I have never though about seeing food as art before today. To me, art should be something like painting, drawing, and/or building. Basically I think art is things in a higher level than basic needs. Food is absolutely basic need for every person, and different people would have different taste and preference for food. Just like Telfer said in this week’s reading, “because people have to eat them to appreciate them, and because each person necessarily eats a different part of the dish, it might seem that in the sphere of food no one can appreciate a complete work of art, and no two people can appreciate the same one. (P. 17)” The most obvious example is me and my roommate. I love Chinese food while she loves western food, and we often “argue” at home to decide what to eat at night. If I have to see food as art, I would say slow food is more like art than fast food. I agree with the video presentations points. In the fast food presentation, the presenter firstly explained why fast foods are so fast. Because they are all frozen, people just reheat them in store. They have “one taste from all over the world”. He said in the video that people should “save pressures of slow food.” In the slow food presentation, he took an example of mom and son to make slow food. They use “just enough” resource to make fresh food. They could take a very long time to just make a source, which would never happened in fast food store. Although they might taste a little bit different for one time and another, they keep their main taste constant. I like to see these little differences as the soul of slow food. One people can’t draw exact same two eggs, and only copy machine could. Like Ellen Dissanayake said in her essay “What is Art for?” art is something that “make special”. From this point, fast food is not art because it is not special at all. All the McDonald stores cross the country taste the same. But for slow food, chefs would think about every step to ensure its quality, and every time the dish would taste a little bit different because it was made by human not machine. Therefore, I would say slow foods are a kind of art, but fast foods are not.
In your post, you argued that slow food is art while fast food isn’t art, because (by the definition of Ellen Dissanayake) fast food isn’t “made special” and slow food is. You said that fast food have “one taste” and that the little differences in taste is what you really consider the “soul of slow food”. Although I agree with you that typically slow food is considered art, while fast food isn’t; I say this based on how the chef prepared the food or dish, and the interpretation and experience of the consumer. But not so much based on how different it tastes from time to time. I still believe slow food could be considered art even if it only has “one taste” every time. Back during middle school, my mom would always make me the exact same lunch every day for school; and it tasted exactly the same too. But I still considered it to be “made special” because my mom put in the time and effort to make it for me. One point I would like to bring up from your post: it is true that food can vary by taste from time to time; but do you still consider slow food art if that dish started to taste worst and worst every time you eat it? Or is does food art only include pleasurable and good tasting dishes?