Making Sense
of Taste: Food and Philosophy
By Carolyn Korsmeyer
Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2002.
240 pp., illus. b/w. Paper, $19.95
ISBN: 0-8014-3698-2
Reviewed by Dene Grigar
Texas Womans University
dgrigar@twu.edu
Making Sense of Taste:
Food and Philosophy by Carolyn Korsmeyer, a thorough and thoughtful
treatment of the experience of "taste" as in the gustatory
sense, challenges the very notions underlying objectivity in relation
to the way we think about the senses and art, particularly the sense
of taste and the art of food and wine. If ever anyone needed a book
to explain the biases against the sense of taste, the reasons gastronomy
is viewed as an elitist hobby, whyfor somethe
love of food and wine runs counter to a "life of the mind,"
or reasons some people are just better at nailing that 10% of Cabernet
Franc in a meritage wine than others are, then this would be the book
to do it. Even those readers whom a drop of 1978 Guigal Cote Rotie has
never touched their lips will be interested in Korsmeyers argument,
so compelling, well researched, and philosophically sound it is.
Divided into six chapters, Korsmeyer begins with a discussion about
the way the senses have been hierarchised in the philosophical tradition,
beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and are still colored by that tradition
even today. As we learn, those senses, for example, that function at
a distance and, thus, provide a seemingly larger, more complete, amount
of data about an object, are not in any way embodiedthat
is, do not require a close proximity to the body in order to work effectively,
and are perceived as being durable are traditionally valued more highly
than those that do not. In doing so, Korsmeyer sheds light on the reasons
why taste has been relegated merely to subjective pleasure and explains
why collecting wine and tracking down a Michelin-rated restaurant in
an obscure French village is tantamount to frivolity for some.
Chapter two looks at aesthetics in relation to taste, drawing historical
distinctions between gustatory taste from the "evaluative assessment
about the immediate object of experience" (41) we think of as "aesthetic
Taste" (38). Challenging Kant and others who devalue taste because
they describe it as practical since we have to do it to survive, self-directed
because the focus of our perception falls upon the one tasting rather
than the object tasted, and lacking in formal structures such as composition,
harmony, and balance found in the visual arts, she further fleshes out
criteria that have denied taste a place as a meaningful sense of perception.
In chapter three, "The Science of Taste," Korsmeyer critiques
previous views toward taste from a scientific perspective and succeeds
in showing the lack of objectivity in the assumptions about its limitations.
The problem, she shows, centers on the framework we have used in evaluating
the senses in that it has been built upon a notion of senses working
in isolation rather than in synthesis with one another. The most compelling
of the six chapters, she deflates claims about "the alleged poverty
of taste," its reliance on smell, and its primitiveness. In this
regard, one only needs to remember the "wine wheel," a common
teaching tool used in wine appreciation classes, with its twelve universal
qualities that give way to 27 more distinct ones that themselves break
down into 87 more particular qualities certainly a tool
that buoys her claims since it shows that taste is neither meager in
scope or structurally undeveloped.
Chapters four and five focus on the meaning of taste and the way taste
and food have been commonly represented, respectively. Chapter six presents
various themes and narratives found in fiction, such as "revenge
cooking" in folklore, "the paradox of eating" in Moby
Dick, and the development of community in Babettes Feast
and To the Lighthouse, that "supply a network of factors
relevant to moral assessment and furnish a wealth of detail that appropriately
complicates and focuses salient facts and situations" (186).
Korsmeyer makes a compelling argument herself for reading Making
Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy when she suggests that the book
serves to "question the reliance of Western philosophies on the
distal sense of sight and models of detachment and objectivity to characterize
the ideal relationship of the perceiver to the object of perception."
Thus, anyone who critiques philosophys "venerable preoccupation
with the mind over the body" and "matters
of universal concern over particular experiences" (10) should read
this book for the approach Korsmeyer uses to make her argument. Personally,
I would add that anyone who thinks, thinks about eating or drinking,
or even eats or drinks should, too.