Feeding Thought: A Philosophy of Cooking and Gastronomy

This chapter will focus on exploring food as a medium for art (rather than a subject) and will examine the role of chefs at the intersection of food and art, within the larger narrative of food as a creative medium. Beginning in the 1930s, it explores the role of food as a medium in certain avant-garde movements and proceeds to look at their influence on later work in the studio and the kitchen.

The Monist, 2018

According to the ‘Consumption Exclusion Thesis’ defended by Hegel, the fact that food is consumed means that it cannot be considered a proper art object: art is supposed to be timeless and lasting, two characteristics that food lacks by definition. According to the ‘Interest Exclusion Thesis’ defended by Kant, when judging a work of art we should not have any kind of interest towards it, because aesthetic appreciation is characterized by disinterested pleasure. In order to defend the idea that culinary objects can be art objects we will challenge both theses by proposing a definition of art able to explain how culinary objects do last in time even after their consumption, and how our approach to them can be disinterested even if we are physiologically attracted by the food. Art and food matter for different reasons. Typically, we associate art with beauty, emotions, and creativity, while food is considered our principal means of sustenance (it is our fuel, providing energy to make o...

2021

The philosophy of food is an emerging and distinctive area of philosophical inquiry, and much of the work in this area has been informed by philosophical aesthetics. In recent years, philosophers have found it especially productive to explore connections between aesthetics and the sciences and philosophy of the mind. This special issue of Crítica, Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía aims to bring together these two developments to explore what can be learned about food by approaching it from philosophical perspectives that are richly informed by our best aesthetic theories and our best theories of the mind. In this introduction, we contextualize the recent development of the philosophy of food as an autonomous subdiscipline within philosophy and situate the essays in the special issue in relation to that subdiscipline.

BRILL, 2023

When does eating become art? The Aesthetics of Taste answers this question by exploring the position of taste in contemporary culture and the manner in which taste meanders its way into the realm of art. The argument identifies aesthetic values not only in artistic practices, where they are naturally expected, but also in the spaces of everydayness that seem far removed from the domain of fine arts. As such, it seeks to grasp what artists – who offer aesthetic as well as culinary experiences – actually try to communicate, while also pondering whether a cook can be an artist

Here I defend the historically contentious claim that food can be aesthetic. I sketch four objections: the argument that food can’t be aesthetic because tastes are ephemeral, because food cannot induce contemplation, because tastes are indescribable or unjustifiable and because food has other purposes. I show that these presumed requirements are either met by food, or are implausible because ordinary aesthetic experiences do not meet them. I then defend the uncommon claim that chefs can be artists. I do this by arguing chefs intend food for aesthetic appreciation, and this suggests they are artists. I identify their artworks as abstract dishes. I also argue that because meat-eating is immoral, vegetarian chefs are greater artists than chefs who use meat. If my claims are correct, then Sibley is wrong to consider tastes to be minor aesthetic concerns. We should view and value great chefs the same way as Picasso and Mozart.

Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio , 2017

Can there be "languages of food" in Nelson Goodman's sense of "languages of art" ? Food appears like a borderline case because of its strong dependence on context and on the individuals involved. We seem to have difficulty either comparing food with language or seeing it as art. This is at odds with the fact that food has been recognized as an art form for decades by art institutions. The paper approaches this problem on a level often neglected in the discussion: pragmatics, the application of language in context. Cognitive scientists Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber have shown that the use of language is ultimately based not on rules, but on relevance. Relevance in turn depends on contexts and individuals. Such dependence, therefore, does not make food a borderline case. Rather, it is something that food and language have in common. But can we use a concept of relevance to analyze food? Following the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, relevance has two sides, termed here "typicality" and "spontaneity". Both sides of relevance are found to shape our experience of food in striking ways. Food is a particularly clear example of a more general, relevance-driven context dependence of both language and the arts.

International Journal of Hospitality Management, 2001

The culture of a society is manifest in a variety of ways, in its art, language and literature, music, and in all forms of religious and secular ritual. Cultural expression, however, whilst being a powerful factor in the definition and development of the human species, is not always vital in the utilitarian sense. Rather, it can be regarded as a group of activities usually referred to as ''art for living'', which provides substance, meaning, continuity and value to living in a particular social grouping. This paper argues that gastronomy, the selection, preparation, presentation and participation with culinary and gastronomic aspects of food, falls squarely into this category of 'fine art activity' since most societies seek to differentiate their food preparation into either the purely utilitarian or the highly developed and stylised methods of presentation and participation which, in many instances, are not designed for consumption merely, but also for status, ritualistic and aesthetic purposes. #

This investigation of a point of connection between aesthetics and ethics unfolds in the context of a larger project on food, philosophy, and a reinterpretation of the relationship between the two. More specifically, my goal is to take food as a starting point for rethinking some of the basic categories of philosophy, with the understanding that the rather humble position afforded to the proximal (i.e., lower) senses by the tradition—and here I am thinking primarily of taste, but also of touch and smell (both of which, incidentally, are a major component of taste and tasting as a means of encountering the world)—constitutes a site whereupon we might begin to think seriously about why food matters, and for this discussion, how the event of eating as an aesthetic experience—food as art—might lead us not only to rethink an ethics of food, but also to rethink the very foundations of ethics more broadly construed. The impetus for this project has three rather distinct origins. The first is a prompt I employed while teaching my " Food and Philosophy " course: Monty Python's skit " Art Gallery " (watch it), which features the actual ingestion of works of art. 1 The second is my involvement in the planning of a recent exhibit " A Feast for the Eyes " at the Suzanne H. Arnold Gallery on the campus of Lebanon Valley College, which featured artist's renderings of food from traditional still life paintings to Warhol and Dali. The third, which provides the theoretical backdrop for this essay, is the recent work of Jacques Rancière on aesthetics and politics. My reflection on the aesthetics of eating thus places these origins within the horizon of what might be described as a general proliferation and even democratization of gastronomic experiences since the early nineteenth century. Such phenomena include, but are not limited to, the industrialization and mechanization of methods of food production from the farm all the way to the table, the acceptance of gastronomic taste as a metaphor for judgments of subjective taste in the arts and beyond (Korsmeyer 103-115), the rise of restaurant culture as a pleasurable and accessible possibility for the middle and working classes (Sweeney), the globalization of food economies and tastes, and more recently, the explosion and ubiquity of fast food, the rise of the chef as a cultural figure and icon, and the dissemination of food culture and knowledge through television programming dedicated to food. Such democratization, however, cuts both ways, and through my investigation I hope to expose the degree to which a particular distribution of sensible

Towards an Eliasian Understanding of Food in the 21st Century Established Foundations and New Directions, 2024

Defining cooking as art has a long history. Such discourse appears to be intensifying in recent years as the world of gastronomy undergoes important changes. But has change been so profound as to warrant us endorsing that definition? The theory of artification as a civilizing process helps us approach the question sociologically. Journalists are at the forefront of the trend to treat cuisine as an artform, especially “high cuisine”. They are not alone; data indicate that this is a widespread point of view. Cuisine is deemed to be the artistic production of chefs, and eating an artistic experience for eaters. The assumption gains traction from recent inter-related developments such as: the development of the tertiary sector, technical and scientific rationalization of food production and distribution, aesthetic and institutional innovations, the refinement of taste, the financialization and transformation of gastronomy into an international luxury industry, the upward social mobility of cooks, and novel accolades from the art world. So, have cooking and chefs indeed accomplished a process of artification? Artifying trends contribute to the shifting balance of power in favour of chefs and their heightened status as creative professionals. Nevertheless, the socio-economic context of producing and disseminating cuisine as well as the very nature of the food factor set extremely strong limitations to the artification of cooking.