The Aesthetics of Taste

Discussion of culture inevitably centers on sensory experience, the vehicle by which we as humans experience culture (although at least a portion of the experience is undeniably intellectual as well, if the culture is good culture). 

However, the senses of seeing and hearing (sight and sound) have historically exercised – and exercise to this day – a hegemonic control over cultural discourse, relegating smelling, tasting, and feeling to the outskirts of aesthetic experience.

It is time we moved past this discrimination against equally legitimate avenues for sensual experience of culture. While sound and feel are perfectly legitimate methods of aesthetically valuable experiences, it is the sense of taste on which I desire to focus. In contemporary society, in which fast food chains sell amounts of food that are nearly impossible to believe, refinement of the sense of taste is a lost virtue, one which is rarely seen and recognized more rarely still.

However, there is just as much beauty to be found in a delicious food (or a pleasant scent or touch) as there is in the paintings of Raphael, the music of Mozart, or the films of Kurosawa. Certainly, the beauty is of a different kind, but the incredulity one might feel at the comparison between the music of Mozart and the taste of a refined, sophisticated, artfully-prepared meal demonstrates the extent to which the possibility of a beautiful taste has been neglected.

There are a couple of candidates for this neglect. Firstly, people undergo the experience of taste daily when they consume food, so it is a less remarkable experience than, say, encountering a beautiful sculpture. 

Moreover, food and drink, the primary vehicles for the experience of flavours, are necessary for the continuation of human life and therefore unexceptional. However, both of these options are to be rejected, because while it may not be immediately obvious, aesthetic experiences of sound and sight are undergone even more frequently than those of taste, as they form our phenomenal understanding of the world at nearly every waking moment. 

Thus, it is not the regularity of taste that sets it apart, but rather the similarity of cultured experiences of taste to unexceptional ones. Both are found primarily in food and drink, whereas with something like aesthetic experiences of sound, the cultured auditory experiences are clearly found in symphony halls and undergone by way of record players, whereas the unsophisticated sounds of (e.g.) cars honking on the street or one’s alarm going off in the morning are seen as regularities participating in an entirely different sphere.

There is thus a reclamation needed, a return to an artistic perception of food and drink, where the carefully prepared and curated meals of a trained chef are seen as participating in a category distinct from the meals at fast food institutions, the former being designed to provide the experience of aesthetic, beautiful tastes, while the latter are tailored specifically towards sustenance and gratification of desires. 

The desire for beauty is gratified, of course, by a sophisticated meal, but it is not the same desire as the desire for pleasure satisfied by a Big Mac.

Of course, there are plenty of arguments to be had about health, but this argument is entirely separate. The concern is not over what one puts in one’s body or how it fills and sustains one (although those are very important), but is rather over the ability to experience beauty through taste, a unique and therefore irreplaceable aesthetic experience. 

A return to a perception of the possibility of a cultured taste experience, just as there can be cultured visual experiences of (say) paintings, enables us to see the property which we term “beauty” in yet another part of our lives.