Epicurus—whom we will meet again in the next chapters—is the most famous representative and eponym of the positive and key role food plays in philosophy; but there are also libertines and materialists, and, interestingly, some medieval scholars attributed great importance to the palate. A monist and ecological conception of reality that goes beyond the dichotomy between the ideal and the real world can easily overcome the argument that places the distal senses as “superior” to the proximal ones. According to Gibson and Dewey, seeing and hearing, on the one hand, and touch, taste, and smell, on the other, are in fact different perceptual systems, with different functions, but they derive from the same psychophysical unit that developed during the course of evolution with respect to different skills. To put it differently, in a systemic approach, just as it is wrong to state that the brain is metaphysically superior to the hand, because a coevolutionary process between the development of the prehensile hand and the growth of the human brain occurred, it is also wrong to define sight as “superior” to taste and smell. Sight became more and more convenient and useful in the growing process of human beings. It is not so important to us now to recognize the scent of a blackberry bush as it is to recognize the noise of a car or the sight of a predator, such as a tiger. Or even the smell of gas in our apartment, informing us of the risk of an explosion.

Indeed, one can consider incorporation and assimilation a cognitively safer way of interacting with objects than sight, due to the assumption that epistemic certainty may require exploration by contact (a food may seem cold to the eye, only contact will tell me if it is hot). Even the inventor of the term aesthetics, the Leibnizian Baumgarten, left a possibility for the palate: aesthetics as “the science of sensible knowledge” referred to all senses. In the original project, aesthetics was to be the science of all arts, including the beautiful ones, as well as the practical and useful ones. However, as I already mentioned, after its birth Western aesthetics turned primarily to elaborating the intangible aspects of art. Thus, Epicurean thought, as well as that of thinkers such as Montaigne, remained marginal and secondary. And even if the cognitive ennobling of gustatory taste were thought to be possible, it does not imply its free and unlimited cultivation and circulation: the paradigm of moderation—la giusta misura—became a precept of the highest importance also for those who claimed the legitimacy of food pleasures. David Hume, who carefully took taste and the palate into account for his explanation of aesthetic appreciation, wrote that a “very delicate palate, on many occasions, may be a great inconvenience both to a man himself and to his friends: But a delicate taste of wit or beauty must always be a desirable quality; because it is the source of all the finest and most innocent enjoyments, of which human nature is susceptible” (Hume 1909–14, §17). The moral of the story is that an expert in visual arts will never be accused of knowing too much, yet it is easy to see how the intake of food beyond a certain measure is considered, outside of health issues, to be ethically and politically dangerous.

Are the views of Platonic philosophy, of Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics on the value of gustatory taste mere relics of the past? Unfortunately not. Two recent examples from Italian journalism will suffice to demonstrate this. The first appeared in the newspaper La Stampa on September 26, 2007, in an op-ed by the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater titled “L’arte della digestione” (The art of digestion). In this article, Savater criticized the way in which today the media celebrates gastronomy and chefs, taking the cue from a number of meetings on creative cooking and polemicizing in particular using the idea of cooking as an art form, promoted in the last decade by the great chef Ferran Adrià. At the heart of his argument, Savater claimed that food “is an honest craft, not an artistic creation whose goal is not to satisfy the mere senses, but to awaken feelings and encourage the discovery of new meaning. The highest effect of a dish is to pleasantly satiate hunger; true art, in reality, begins later.” Savater fused here the Platonic argument with the Hegelian and Kantian one: art has nothing to do with material sensitivity except as an interim stage. Seeing and hearing actually serve as a go-between for the spiritual and ethereal feeling of beauty. The strategy I propose in this essay is quite the opposite paradigm: I do not deny the importance of the satisfaction of hunger, but rather suggest that satiating hunger can be a way to awaken feelings, create emotions, and enrich one’s own life with new meanings (Perullo 2013). The second example was published in the Sunday insert of Il Sole 24 Ore on March 15, 2009. With a polemic sideswipe at unnecessary spending in times of crisis, the author also picks on Ferran Adrià, the true bogeyman of any critic of the artistic value of gastronomy, “who serves the most sophisticated and most expensive food in the world in his restaurant.” (By the way, this second bit of information is objectively false, it was never true that Adrià’s restaurant—which definitively closed its doors on July 30, 2011—was the most expensive one in the world.) The article quoted the Catalan chef’s answer to the question regarding the ethical legitimacy of spending about two or three hundred Euros for a dinner. According to Adrià, the decision of who goes to a certain kind of restaurant was to be framed in a different complex of issues. Eating at Adrià is not about going out for dinner, but rather about wanting to indulge in an overall experience that is not only sensory but also cultural, aesthetic, and—in this case—even artistic. From this perspective, the choice is as legitimate as spending one’s money to attend a premiere at La Scala or a major sporting event, or even to buy a pair of designer slacks. This (not only legitimate but also philosophically sound) consideration was greeted by the columnist with “Adrià, give us a break! There is no gallery in your restaurant, if a client does not appreciate your liquid nitrogen mozzarella she cannot even whistle, and in any case you will have to concede that a designer dress lasts a little longer than a dinner.” In a presumptuous and mocking tone, three arguments are used here to confute the deep cultural value of gustatory taste. The first one is that gastronomy is not comparable to art, because “true” art is something altogether different. It is supposedly concerned with spiritual, universal, and disinterested pleasures, not with bodily, singular, and interested ones. The second one is that gastronomy is not comparable to true leisure and genuinely entertaining practices either, such as going to the stadium, where the audience can vent its feelings by whistling. Here gustatory taste and fine dining are curiously enough presented as practices that are empty and boring at the same time, hardly serious if compared to knowledge and art but paradoxically also too serious with respect to leisure and fun. The third argument—one of the most classic objections against the value of gastronomy—is that gustatory pleasures are not comparable to clothing and couture either, because unquestionably clothes last longer than a meal; they are less perishable items and, therefore, a better investment. The Consumption Exclusion Thesis (Monroe 2007) still looms large in the ordinary perception of the (in)comparable values of food and art. Even today, in the age of performance arts, there is a widespread conception according to which a work of art—as an object or as an experience—is a valuable fact because it is lasting, in terms of its permanence, of its cultural memory, and of its storage. The prejudice that a dish and a meal are quickly consumed is still ongoing, although everything today clearly indicates that this is not the case (digital memory, mediatization, narration on one side; dietetics and political issues about food hold everyone’s attention) (Perullo 2013).

The objections against gustatory taste thus fall into three categories: epistemological (taste belongs to the minor senses, cooking belongs to the empirical activities); aesthetic (true art versus crafts or applied arts); ethical (the dangers of physical pleasure, compliance to animal instincts, gluttony and greed). Today, these objections seem threadbare, both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. The idea of any rigid definition of art was called into question from the beginning of the twentieth century onward by many authors (including, Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Dewey, and Danto, to name but a few from different philosophical areas) and now into the domain of aesthetics it is almost commonsense. In the twentieth century, the modern separation between the fine arts and crafts, between theoretical and practical activities, was also called into question. More recently, some scholars like the sociologist Richard Sennett and the anthropologist Tim Ingold have proposed a conception of art in its original and most long-lived meaning, that of skillful making and technique (téchne). Art, in the ancient world and throughout the Middle Ages at least up until the Renaissance, was mainly know-how, and was produced according to rules. It therefore expressed the technical capacity and dexterity to make objects with superior care and recognized ability, but within an established code that served as a paradigm. This is an interesting consideration for our specific topic: cooking is certainly a good example of knowing how to do something according to rules, hence a pertinent example of art as skillful making. Therefore, its exclusion from the artworld would seem wrong. Moreover, the representation of the gastronome as someone boring and overweight, if, on one hand, occasionally true, is, on the other, often a caricature produced by someone who holds the whole subject in disregard. Not all gastronomes are dull and ignorant, just as not all philosophers and journalists are intelligent and brilliant. Let us once again take Ferran Adrià as an example, the most discussed and probably least directly “tasted” chef in the history of cooking. Many of his critics, as we have seen, have never set foot in his restaurant (and not even in restaurants comparable to his), nor do they know anything precise about his techniques or about the history of cuisine. Adrià has become the symbol of artistic cuisine, and furthermore has become so in the modern sense of art, which means creativity, originality, and imagination. He was, in 2007, the first chef to be invited as an artist to the Documenta exhibition (Hamilton and Todolì 2009). Although the contemporary artworld accepted this, it was feared and opposed by many others. Why? In this essay, I will suggest that the reasons are psychological and historical rather than theoretical. Finally, even the argument that gustatory taste is an ephemeral and fleeting pleasure has been strongly questioned. Taking, as it were, the bull by the horns, how could one measure the length and also the intensity of pleasure? Proust’s madeleine is the easiest example of a different possibility, applying the same paradigm in which taste can evoke and express feelings, sentiments, and memories. It can be a resurfacing of emotional states presumed to have been overcome and forgotten. Food’s potential depth of pleasure and taste can also be substantiated through memory and, in any case, a short but intense experience does not necessarily produce less significant pleasure.

Much of twentieth-century aesthetics has contemplated these questions and tried to provide answers to deconstruct both the Kantian arguments on the judgment of taste and the Hegelian ones on aesthetics as philosophy of art based on the paradigm of visual and auditory perception. These responses provide us with the technical tools that can be applied to a philosophical program in which food is based on taste as a relational experience. If we put these tools to use, it becomes possible to overcome contemplative aesthetics, which exclude the body and gustatory pleasures from the realm of philosophy. If, therefore, a complex project and good arguments are necessary in theoretical terms, on the practical side things are much easier and speak for themselves.

POSSIBILITIES AND PERSPECTIVES

Attributing an aesthetic value to gustatory perception is an option that falls under a more general theoretical perspective. Food constitutes an exceptional field of investigation for a coevolutionary and ecological concept of culture. Taste as an aesthetic experience also represents a possibility of promoting a systemic relationship between food fruition (consumption) and food production. Mass industrial production has progressively deprived the human body of the possibility of autonomously producing and processing food by replacing it with machines. This modern change has been obviously beneficial for many aspects of human life, and has allowed more and better food to reach more people. Under the lens of taste experience, however, that shift of paradigm has often led to a perceptive impoverishment, resulting in an increasing distance between production and consumption. In modern agriculture, this is defined as a “long production chain,” with no direct relationship between the eater and the eaten, no information, no knowledge of the sources and of the processes of food making. It has become very difficult to think of food in relational terms, and it is also for this reason that we frequently witness total indifference to taste, with the production of anonymous food, of which nothing is known and which is prone to a purely instrumental approach. In the last two centuries the value attributed to practical skills, especially as far as production is concerned, has steadily decreased. It has become subordinate to design-related intellectual skills and mechanical production (Ingold 2000; Sennett 2009). From this point of view, the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, published between 1751 and 1772 under the direction of Diderot and D’Alembert, is one of the last attempts to uphold the importance of these skills and of the technical expertise, acquired with patience and experience, that they require. The subordination of practical skills to intellectual abilities in production runs parallel to the subordination of taste to sight: the “minor” senses refer to practical and marginal skills compared to the constituting processes of the master narrative of modernity, which instead stipulates the “major” senses as the natural instruments for scientific and technological progress.

However, industrial food production is neither good nor bad in itself: its meaning and its value lie in the development of human thinking under a technological guise that, as such, is a great adaptive and evolutionary resource. Nevertheless, technological development does not entail the dismissal of the capacity and skills of the human body in terms of its expression of wants and primary desires, primarily in food making and eating. In the present age, technology can also allow for a fulfilling and intense quality in the aesthetic relationship between human beings and food. It all depends on how technology is used, and on the experiential and social context in which it operates. Gustatory relational aesthetics can play a crucial role for improving awareness of the systemic connection between production and consumption.

The word taste has undergone a semantic shift since the middle of the seventeenth century, passing from identifying a natural sense assigned to the recognition and appreciation of edible substances to expressing a cultural sensitivity entrusted with the evaluation of natural beauty and, above all, works of art. This shift from the literal to the metaphorical strongly affected the subordination of the taste with respect to the other senses. By the eighteenth century, gastronomy had carved out a minor niche for itself in the context of shared practices, hobbies, and recreational activities. Since then, gastronomes have been mostly affluent professionals, dandies, refined connoisseurs, collectors, and journalists. The intellectual-gastronome is as rare as he or she is evanescent. In this light, things are beginning to change: gastronomy and cuisine are gaining ground and many important chefs are becoming highly visible public figures comparable to pop stars and contemporary artists. This contamination between pop culture, material practices, and the Academy—judged, as usual, with moral contempt by purists of thought—offers new potential for gastronomy. In this essay, I will propose a promotion of taste through a lowering strategy: on the one hand by accepting its marginal status, and on the other hand by developing an alternative and critical concept of making and eating food. Gastronomy here is seen not as a social club for acquiescent gentlemen, but rather as a dynamic space in which philosophy, humanities, arts, and natural sciences can reflect on their own times.

Strategies for valuing taste cannot be planned by overthrowing the hierarchy of the perceptible and upsetting the axiological order between minor senses and major senses. The fact that taste is marginal to thought, to knowledge, and to art is not due to vast carelessness, negligence, or a major conspiracy (as the French philosopher Michel Onfray, author of many books advocating the liberation of physical pleasure and taste, is inclined to think). It is not necessary to line up the good guys (the Epicureans, the materialists, the libertines, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and so on) and the bad guys (the Platonists, the idealists, the ascetics). Nor is it necessary for gastronomy to gain admission to the realm of institutional modern art. Instead, taste and cooking should be used to contribute to a redefinition of the boundaries of art (Perullo 2013). Just as the German philosopher Walter Benjamin advised in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” from 1936, in order to be able to consider cinema as an art form, it is not necessary to turn it into something it is not (for example, a refined form of painting or theater); instead, it is necessary to expand the domain of art, to rethink it on a new basis (Benjamin 2008). The same will happen to gastronomy if a reassessment of taste comes about by way of a lowering strategy, consisting in knocking art off its pedestal and, at the same time, in taking taste experiences as aesthetic ones (Saito 2007). This leads to a consequential shift from a subject/object paradigm of knowledge to an ecological one, a “knowing from the inside” perspective as Tim Ingold (2013) calls it.

It is therefore necessary to proceed differently and change the perspective. There are two steps to the strategy of the aesthetics of taste as experience. The first is the unrelenting emphasis on the value of marginality, in all its possible forms. This is the key to reconsidering established boundaries and customary codes. Changing the signs on the marginality of taste perception means accepting its paradoxically parasitic nature: taste is the paradigm of embodied knowledge, which originates and develops in and through the body, and which is not conceivable otherwise. But taste also needs observation, reflection, and introspection, on the one hand, and expression, sharing, and concepts in order to be communicated, on the other hand. The second, even more exciting step involves embracing a different concept of aesthetic value. This concept takes the functional, instrumental, ordinary characteristics of food to the most extreme consequences: the acts of being ingested, assimilated, and metabolized should become the cornerstone of the new aesthetic values of food. In other words, the gustatory process of ingesting, assimilating, and metabolizing plays a key role for the aesthetic value of taste. Instead of classic aesthetic values such as formal beauty, elegance, and harmony forged on distal contemplation (because these objects are never ingested), here we come face to face with the specific domain of eating and tasting. Eating well is an aesthetic value, but “well” does not mean accommodating a value to a standard of reference borrowed from another field. Rather, “well” has to do with the contact of food with our internal tissues, with the juices that make it digestible, with the channels that transport it to where it can be processed. This move will allow enhancing the taste experience as such, not as more or less comparable to the intellectual (and conventionally aesthetic) ones.

Pleasure, knowledge, and indifference are the three main entryways to taste experiences, from the highest intensity and attention to its total absence. I propose to accompany the reader on a journey into this territory. Pleasure goes back first of all to the primary, infantile, instinctual, naked stage of our relationship with food, a stage that is never completely and definitively overcome: pleasure is never neglected. Food is not only—and this statement is equivalent to: cannot be simply reduced to—a cultural construct. In other words, eating is an activity in which, in many respects and from time to time, something like “nature” emerges. After pleasure, knowledge leads us to our conscious intentions, to adulthood, and to the evolution of culture: taste gets dressed. This is a vast and fascinating field, thanks to which the problems of language, identity, authenticity, different preferences, and appreciation can be addressed. Finally, indifference refers to the negation, suspension, or suppression of taste for many different reasons. In this experience, gustatory attention leaves the scene and food is left to perform its purely nutritional and energy-providing function. This is a necessary integration of the experience of eating, without which one would understand nothing of taste as an aesthetic perception. Understanding these three modes of access encourages what I suggest calling the wisdom of taste, a perceptual ability that assimilates the variables of eating experience and reconciles them with a mindful awareness. Wisdom is the outcome of endless self-enhancement and is a dynamic, not static, condition. It can be depicted better as a guide for the continuous exploration of experience than as a perfectly attained state.

Understanding the taste experience as a whole does not mean isolating it from its ordinary dimension. Taste does not have to be ennobled and does not have to become something other than itself. Rather, it is integrated into a philosophy with food, which is close to an aesthetics of everyday life (Saito 2007). Taste as aesthetic relationship lies on the margins of theory. It can also be understood as a theory of the margins. It is an elusive and ethereal object of reflection, precisely because of its evidence, its universality, and its ordinariness. After all, Ludwig Wittgenstein said that the most important aspects of things are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. And Roland Barthes stated in turn that we do not see our own food or, worse, we assume that it is insignificant and trivial. So let’s start observing and perceiving our daily food with open-mindedness, patience, and confidence.