Thank you, Kent, for the link to the above video.
I would also like to acknowledge Carolyn Korsmeyer once again, without whom my work on the topic of food and art would have been impossible. I highly recommend her book Making Sense of Taste: Food & Philosophy, and I would also like to point out that she published a new book last year that might be of equal interest: Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics.
Finally, as this post will appear above the previous eight, below are the individual links to each part of “How Food Can Be Art: A Discussion of Taste.”
- Part 1: Caveats / Works Cited
- Part 2: Introduction
- Part 3: The Hierarchy of the Senses
- Part 4: Brillat-Savarin: Complicating the Hierarchy
- Part 5: Hume: An Empirical Approach to Taste and Beauty
- Part 6: Cultivating Tastes for Cilantro and Slow Cinema
- Part 7: The Aesthetic Meanings of Food / How Food Can Suggest Death
- Part 8: Conclusion
Further reading:
- Is edible cinema a tasty new way to enjoy films?
- Why Heston Blumenthal deserves the Turner prize
- Why cooking was the original artform – and is still the most universal
- Look Inside Ferran Adrià’s elBulli Art Exhibit in NYC
- The Bake Sale as High Art
- Eating with your eyes: Study links pretty plating to improved taste
- Food Art: The Art That Will Make You Drool
- Why does artistically presented food taste better?
- Ferran Adria: The chef without a restaurant has big ideas
- Candy crush: the artworks that look like sweetshop nightmares
- ‘Hannibal’: Meet the Chef Who Makes “Cannibal Cuisine” Look So Delicious
- Is Food the Greatest Art Form of All?
All in all, some great food for thought… or thoughts for food… plenty to chew on– digest– a feast for the mind– a real palate-tickler, no, a *palette*-tickler… hmmm….
And what about food that isn’t mean to be food? I mean, food created for non-utilitarian purposes? Christian communion wafers? Bubblegum? It’s hard to fit them into any kind of “art” boxes, but surely the fact that not all “food” is “merely” created for base corporeal ends (i.e. sustenance, no matter how artistically or poisonously presented) gives it a bit of a leg up into some “higher” speculative realm…? And hey– Bazooka gum, perhaps the most mentally, physically, and spiritually useless of foods, even comes [came?] wrapped in art!
I used the seder plate example for that very reason–that it has no utilitarian purpose. Each element is included simply to be tasted (thus, to convey meaning through taste) or to be present as a symbol and not be eaten at all (the shankbone). Korsmeyer does use the Eucharist as an additional example in her book, but I thought that the seder plate suited my purposes better here. Thank you for the wonderful Bazooka gum example, though!