Culinary aesthetics: World-traveling with culinary arts

Abstract

Tourism and gastronomy scholars often mobilize the term “culinary aesthetics” as a mere metaphorical descriptor paralleling a culinarian's work the likes of painters and sculptors without explaining its theoretical underpinning. In this study, the author turns to John Dewey's theory on art and experience to offer a theory that delineates the aesthetic relation among the culinary artist, culinary artwork, and culinary audience as a world-traveling phenomenon. The author puts forward the idea that when a taster engages with a culinary artwork, one potentially dialogues with the culinary artist's expressive self, hence transforming the culinary encounter into a dialogue of different culinary worlds. In other words, one can world-travel into a world of another when engaging with culinary arts.