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 Woman’s 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, why——for some——the 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 Korsmeyer’s 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 embodied——that 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 Babette’s 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 philosophy’s "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.