The Pleasure of Food

Elizabeth Telfer is absolutely correct in her classification of food as a simple and minor art. Of course, as Telfer points out, food is limited by its transience (24) and that it is considered differently because of “the usefulness of food and drink” (21), but I think she tries to work around this to prove that it does not matter, rather than differentiating food for nourishment and food for an aesthetic experience. She talks about the aesthetics of food (10), but she ignores that there is an element of eating that is purely based on the aesthetic pleasure.  People do not go to upscale restaurants for nourishment. They do it to experience the artistry of food, to enjoy tastes that are different than the tastes of fast food or store-bought food.

Food can easily fit into the paleoanthropsychobiological mode of interpretation coined by Ellen Dissayunake (1). This is why different cultures have different food, and that food is closely related to a person’s perspective of that culture. For example, I was fortunate enough to travel to Italy last summer, and along with the architecture and visible art that I saw, my most memorable experiences were the aesthetic pleasure of real Italian food. The way the narrator describes the food-making process in the second presentation, “Slow Food,” captures this idea. The crepes made by this family are dishes that can only be experienced in this area (the basil only grows around their town and the olives are freshly grown) and can be appreciated with a cultural, societal, and biological background. This perspective also accounts for why people have vastly different tastes. This touches on the psychological and biological part of the analysis.

Even when reading Telfer’s descriptions of food, a physical response was evoked in me. My mouth salivated and I had to stop to make something for myself to eat. The reason that food counts as art is because my home-cooked meal did not live up to the aesthetic pleasure I craved. Chefs are artists who can create something that is appreciated in a similar way to other modes of art.