Tasting the World: Environmental Aesthetics and Food as Art

Abstract

Food can provide an unique insight into both the human conditions of embodiment and interactive experience, and aesthetic education of awareness. My project is to present an opportunity for a far-reaching pragmatic vision by treating 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 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.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 DouglasDining is and always was a great artistic opportunity.2 Frank Lloyd WrightTraditionally, 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. 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 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 eighteenthearly nineteenth century French chef, Marie Antoine Careme. From Careme, we get a clear articulation that through food, and confectionary in particular, our edible is related to the 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 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 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 is held together by a tensionfilled, 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 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 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 is not an article about 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 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 aesthetics that is nature -oriented. Instead I treat aesthetics as having to do with the elements (cultural, qualitative, dynamic) that make up an environment. …