Elizabeth Telfers’ article Food as Art is a great piece of work that explores many avenues on whether food should be considered and art form and why many people have different outlooks on the subject. This work was extremely interesting to read and brought up numerous views on the topic that I have never thought much about. Telfer brings up the issue of classifying “dishes as works of art” on page 17 and offers an issue of making thousands of pies off the same recipe, is this considered a work of art still? She compares this to engraving or print-making and says, “Since we can call each engraving a work of art, we can call each Marks and Spencer pie a work of art” (Telfer 17). She is making a point that even though something can be replicated a thousand times or more it is still considered a work of art. When reading this section and thinking of the video clips, it brought up the issue of fast food. McDonald’s is all about making everything taste the same everywhere in the world. They produce millions of meals a day that taste and look the exact same. I would say that this type of food is not art, but from Telfer’s article, maybe the very first recipe created for a hamburger at McDonalds was a work of art. It is hard for me to call any kind of fast food art, but maybe this is my dislike for fast food coming through.
I think there is a limit to where and when food is considered art. Telfer makes an interesting point in saying that, “if I like the way cottage cheese contrasts in flavour and texture with rye bread, my reaction is aesthetic, whereas if I am please with the combination because it is low-calorie and high-fibre, it is not” (Telfer 10). She is making a good point of food has to have some form of aesthetics to it for it to be considered art. Many of the things I eat on a daily basis are because I know that they are healthy and my body will benefit from the nutrients they contain. I would not consider my daily eating habits as a form of art. But when I go out to a nice meal I can find myself really appreciating the time, energy, and thought that must have been made in order for my meal to taste and look the way it does. I lived with a chef once and he was always very particular in the way he presented a dish and he would spend hours and hours perfecting a new dish just to his liking before he would serve it to anybody in his restaurant. Maybe from living with him I am biased in the way that I view food as art. I understand the things that go into making a “perfect” dish and I believe the chef should be praised for the work they put into creating a meal.
When looking at Ellen Dissanayake’s article I may have taken a modernism view of food as art, where “art had become if not a religion, an ideology whose principles were articulated by and for the few who had leisure and education enough to acquire them” (Dissanayake 18). I for some reason have this view on food as art maybe because of the culture we live in and all the television shows on food that are broadcasted daily. I do not believe I am educated enough to view a lot of food as art because I am not accustomed to many of the taste that are out there. I have foods that I enjoy and others that I do not, but I am no good at telling you why or which specific spices I do or do not enjoy. There are many people out there that study food and what tastes go with what for a number of years, I believe thess people truly understand why certain dishes taste better than others.
I also have a hard time calling fast food a work of art but Telfer’s statement that “food does allow of systematic, repeatable, regular combinations: the cook creates the possibility for them, which the eater then realizes” (21), causes me to wonder if the ability for the recipe to be repeated is required for food to be considered art would make food from McDonalds classified as art. Your comment about appreciating food more when you go out reminds me of Telfer’s statement that “a meal that claims to be a work of art is too complex and long-drawn-out to be understandable in terms simply of feeding” (14), I believe that you aren’t appreciating the food as much as you are appreciating the process you imagine the chefs went through to make it due to your past experience of living with a chef.
Your statement that you don’t believe you are educated in food enough to view all art as food intrigues me, I would counter with Telfer’s claim “that our sense of smell, at any rate, is less highly developed than that of many animals. But we can still recognize a huge range of different smells and tastes” (Telfer 20). This claim means that although you believe you don’t know why you like some food but not others is due to your body being able to recognize the tastes of the food or the smells emitted from the food enough to know whether you like the food or not.