Touch Description, 500-600 words
The Aesthetics of Taste
Sense Lecture 6: Gustation I
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Why Don’t We Eat Bugs?
Deep-fried Tarantula, Cambodia (preceding).
Fire-grilled Stink Bugs, Irian Jaya, Indonesia.
Peter Menzel & Faith D’Allusio. 1998. Man Eating Bugs. All images by Menzel.
Food Taboos
“There are many species of plants and animals that are edible, but only some of them become food. Those that become food vary cross-culturally. Why is it that Germans eat pork, while for Jews and Muslims it is forbidden? Why is beef the heart of a meal for many British and Americans, but sacred and not eaten in India? Why is the dog elevated to sacred status in Britain and the United States, but eaten in Vietnam and elsewhere? All of these meats are edible; it is culture that deems them edible or inedible” (Delaney 2011: 249).
Carol Delaney with Deborah Kaspin. 2011. Investigating Culture: An Experiential Introduction to Anthropology. Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Menzel 1998. Chef Jean-Pierre Rodot. Live Witchetty Grub Soup. Alice Springs, Australia.
Man Eating Bugs
All of the bugs are edible. Why don’t we eat them?
Cricket Lollipop, US
Roasted Grasshoppers and Avocado on Tortilla, Mexico
The Culture of Food
Edmund Leach notes that while there is “a vast range of materials which are both edible and nourishing, … only a small part of this edible environment will actually be classified as potential food. Such classification is a matter of language and culture, not of nature” (1964: 30-1).
Edmund Leach. 1964. Political Systems of Highland Burma. London: London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology.
The Tastescape
Not everything edible gets eaten. Each culture has its own “tastescape” (Pasi Falk 1994: 68, 69).
Pasi Falk. 1994. The Consuming Body. London: Sage.
The Physiology of Taste
“Taste preference… cannot be reduced to a relationship between the objective properties of foodstuffs and the sensory-physiological reaction of the human ingestive and digestive organism. At the sensory level taste preferences are necessarily also related to and even determined by the symbolic principles which translate the material universe into representations of the edible vs. inedible, which are then further specified into different sub-categories according to taboos and ritual rules” (Falk 1994: 69).
Disgust
Disgust marks the edge of a three categories:
A gustatory category
An aesthetic category
A moral category
In all instances, the disgust in question is a cultural construction, not a physiological reaction.
The Eroticism of Disgust
As [Aurel Kolnai] points out, the intentional structure of disgust directs our attention so strongly towards the revolting properties of its object as virtually to rivet attention. Disgust… almost savors its object at the same time that it is revolted by it” (Smith & Korsmeyer 2004: 9).
Barry Smith & Carolyn Korsmeyer. 2004. “Visceral Values: Aurel Kolnai on Disgust.” In Aurel Kolnai. On Disgust. Chicago: Open Court, 1-25.
Macabre Attractions
Cheese ripened toward a slight putrefaction is thought to be better than less developed version.
Hence link between disgust and desire.
Categories of Disgust
Kolnai lists 9 traits of the materially disgusting:
1) “putrefaction,
2) excrement,
3) bodily secretions,
4) and dirt…
5) disgusting animals, especially insects when they appear with the apparent excess of swarms;
6) foods in certain conditions;
7) human bodies that are too near;
8) exaggerated fertility,
9) disease and deformation”
Yuck
Kolnai thinks of disgust as an object of smell (2004: 15); I take it to be nearer taste. Perhaps it is both.
The gag response we mimic when we are disgusted with something is a trace of the vomiting reflex to eject foul substances we have swallowed. The nose wrinkle we make in response to disgusting smells is anticipatory of this gustatory effect.
The Psychology of Disgust
“Objects of material disgust share the impression of life gone bad, of flesh turning towards death, and of a primordial and profuse regeneration of life from the muck of decaying organic matter.”
“Things that rot and putrefy become the fuel of maggots and bacteria; insects in swarms give the impression of excessive, mindless generation, of life ‘senseless, formless, surging’” (Smith & Korsmeyer 2004: 16).
Entomophagy
Honey Ant Abdomens (Melophorus sp.) on Chocolate Cups (right), Australia.
Water Beetles in Ginger and Soy Sauce
(left), China.
Taste as Natural
Pasi Falk writes, “The line of argument may be characterized roughly as follows. There is a natural basis for the human diet (both biological and ecological) which is guided by a genetically and/or culturally structured ability and tendency in food choice which optimizes physiological survival” so that “the search for ‘real’ foods… determines food preferences in body sensory (‘good’) and cultural-classificatory (‘right’) terms” (Falk 1994: 72).
Tastescape
Not everything edible gets eaten. Each culture has its own “tastescape” (Pasi Falk 1994: 68, 69).
Food Categories
Falk distingushes three food categories:
Real Food: edible substances (recognized as food)
Right Food: food you are permitted to eat (classificatory)
Good Food: food that tastes good (body sensory).
The Physiology of Taste
“Taste preference… cannot be reduced to a relationship between the objective properties of foodstuffs and the sensory-physiological reaction of the human ingestive and digestive organism. At the sensory level taste preferences are necessarily also related to and even determined by the symbolic principles which translate the material universe into representations of the edible vs. inedible, which are then further specified into different sub-categories according to taboos and ritual rules” (Falk 1994: 69).
Universal Preferences
“The strong case…is the universal preference for sweet (tasting) substances which actually crosses the boundaries between nature/culture and animal/human.” It is apparent in infants response to water sweetened to milk level. “This is pure biology for the natural nutrition of the suckling, but very soon … the preference is humanized and thus culturized… [into] a link between mother, breast, milk and the positive bodily state including the sensory dimension which we might call a taste preference – for sweetness. So there is a kind of pre-verbal ‘unrepresentable representation’” (Falk 1994: 73).
Culture-Specific Preferences
Cultural food classifications determine food preferences. This produces a contrast between ‘right’ foods and ‘wrong’ foods, on the one hand, and between ‘good’ foods and ‘bad’ foods, on the other.
Wrong Foods are culturally prohibited
Bad Foods are personally distasteful
Us/Not Us
Edmund Leach identifies as taboo, foods that are either too close to us, which equals eating oneself, or too far from us, which would amount to eating aliens. For instance, Leach’s illustration: very close pets are strongly inedible; farm animals and game edible; wild animals inedible (Falk 1994: 75).
The concern with wild animals is not only whether to eat it but also whether it will eat us (or, in the case of poison, kill us) (Falk 1994: 76).
Too Close / Too Far
Cannibals
“Alice-Mutton: Mutton-Alice.”
John Tenniel illustration from Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking Glass.
The Abominations of Leviticus
Mary Douglas takes food taboos to be a result of category transgressions. Animals that do not sport the characteristic insignia for inhabitants of their territories (land, water, air) are regarded as abominable.
Pigs
Pig reputations: fact or slander?
Anomalous Categories
Falk fits together Leach’s and Douglas’s accounts: “the things located at the inedible far end of the scale share the same characteristic with the boundary-transgressing anomalies of the taxonomical scheme – things out of control or things which potentially consume (pollute or eat) us.”
Wrong foods confuse the distinction between eating and eaten.
Allison Jones Image.
www.pinterest.com
Neophobia/Neophilia
How do wrong foods get converted into either right foods or good foods?
Paul Rozin suggests that humans hover between neophobia: fear of the new; and neophilia: desire for variety (Falk 1994: 80).
The Transformation of Taboos 1
Temporary Taboos
The Forbidden Becomes the Restricted
You Are What You Eat
Magic
Imitation
The Transformation of Taboos 2
The Restricted Becomes the Prestigious
The Prestigious Becomes the Good
A Taste of Class
Prestigious food “represents the ‘sweet life,’ and it is possible to desire it just because it stands for the ‘good’ – the higher, prestigious, etc – which now makes the taste of food, as an index of representation, ‘sweet’” (Falk 1994: 84).
Forbidden Fruit
Hence the fascination for the forbidden fruit: now something can be “‘sweet’ (that is, good) just because it is forbidden” (Falk 1994: 85).
Fear and Desire
The psychologist Otto Fenichel contends that humans “fear and desire to be eaten by or dissolved into the other (being, object, substance)” (Falk 1994: 86).
The result is the what Sigmund Freud called ‘oceanic feeling’ and its intense form in orgasm or ecstasy (Falk 1994: 87).
The Aesthetics of Taste
Carolyn Korsmeyer notes the irony that the sense of taste provides the language for aesthetics but is itself excluded as an aesthetic sense.
Is food art?
Georg Flegel; Willem Kalf (1619-1693)
38
Three Aesthetic Arguments
Beauty is in the mind of the artist
Beauty is in the eye of the perceiver
Beauty is in the work of art
Limited Repertoire
Sweet
Salt
Sour
Bitter
The Fifth Taste
The Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda proposed umami as a fifth taste in 1907.
Aesthetic Objections
Blends
Ephemerality
Visibility
Class
The Social Construction of Desire:
Hunger and Abstinence
Aesthetic Language
“Both aesthetic objects and food and drink are ‘savored’ or ‘relished’ as part of the assessment, and gustatory metaphors continue in this choice of language. And – importantly – both are intensely bound up with pleasure or pain reactions. Disapproval is more than an intellectual judgment; it involves distaste – again both literal and metaphorical. (Particularly strong aversions evoke disgust.). This is another aspect of the fact that they are importantly subjective, constitutively a response of the subject him- or herself” (Korsmeyer 1999: 43).
Food Art
Damian Hirst
New Sensualities
In contemporary culture, food got sexy. Just when was it “that food and chefs and things culinary, and books about them, replaced sex as our main sensuous nourishment”? Martin Arnold asks. Ruth Reichel takes our contemporary fascination with food as a “sign that we are ‘getting away from our Puritan roots and are no longer embarrassed about thinking about food,’ that is, we are able to view food sensually and aesthetically rather than merely as a source of energy and survival” (2001, cited in Delaney 2011: 247).
Bento Box
The care and attention bestowed on the aesthetics of food indicates to the children “that they deserve such attention”
(Delaney 2011: 251).
Food Porn 1
“Does the increased interest in cooking, food, and cookbooks indicate a revolution in our approach to food or a nostalgia for the delicious, nutritious sensuousness of food that we have lost?” (Delaney 2011: 279).
Or has food gotten too sexy? In contrast to the puritanism of the health and slow food movements but heir to their sensuous fascination with food is what Rosalind Coward dubbed food porn (Female Desire 1984: 103).
Food Porn 2
Why is this pornographic?
Food Porn 3
Or this?
Food Porn 4
This?
Food Porn 5
How could you resist?
Food Porn 6
What’s happening?
