Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (review)

Making Sense of Taste. By Carolyn Korsmeyer. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

This is a book about taste—the thing your tongue (and nose) do. It's also a book about Taste—the thing the art critic has. It's a book about food, art, and the relations between food and art. Do those two categories overlap? Where and how? How might we best understand and appreciate food in light of the way we understand and appreciate art? It's a book about how the divergent histories of taste and Taste have left us with an impoverished understanding of the former—and thus a deep skepticism about the aesthetic worth of food. Carolyn Korsmeyer suggests that her project will illuminate readers' understanding of food—and observes that it might well illuminate our understanding of art as well. She succeeds on both counts.

Korsmeyer's approach in this book might be described as Aristotelian. Rather than elucidating a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the category Art and then going on to select just those examples of food and taste that (however remote, arcane or rare) perfectly meet the criteria, she instead looks seriously and deeply at some of the ways food actually is understood, at the ways in which it is experienced, appreciated, meant.

But is it art? While Korsmeyer does conclude that food is not an art—in the sense of fine art that we employ in Western culture today—she argues that the question "is it art?" is not the most important or interesting question to ask. She states: "Certainly food does not qualify as a fine art; it does not have the right history, to make a complex point in shorthand. Culinary art can still be considered a minor or a decorative art, or perhaps a functional or applied art (for we should not minimize the fact that eating is a daily aspect of living in the most literal sense of that term). . . . However, this warrant for the label 'art' is not the most important link between food and art. It is much more significant that both form symbolic systems with similar components . . ." (144).

What is a symbolic system, and what does it have to do with aesthetics? In searching out an aesthetic framework within which food and taste might have a fighting chance of being understood in their richness and multifacetedness, Korsmeyer adopts Nelson Goodman's understanding of art and other aesthetically relevant activities as symbol systems; she then extends Goodman's analysis to show that food constitutes such a symbol system. A symbol system is aesthetically relevant if it manifests a number of "symptoms" of the aesthetic (a phrase that rejects the notion that objects must meet a number of necessary and sufficient conditions in order to count as an aesthetic object). Korsmeyer shows that several of these symptoms—representation, exemplification, relative repleteness, and expression—are manifested time and again in foods and in eating experiences. Chicken soup, to take just one small example, is expressive insofar as (in some cultures) it "is a home remedy and means that one is being taken care of. The expression of care that soup exemplifies is supported by the literal properties that soup also has: a rich but not taxing flavor, ingredients that are easy to swallow, and so on" (132). Korsmeyer's book is filled with examples—familiar and unusual, simple and complex—that attest to the many ways that food means.

Korsmeyer nevertheless argues that food is not fine art. She does so not because of something intrinsic or inherent about food or tasting or smelling—though she also does not seek to elevate tasting and smelling to the ranks of hearing and seeing (a move that would upset the usual hierarchy of senses whose genesis she so carefully charts historically). Rather, she rejects the categorization because of something about history, about the way that both food and art have emerged as cultural practices. ("Aha! It's historically...