Glenn Kuehn

Forthcoming in Special Edition of Contemporary Pragmatism on Environmental Philosophy

 

Tasting the World:

Environmental Aesthetics and Food as Art

 

The true cook is the perfect blend, the only perfect blend, of artist and philosopher.

He knows his worth:  he holds in his palm the happiness of mankind,

the welfare of generations yet unborn.[1]

Norman Douglas

 

"Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity."[2]

Frank Lloyd Wright

 

 

            Traditionally, cooking, and eating have not been hot topics in philosophy; they never really took off in the way that talking about systematic doubt, ontological arguments, and bound variables did.[3]  Yet, I hope that by the end of this essay, you will join me in seeing food as providing an unique insight into the human conditions of embodiment and interactive experience, and as providing an aesthetic education of environmental awareness through taste.

            To make this work, I am going to attempt to connect three rather different people, and, in the process, overcome a traditional practice I see as outworn.  The people to be connected are:  John Dewey, Susanne Langer, and a late 18th early 19th century French chef, Marie Antoine Careme.  From Careme, we get a clear articulation that through food, and confectionary in particular, our edible environment is related to the art of architecture.  Thus, food is more than the merely edible—it is an insight into the way we construct various environments.  From Langer, we see how art can take us places.  Art creates "virtual" realities that allow us to aesthetically encounter aspects of human feeling.  For Langer, architecture in particular creates a type of space where the environmental elements of culture can be directly experienced through art.  From Dewey, we see how the potential for aesthetic development is larded in even seemingly ordinary experiences because living is qualitatively environmental, and our interactive experience of our environment is held together by a tension-filled, qualitative rhythmic flow.  Further, learning involves aesthetic experience by going beyond the merely cognitive and showing how education is based on the qualitative interaction one has with the world through a shared community of inquiry.  Together these three provide a framework in which food can be facilitative of an environmental education.

The practice to be overcome (and this may be a side issue) is the traditional attempt to determine what is and is not art.  I believe that this project overshadows the more important project of figuring out why we want to call anything "art" in the first place.  Therefore, I will focus on the qualitative aspects that provide aesthetic experiences.  This approach is not only more conducive to understanding the value of art in general, it (along with the trifecta of Careme, Langer, and Dewey) also allows us to see a rich potential and use for a philosophy of food.

 

            This isn’t a paper on what would normally be considered to be "environmental philosophy," and its inclusion among the other contributions is testimony to the wide spectrum of interpretations regarding environmental issues.  My use of "environment" is intended to be quite broad (perhaps enormously broad), because the project is to present an opportunity for a much more far-reaching pragmatic vision regarding food as a method of exploring our shared world.  Accordingly, I do not use a discussion of environmental aesthetics that is nature-oriented.  Instead I treat environmental aesthetics as having to do with the elements (cultural, qualitative, dynamic) that make up an environment.  This provides a sufficiently extensive ground on which to argue for environmental eating as one of the most profound meanings we can experience.  Environmental eating, then, means tasting a world—tasting the fundamentals of what constitutes a place.

 

Part One:  Careme

            Marie Antoine Careme (1784-1833) was known as the "cook of kings, and king of cooks."[4]  As the story goes, he was born the 16th of 25 children (unknown how many of the 25 survived), and was abandoned on the streets of Paris at age 12 by his father.[5]  From here, the journey began for someone who, by the time of his early death at age 49 (reportedly from a combination of exhaustion and lungs coated with the residue from his coal-burning stoves and ovens), would be the author of at least five of the canonical texts on French cooking, and the greatest, most original chef in European history.  Among his patrons were Tallyrand, Alexander the First, the Baron de Rothschild, and Napoleon.

            The reason I go back to Careme is not simply because he was one of the most important chefs in the history of Western cooking (his culinary prowess is certainly impressive—he was an inventor, a destroyer, and a creator in the world of cuisine).  More importantly, he had an insight into the way cooking related to art and to how the elements of dishes and meals fit together in a way that emphasized aesthetic elements such as harmony, structure, and beauty.  Careme stated, "The fine arts are five in number, namely:  painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and architecture, the principle branch of the latter being pastry" [also translated as "confectionary"].[6]  Unlike recent philosophical attempts at connecting food and art, he didn’t propose that food could be art, but that a particular food, pastry, was the epitome of one of the fine arts.

Two elements are striking upon learning about Careme.  First was his approach to food as being filled with a great sense of wonder and aesthetic potential.  In this I found a similarity to how I often view art and aesthetic experience, which is an approach that seeks to reveal the potent underlying qualitative elements that allow us to have an experience that we would call "aesthetic."  Careme understood, or more appropriately grasped and felt, the importance of the qualitative interrelationships in cooking.  As Jean-Francois Revel states, Careme "introduced into cuisine what in painting are called ‘values’; that is to say, he was the first to put across the fact that flavors and odors must be judged not in the absolute but according to their mutual relationships".[7]  Careme talked about the interaction of the qualitative elements of flavor, and he made the claim that this is important for understanding how we should understand and treat food.  In this there is an emphasis on harmony.

Part of this view comes out his writings and his incredible disrespect for virtually all cooking that preceded him; cooking that treated food as something to be overcome—to be covered up with obscenely strong flavors and, at best, tolerated.  Careme’s writings, while lambasting previous cuisine in all its forms, also almost single-handedly refined and summarized five hundred years of culinary evolution.  He didn’t just write "cookbooks," he analyzed cooking, he took it apart and looked at how it worked, he saw the need for procedure and order and grandeur.[8]  His stated goal was to "achieve ‘lightness,’ ‘grace,’ ‘order’ and ‘perspicuity’" in his preparation and presentation of food.[9]  He sought not only to modify the way we cook and eat, but to write a new Genesis of cuisine—one with a set of standards and guidelines, and one that had strong aesthetic and artistic roots from which to grow.

The second element that caught my attention was his connection of architecture and pastry; of an art form obviously expressing structure, arrangement, and environmental purpose, with food.[10]  I believe that Careme is pointing to something important in the connection between architecture and food:  through food, he is showing us something about the world—how the structure of our created environments might taste.  When I first heard this reference I was reminded of the work of Susanne Langer, who claimed that elements of our day-to-day lives don’t merely show us a "different way of seeing things," they provide a different way of experiencing them.  Langer also talked about architecture in a way that fits very well with the connection being made by Careme.

 

Part Two:  Careme leads to Langer

            For Langer, art expresses life.  It presents a "living form," or articulation, of vital human experiences such as feeling, growth, movement, and emotion. [11]  The living form of art is an expression, a manifestation, a "highly articulated form" where the beholder "recognizes, without conscious comparison and judgment but rather by direct recognition, the forms of human feeling:  emotions, moods, even sensations in their characteristic passage."[12]  The role of the artist is to relocate our attention by creating a kind of perceptual deception that has some sort of aesthetic effect on us.  She states,

To produce and sustain the essential illusion, set it off clearly from the surrounding world of actuality, and articulate its form to the point where it coincides unmistakably with forms of feeling and living, is the artist’s task.  To such ends he uses whatever materials lend themselves to technical treatment--tones, colors, plastic substances, words gestures, or any other physical means.[13]

 

            Art displaces our attention from the directly experiencable object, sound, structure, to an alternate "virtual" experience of qualitative expression.  Yet since this virtual experience is connected somehow with the condition of embodiment, art both takes us to places and times that are almost detachable from where we are at a given moment, and also shows us how our embodiment in the world is involved in art.  The experience articulated through each art form is therefore almost always related somehow to a vital aspect of embodied living such as movement, emotion, and gesture—it is related to how we as individual selves interact with the spatial and temporal aspects of our environment.

            In Feeling and Form, Langer shows the different virtual realities created by various art forms, and, not surprisingly, cuisine is not among them.  While painting expresses virtual space, sculpture expresses virtual kinetic volume, and music expresses emotion through virtual time, and so on….cooking is just cooking.[14]  In fact, in contrast with music, she states,

If music, patterned sound, had no other office than to stimulate and soothe our nerves, pleasing our ears as well-combined foods please our palates, it might be highly popular, but never culturally important.  Its historic development would be too trivial a subject to engage many people in its lifelong study, though a few desperate Ph.D. theses might be wring from its anecdotal past under the rubric of "social history."  And music conservatories would be properly rated exactly like cooking schools.[15]

 

            Clearly, for Langer cooking isn’t an art form, food is not art, and her only comments about food-related issues are in contrast to higher art forms.  Yet, all is not lost.  She does not have to consider food to be art because she does consider architecture to be art—and we already have Careme who claimed that the connection between architecture and pastry is innate.

Langer says that architecture creates a type of virtual space—a virtual "ethnic domain".  She says, "Actually, of course, a domain is not a ‘thing’ among other ‘things’; it is the sphere of influence of a function, or functions; it may have physical effects on some geographical locality or it may not."[16]  That is, this domain is not so much in a place, as it is a place.  Architecture expresses the elements of civilization, of culture—of the qualitative aspects of living in a shared community in the world.  Langer states,

A place, in this non-geographical sense, is a created thing, an ethnic domain made visible, tangible, sensible.  As such it is, of course, an illusion.  Like any other plastic symbol, it is primarily an illusion of self-contained, self-sufficient, perceptual space.  But the principle of organization is its own: for it is organized as a functional realm made visible--the center of a virtual world, the "ethnic domain," and itself a geographical semblance.[17]

 

            What Langer means by a non-geographical ethnic domain is congruent with the expressions of vital import (or value) of the other arts—it is a continuous functional pattern that expresses the "meaning" of the total pattern of life.  Specifically, an ethnic domain expresses the ingredients of a human culture based on vital elements of what it means to be a living being—the influence of "social conditions on the development, posture, and movement of the human body".[18]  Langer states,

The architect creates its image:  a physically present human environment that expresses the characteristic rhythmic functional patterns which constitute a culture.  Such patterns are the alternations of sleep and waking, venture and safety, emotion and calm, austerity and abandon; the tempo, and the smoothness of abruptness of life; the simple forms of childhood and the complexities of full moral stature, the sacramental and the capricious moods that mark a social order, and that are repeated, though with characteristic selection, by every personal life springing from that order.[19]

 

            What’s important to see is that the ethnic domain created by architecture is an environment made visible.  It is a virtual domain full of the tensions of what it means to exist as a place.  "And as the actual environment of a being is a system of functional relations, so a virtual ‘environment,’ the created space of architecture, is a symbol of functional existence."[20]

            As an obvious concession, Langer didn’t write about food and she certainly didn’t mention Careme anywhere in her writings, so there is no documentable connection between them.  Further, if one takes a step back, there is the further obvious claim that Langer is talking about buildings and cathedrals, and Careme is talking about cake, and, superficially, this is true.  However, I think they both have insights into ways that constructed environmental elements of the world can be connected within a mutually beneficial context of philosophy and food.  For Careme, stating that the principle branch of architecture was confectionary/pastry was not some great leap from the high arts to the practicalities of gastronomy; that architectural delight that you eat (Careme’s desserts) is not merely food, nor is it merely a construction.  Through the qualitative interaction of edible elements, it is an edible expression of a place.  Likewise, that ethnic domain is not merely some area you go to visit when you walk into a building.  An ethnic domain is the expression of the human condition of existing as culture.

For Careme and Langer, elements of our day-to-day lives give rise to a different way of experiencing things—they’re both ways of understanding and expressing the qualitative elements of our environments.  Obviously, food takes us through life because it keeps us alive, but it also can take us places because its construction, and the experience of its harmonic elements is a part of an ethnic domain.

            Here more needs to be said about how food really can be understood as "art".  This is necessary because so far I have just been working off of Careme’s brief statement, and that is insufficient.  And, since Langer didn’t specifically include it in her list of art forms, we need to figure out how to fit food into the art world in a way that is supportive of what I have argued so far.  So far we’ve got Careme talking about food in terms of the interrelations of elements and how they fit together.  He points to the relationship between architecture and pastry, and I am suggesting that he’s pointing to more than a similarity of form—he’s pointing to food and calling it "art" in virtue of its qualitative arrangement of interrelated elements.  Langer shows how alternate realities, virtual realms, are experiencable through art; and how architecture takes us into different cultures, different "ethnic domains," where the qualitative arrangement of the elements of living in a culture are symbolized, articulated, and directly experienced as an alternate environment.  So, how does food as art fit in?

 

Part Three:  Food As Art and Dewey

Food can be seen as art if we take what I would call an "environmental" approach to art.  That is, if we focus on the qualitative conditions underlying the experience of our immediate environment, we can see them as leading to the creation and appreciation of art.  Food is art because it offers us an unique awareness and appreciation of those qualitative aspects within experience.  Food is qualitatively affective because it has the potential of transforming our experience of living, and, as art, it is expressive of the ways we interact with others.  I find this environmental approach useful because it directly addresses (instead of avoiding) the question of why we want to refer to anything as art in the first place.[21]  I am dissatisfied with the project of trying to determine what is and isn’t art because this project falls short of addressing the bigger issue of why we want to call something "art."

In my introduction I mentioned that this may be a side issue, but I believe it does play an important role in this discussion.  I believe that the desire to figure out what is and is not art has in many ways led us down a very tedious path of unnecessary artistic segregation, prejudice, and elitism, and I am convinced that if we want to argue for something being art, it isn’t all that difficult to come up with a theory that will work.[22]  Therefore, I don’t think it would be too much of a challenge to find a theory that will let food and cuisine through the great doorway and into that special realm of things we call "art."  However, if we do this, we have to acknowledge something that makes food’s membership in the artworld unsettling.[23]  As art, food has a relatively unique characteristic that no other art form has in that it must be destroyed through consumption in order to be experienced.  Therefore, an adequate assessment of food's aesthetic worth has to go deeper than theories based on mimesis, social construction, formalism, emotion, and so on, can go.  Food must live in a theory of art that embraces such things as temporality, process, qualitative experience, and ambiguity.  I propose that a contextualization of food (and cooking) as art is more productively understood through a Deweyan perspective of emphasizing the aesthetic potentiality of qualitative experience.  That is, let’s not try to figure out if it is art, but instead try to figure out why we are compelled to call the experience of food artistic; what does food, cooking, and eating do to us that makes the experience of it aesthetically valuable?

In Art as Experience, John Dewey argued that segmenting art off in museums has contributed to a misguided and problematic view of the relation between art and aesthetic experience, and that the desire to classify certain objects as "art" has led to outworn theories which hinder our ability to welcome and appreciate as art the ordinary experiences within everyday life through which we begin to cultivate a sense of the aesthetic.  This is partly what has convinced me that a serious effort to determine what is and isn’t art can be functional, but is nevertheless ontologically misguided.  At the beginning of Art As Experience, Dewey states, "By one of the ironic perversities that often attend the course of affairs, the existence of the works of art upon which formation of an esthetic theory depends, has become an obstruction to theory about them."[24]  It is not through a distanced and objective appreciation that we should seek to understand art.  Instead we must illuminate the qualitative potentialities within experience to gain an understanding of art.  An awareness of these qualities leads to an appreciation of the aesthetic, and this is the source of our desire to label something, "art."

In Democracy and Education, Dewey states that, "Any experience, however trivial in its first appearance, is capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending its range of perceived connections."[25]  This is possible because "Experience is a matter of the interaction of organism with its environment, an environment that is human as well as physical, that includes the materials of tradition and institutions as well as local surroundings."[26]

            We are effected by and affecting the qualitative tensions within experience--the rhythmic flow of potentiality and frustration and perturbation and satisfaction.  Art does something to us because we are involved with it through our bodily selves, and we are environmental beings not because we live in an environment, but because we live through and with it.  The ability of food to change, to qualitatively transform us, is on a level of inherent and (though it is often hard to face) inescapable involvement with one’s environment.[27]  When you eat you are taking an object, some other "thing" in the world and adding it to your being; food stands in a tensive potentiality towards you—it is the "not yet" you.  The complex act of eating is quite beyond mere nourishment and pleasure, it is life-sustaining and life-altering.

It’s not a real stretch, therefore, to see cooking and eating as involved in aesthetic experience because even ordinary experience has the potential for aesthetic development so long as it involves the tension-filled and potentially organizable dynamic qualitative rhythms within experience.  Any experience, when it is merely routine and morbidly regular (Dewey uses "humdrum") or chaotic, becomes un-aesthetic (anesthetic)—it becomes not-art.  Thus, food could only be excluded from being art in a particular experience if it exhibited qualities that did not promote the transformative organic growth of an organism living through its environment.  It would not be art if either it didn’t do anything to us or utterly baffled us.

Although Dewey, like Langer, didn’t extensively consider food and its role in aesthetic experience, he did include brief references to eating in other contexts.  One such reference is in a brief description of an experience, which is the epitome of a complete and unified aesthetic experience.  He states, "An experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that storm, that rupture of friendship.  The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts."[28]

 

Part Four:  Dewey and Education

This depiction of aesthetic experience as involving a qualitative harmony is also seen in Dewey’s understanding of education.  While Dewey held that the major function of art was the illumination of a community of shared experience, he also believed that education is the means of the social continuity of life; thus the connection between education and aesthetics is very strong.[29]

            The deep purpose of Dewey’s philosophy of education is the infusion of social meaning and relevance into the learning activity, and the replacement of individualistic organization of these activities with a style of cooperative inquiry.  The proposal that Dewey made was that instruction should be organized around the various socially important forms of human work which were to supply a context within which virtually the whole of human culture and knowledge could be experienced in the form of a significant relationship between oneself and one’s environment.

Education and aesthetics are processes involving shared experience, and they modify the parties involved in that common environment.  Environment is key here, for, as it is with Langer, it is not referential of climate and geographical location.  Our environment is the qualitative world in which we live; it is where, when, and how we live, and through it we exist.  Dewey states,

The environment consists of the sum total of conditions which are concerned in the execution of the activity characteristic of a living being.  The social environment consists of all the activities of fellow beings that are bound up in the carrying on of the activities of any one of its members.[30]

 

Although Langer and Dewey never saw eye to eye, they might break bread together over the notion of environment.  For Langer, a virtual ethnic domain is an articulation of the elements of a living environment.  Langer said that architecture creates a virtual ethnic domain, a,

…semblance of that World which is the counterpart of a Self.  It is a total environment made visible.  Where the Self is a collective, as in a tribe, its World is communal; for personal Selfhood, it is the home.  And as the actual environment of a being is a system of functional relations, so a virtual "environment," the created space of architecture, is a symbol of functional existence.[31]

 

Dewey states, our "…environment consists of those conditions that promote or hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic activities of a living being."[32]  This involves the aesthetic because "A work of art elicits and accentuates this quality of being a whole and of belonging to the larger, all-inclusive, whole which is the universe in which we live..  This fact, I think, is the explanation of that feeling of exquisite intelligibility and clarity we have in the presence of an object that is experienced with esthetic intensity."[33]

To take food as art seriously in philosophy, and furthermore as potentially educational, we have to be coming from a perspective that sees the self as interactive with its environment on physical, mental, spiritual, historical, and cultural levels.  For Dewey, education is accomplished indirectly through our environment; by means of the environment.[34]  He states, the environment

…is truly educative in its effect in the degree in which an individual shares or participates in some conjoint activity.  By doing his share in the associated activity, the individual appropriates the purpose which actuates it, becomes familiar with its methods and subject matters, acquires needed skill, and is saturated with its emotional spirit.[35]

 

            What we learn, aesthetically, are the concerns of our relation to culture (or nature).  Subjects such as history provide a perspective on human connections.  Dewey states, "The function of historical and geographical subject matter has been stated; it is to enrich and liberate the more direct and personal contacts of life by furnishing their context, their background and outlook."[36]  Food can put us in touch with the elemental relations of these historical and geographical environments because food is an element within those environments.  Culinary experience is an environmental awareness that brings one into an aesthetic contact with an extended community.

 

Part Five:  Tasting The World

            Careme shows us that cuisine is an effort at displaying how elements of our edible environment fit together, and this edible environment is inherently related to architecture.  The art of architecture is connected to food (pastry) because they both show us something about the world and how our environments in the world are constructed.  Langer shows how architecture takes you into a virtual space where the qualitative elements of different ethnic environments, different cultures, can be experienced through art.  Dewey holds this together by providing an understanding of qualitative experience that allows food to lead us towards a type of exploration of aesthetic elements within experience.  In education those qualitative elements come together in a community of shared experience based on articulating the aesthetic connections one has with the world.  That is, education is environmental.

We learn through the aesthetics of food, because food is an education in culture—it is an education in what the interrelated environmental aspects that hold together a group or a society or an history or an heritage tastes like.  Food takes us to that edge of experience where our interaction with the world and others takes place, and it does it, very significantly, through taste.  I imagine that talking this much about food without thus far mentioning the issue of taste might seem ill-planned.  I waited until now because I want to present the issue of tasting as a very complex act of having deeper levels of meaning beyond salty, sweet, bitter, etc.  Given the emphasis on the qualitative connections and interactive experience with one’s environment, it appears to me that when we eat we are actually tasting the world.[37]  "What does it taste like?"  This is an important question; a real important question.  What does the world taste like?

            With other art forms, we learn through looking, seeing, hearing, touching.  With art of food, we learn through tasting—through masticating, swallowing, making it part of our selves.  In order to eat we have to involve ourselves in a gustatory relationship with the world.  We may put the food "into" our mouths, but eating is an interaction, we "go out" to meet the food.  Food transforms us, it is filtered by us, and not all of it stays with us.  Through eating, the world passes through us and thus completes the truly interactive and transactional relationship that is our experience.

There is clearly a strong connection between food, art, and the environment.  Careme described taste in terms of the mutual relationships of flavors and odors.  He saw taste as an interrelationship of elements within the environment created by food, and food could be art when its construction was environmental, that is, when it created an environment.  Langer described how the elements of an environment could be harmonized such that they could present a virtual ethnic domain, a virtual culture—therefore, combining Langer and Careme, we can see that you’re tasting that ethnic domain, that culture, because when you eat you actually taste the environment.  You take the world and put it into your "self" and since, ala Dewey, your chewing is part of that qualitatively-tensioned rhythmic living that is aesthetically charged, you taste the artistic connection we have with the world.  That taste, I suggest, is not something like the universal standard (the taste of chicken), it is the taste of culture.  You are tasting the elements behind the salty, sweet, sour, and bitter veneer.  You are learning about the culinary elements within the arrangement of civilization.

What do we learn from our masticatory experiences?  Aesthetically, we gain a visceral knowledge of qualitative experience—we learn about harmony and dissonance, about desire and satisfaction.  Culturally, we learn about our environment and what constitutes our sense of place.  This can and does go far beyond our present conditions.[38]

In the end, there is great fecundity in using food as a philosophical method for investigating our shared issues and concerns.  In a letter to his wife, Alice, I’d like to say that Dewey foresaw this great tool—but perhaps he was merely reflecting on a fine evening.  Either way, his musing speaks volumes regarding culture and environment.  He wrote,

Speaking of civilized places, the nearest dip into civilization I have made was at the Lorings' Thursday evening.  . . . Mrs. Loring's dinner was a work of art, just as individualized as everything else.  I suppose life in a boarding house makes me unduly aware of this petty side of things, but after all the innate barbarism of America seems to me indicated by the lack of sense for what constitutes a meal….[39]

 

Bibliography

Dewey, John. "Art As Experience." In Vol. 10 of The Later Works, 1925-1953. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989.

Dewey, John. "Democracy and Education." In Vol. 9 of The Middle Works, 1889-1924. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985.

John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey & children. 1894.07.28,29 (00165), The Correspondence of John Dewey, vol. 1, 1871-1918 (Charlottesville, VA: In telex Corp., 1999); original, John Dewey Papers 2/6, Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University.

Labensky, Sarah R., and Alan M. Hause. On Cooking: Techniques from Expert Chefs. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1995.

Langer, Susanne. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Scribner, 1953.

Maria Polushkin Robbins, Ed., A Cook’s Alphabet of Quotations. New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1991.

Revel, Jean-Francois. Culture and Cuisine: A Journey Through the History of Food. Trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Doubleday & Co. Inc., 1982.

Telfer, Elizabeth. Food for Thought:  Philosophy and Food. London: Routledge, 1996.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


[1]  A Cook’s Alphabet of Quotations, ed. Maria Polushkin Robbins, The Ecco Press, 1997., 55

[2]  Ibid., 65.

[3]  Plato (in the Gorgias and Republic) said food was a craft much like rhetoric, and cooks, though an essential part of a well-run state, didn’t provide us with anything that would lead us out of the city of pigs.  And, really, that’s where the philosophical pigeon-holing of food has remained.  Of course, cuisine has improved since Plato’s "informal" get-togethers, but

[4]  Labensky and Hause, 6.  Two of the greatest European chefs of all time were Marie Antoine Careme and Auguste Escoffier.  In the Concise Encyclopaedia of Gastronomy, Andre Simon states that, "Escoffier is to Careme what the New Testament is to the Old."  Between the two of them they not only provide the canonical texts of French cuisine, they changed the way food was understood, prepared, served, and eaten.

[5]  His father "urged him repeatedly to take advantage of a social universe that offered to an enterprising soul far more possibilities than he himself could guarantee him." (Revel, Jean-Francois. Culture and Cuisine: A Journey Through the History of Food. Trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Doubleday & Co. Inc., 1982., 246.

[6]  Revel, 68.

[7]  Revel, 258.

[8]  Labensky and Hause, 6.

[9]  Ibid.

[10]  He actually wrote two books on architecture, designing buildings and structures for Paris and other large cities of the time.

[11]  Langer crossed-over from Kantian and analytic roots to aesthetics, but never really lost the idea that meaning relies on cognitive truth claims and logical form, thus she uses words like "form" and "symbol" and so on to express her theory on art, but does so unconventionally because she links them to ideas such as, "virtual reality," "feeling," "emotive import," and "vital import."  This shows her leaning tendency towards a possible meaningfulness to be found in seeing art as an "unconsummated symbol."

[12]  Langer, Susanne. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Scribner, 1953., 82.

[13]  Langer, 68.

[14]  Painting articulates a "scene," a virtual space that is opposite the eye and related directly to it.  It’s a flat surface made three-dimensional…a place to which you can go and look around.  Sculpture offers an organic semblance of life…a virtual space understood as "kinetic volume."  This is not volume as in cubic measurements, but volume as space made visible.  Like a living organism, its shape shows its resistance to the changes and influences of the world.  It fits into the room or stage, but stands alone and away from the walls and floor…it resists as we resist, and it expresses the life, the kineticness, in those places of space we occupy.

[15]  Langer, 28. – emphasis added.

[16]  Ibid., 94-95.

[17]  Ibid., 95.  I would like to add "tasteable" to the list of qualitative elements of this non-geographical place.

[18]  Ibid., 96.

[19]  Ibid.

[20]  Ibid. 98.

[21]  Again, "environmental" is being used in a very broad manner to mean the qualitative elements that make up experience.  That is, the fundamental dynamic elements of what makes something an environment.

[22]  If I were pressed, I would probably have to claim that the label "art" collapses into an understanding of aesthetic experience.  In this regard, I would use the words "art" and "aesthetic" interchangeably.  An emphasis on food as involved in aesthetic experiences can lead to labeling it "art," but more importantly it demonstrates how the so-called ordinary aspects of everyday life are as potentially valuable as the refined.  An aesthetics of food shows a way in which primal aspects of valuing how we live can be communicated through articulate modes of experience such as cooking and eating.

[23]  An example of the food-art project is by Elizabeth Telfer and is entitled, Food For Thought:  Philosophy and Food (1996).  In a chapter on food and art, she states that, "With the art of food, we have two problems.  We need to strike a balance between the aesthetic claims of the food on a particular occasion and the social claims of that occasion.  We also need to find a middle way between two unsatisfactory attitudes to the aesthetic dimension of food: we must not be so heedless as to waste a satisfying kind of aesthetic experience, but not so precious as to expect more of it than it can give." (Telfer, 60)

[23]  Telfer uses the notion of reaction for aesthetic evaluation and a modest institutional theory for artistic classification, and concludes that food is art, but only in a "minor" sense because it is inherently temporal, non-representational, and cannot move one emotionally.  I found it telling that she would fit food into the artworld in such a manner because she reveals three projects to which I cannot adhere:  first, that she wishes to preserve the high art/popular (low) art distinction because she is already concerned about "minor" arts versus major ones; second, applying her theory of artistic experience (based on reaction) to food, or anything else for that matter, inherently preserves strong ontological self/other, subject/object dichotomies; and third, institutional theories of art (which she uses for classifying things as art), like many other theories of art, seem overly preoccupied with the project of verifying that something is or isn’t art, and typically fall short of addressing the bigger issue of why we want to call anything art in the first place.

[24]  Dewey, John. "Art As Experience." In Vol. 10 of The Later Works, 1925-1953. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989, 10: 9.

[25]  Dewey, John. "Democracy and Education." In Vol. 9 of The Middle Works, 1889-1924. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985., 225.

[26]  Ibid., 251.

[27]  The difficulty resulting from facing this profound interaction has provided fuel for veganism, organic farming, locally-sustained agriculture, and so on.

[28]  Dewey, Later Works 10, 44.

[29]  Dewey, Middle Works 9, 5.

[30]  Ibid., 26.

[31]  Langer, 98.

[32]  Dewey, Middle Works 9, 15.

[33]  Dewey, Later Works 10,: 199.

[34]  Dewey, Middle Works 9, 23.

[35]  Ibid., 26.

[36]  Ibid., 218.

[37]  Here I wish to use the word, "world," in the sense of "my world" or "our shared world"—that is, the meaningful elements of our immediate environment.

[38]  I’ve written elsewhere on Thanksgiving as a secular spiritual holiday…it’s a holiday surrounding food, but the food isn’t just food, it’s your history and your tradition.  Your transformative environment is the tasting of the history of your family gatherings.  You’re tasting your heritage.  Dewey states that through history we become aware of the "known facts about the activities and sufferings of the social groups with which our own lives are continuous, and through reference to which our own customs and institutions are illuminated."(Democracy and Education, 218).  In eating that Thanksgiving dinner you are gastronomically continuous with your family’s history.  What does it taste like?

[39]  John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey & children. 1894.07.28,29 (00165), The Correspondence of John Dewey, vol. 1, 1871-1918 (Charlottesville, VA: In telex Corp., 1999); original, John Dewey Papers 2/6, Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University.