On Beauty and Being Fed

The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction.

- Elaine Scarry, On Beauty And Being Just

Can a critic ever escape the nagging feeling that he or she is attempting to do the impossible - that is, to fix a source of beauty "in the world" upon the page? Or is criticism just to begin (or continue) the process of what Scarry calls the "infinite begetting" that beauty prompts - a fruit begets a painting begets a poem begets an essay begets another painting and so on?

In the realm of food criticism, the objects of beauty are particularly fleeting. To fully experience a dish's beauty, you have to destroy it by eating it. Perhaps it is this fleeting quality that has many philosophers and theorists reluctant to class food as "art."

Could food criticism change their minds? What aspects of food make it more or less likely to come to be regarded as an art, and how can food criticism affect our perceptions of those aspects of food?

Can food be useless enough to be art?

Both foods and recognized art forms qualify as symbol systems within which common aesthetic features may be found. I do not argue that food ought to be classified as art - or at least, certainly not as a fine art standardly understood. That would be a pointless advocacy in any case, since arts do not arise out of philosophical insistence.

- Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste

Perhaps a comparison to another medium would be instructive. There is a medium whose artistic potential was once in doubt but now seems firmly established, photography. Sontag writes in "On Photography":

Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Yet food is different from photography in several key ways.

First, food is not new - it has been with us for far longer than photography. If its artistic potential has not yet been recognized yet, what hope does it have going into the future of making an easy transition?

Second, food has a clear social use, and is almost never a purely "gratuitous" activity. Where photography started off as a completely "useless" medium, food has started off as the opposite - not merely useful but in fact vital. However, certain aspects or functions of food do blur the line between "useful" and "gratuitous."

Most food straddles the useful/gratuitous line

Take, for example, the practice of the garnish, or of visual presentation generally. One might claim that insofar as the food preparer gives attention to visual presentation, he or she is engaging not in "cooking" but in a form of painting-with-food or perhaps collage. Yet, the other visual arts do not (at least, no longer commonly) suffer the indignity of this sort of comparison. Photography has been called "painting with light," but the comparison is not derogatory (though perhaps a backhanded sort of compliment, refusing, as it were, to acknowledge the distinct features of photography).

Visual arrangement serves a variety of purposes in food preparation. Not all of it is done merely to make the food look "good" or "appetizing" (with the "useful" aim of stimulating appetite). Sometimes food is arranged so as to look like something else, with varying levels of resemblance: fruits and vegetables carved to look like animals, animals deboned and then reassembled to look like a whole animal. Other times, food is made to follow a visual formal code, such as the "five color" requirement of bento boxes, or the preference for whiteness in bread. The presentation of food can be used to send a message - the self-consciously "simple" presentations of Chez Panisse makes sense as a contrast to the highly regular and "refined" presentations in classical French cooking.

Another example of useful/gratuitous blurring in food is the addition of seasoning or spices. It may be that in the past, spices and seasonings prevented spoilage, or masked its effects so that otherwise unappealing food could be consumed for economical reasons. However, with the advent of refrigeration and food abundance in wealthy countries, the use of spices seems to be sliding more and more into the gratuitous, serving not to mask off flavors but to create "good" ones, and often to affirm cultural identity or create a feeling of the "exotic" (depending on one's relation to the cuisine associated with a particular spicing).

Is molecular gastronomy a purely "gratuitous" food?

Since photography's artistic potential was recognized only when two distinct groups of photographers emerged - useful and gratuitous, so too with food, but in reverse. Some chefs must start making purely gratuitous food. Arguably something like this is happening in the world of molecular gastronomy.

Some of the key features of molecular gastronomy, as I understand it:
1) It occurs almost always in professional kitchens and its techniques are almost alwasys unavailable to the home cook. Thus, it paradoxically is playful and professional at the same time. There are no dilettante molecular gastronomy practitioners, any more than there are home particle physicists.
2) It moves further from recognized cuisine than even the "fusion" style of food, occasionally making witty references to well known dishes, but always appearing alien, shedding a very strange light on the familiar.
3) It often goes right up to the edge of what we would recognize as "food" or even "edible" - for example serving edible papers, globes of sugar, making use of hot water to release scents into the air from elements that are then not actually eaten, aerosol sprays, and, famously ethereal foams. In this, it has that self-reflexive medium-referring-to-itself quality that one associates with art and literature.
4) Its methods show concern for the "scientific" and reproducible. In applying "scientific" principles to food, using many mechanized processes, and the presentation of highly-manipulated and "refined" raw ingredients, molecular gastronomy wants to create dishes that can be precisely reproduced, and not dependent on the skill of any particular chef (the famous "cold hands" of pastry chefs, or that mysterious technique of poking at a piece of food to tell if it is done), region or even time of year. Which brings us back to Scarry's description of the effects of beauty on the perceiver:

Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and still other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.

Molecular gastronomy attempts to create a lasting copy, a response to the beauty of food, that is itself food

With its playfulness, its concern with perfect replication, and its distancing from the practical and everyday food of the home, Molecular Gastronomy seems to be as much a reaction to food as food itself. Here then is a "text" that is sufficiently distanced from its subject matter to be considered on its own, and is sufficiently reproducible to be faithfully "read" by many, and thus "public" in a way that food generally cannot be (many restaurants have "bad nights," on which certain dishes, typically prepared well, are noticeably poorly prepared, which to me implies that dishes are inconsistent, even if most of those inconsistencies fall within the acceptable range of a "good" night).

The famous molecular gastronomy chefs are not "talented" in the same way that other chefs are. They are "ideas" men, and their new style has its share of critics, the way that much contemporary art, in moving away from "technique" has drawn criticism.

Even as molecular gastronomy moves towards being classified as "art," its existence as "food" comes to be questioned.

Food about food - are you a chef or a critic?

Molecular gastronomy is clearly "about food." It self-consciously plays at the edges of the edible, and engages with the many cognitive elements of cuisine, if not its more visceral ones. Thus, its practitioners could fairly be called food critics of a kind.

Yet at the same time, their work product results in things that you put in your mouth (usually), chew (sometimes) and swallow (sometimes).

Here then, molecular gastronomy straddles another line - creation and criticism. But this kind of straddling is familiar to those who have encountered art in any medium. A good film is also "about film," a good photograph is "about photography."

Which then prompts me to expand this analysis to all food. All food, not just molecular gastronomy, is a response to other food. All food is a re-creation of the beautiful - a previously encountered instance of food. The origins of many foodstuffs are notoriously hard to find, meaning that for the most part, we have been eating copies of copies for all of recorded history.

Molecular gastronomy's remarkableness lies not in the fact that it responds to food, but that it responds to it in a new, more permanent medium. This means that it can be experienced fully without being destroyed, since the important thing is not the instance of the dish, but its concept, with the instances being brought ever closer to the concept through science and technology.

Art has to be permanent?

Perhaps the unstated reason for the reluctance to recognize food as "art" is its transience. Yet, as I have argued, food displays many other qualities that "art" has - it has instances of usefulness and gratuitousness, it is self-regarding, and it is (or can be) beautiful.

By refusing to grant food the status of art, we reveal our own fears and concerns about mortality. How could something so immediate, so temporary, be worth elevating? How could this thing, encountered so intensely, pressed against the most intimate parts of the body, full of moisture and smells and memory, then suddenly gone, possibly be as civilized as a painting, contemplated day after day, from a distance?

How could something so alive possibly be as important as art?