Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy

by Carolyn Korsmeyer

Taste, perhaps the most intimate of the five senses, has traditionally been considered beneath the concern of philosophy, too bound to the body, too personal and idiosyncratic. Yet, in addition to providing physical pleasure, eating and drinking bear symbolic and aesthetic value in human experience, and they continually inspire writers and artists. Carolyn Korsmeyer explains how taste came to occupy so low a place in the hierarchy of senses and why it is deserving of greater philosophical respect and attention.

Korsmeyer begins with the Greek thinkers who classified taste as an inferior, bodily sense; she then traces the parallels between notions of aesthetic and gustatory taste that were explored in the formation of modern aesthetic theories. She presents scientific views of how taste actually works and identifies multiple components of taste experiences. Turning to taste's objects―food and drink―she looks at the different meanings they convey in art and literature as well as in ordinary human life and proposes an approach to the aesthetic value of taste that recognizes the representational and expressive roles of food. Korsmeyer's consideration of art encompasses works that employ food in contexts sacred and profane, that seek to whet the appetite and to keep it at bay; her selection of literary vignettes ranges from narratives of macabre devouring to stories of communities forged by shared eating.

Genres: Philosophy, Food, Academic, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Carolyn Korsmeyer is the author of five books of philosophy and three novels, Charlotte's Story (TouchPoint 2021) and Little Follies: A Mystery at the Millennium (Black Rose Writing, 2023)and Riddle of Spirit and Bone (Regal House, 2025).

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not everyone has a taste for philosophy and most academic philosophers write in a manner which requires a lot of chewing before swallowing. Carolyn Korsmeyer has done the field of aesthetics (a discipline on the ingredient list of philosophy) a great service with her book Making Sense of Taste. For 2500 years, the sense of taste has been accorded less importance on the hierarchy of human senses than the "higher senses" of sight and hearing. She begins with the earliest Greek and Roman philosophers (who denigrated taste because it was animalistic) and concludes with an excellent chapter that looks at three meals in works of fiction: Melville's Moby Dick, Dinesen's Babette's Feast and Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Her assertions in support of elevating the allied arts of cooking and eating are remarkably diverse in the support she derives of disciplines outside of formal philosophy, e.g. human physiology, psychology, the arts, and beyond. It took me fourteen months to read this book; some things deserve to be savoured.

[Icey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is divided into six chapters, each of which focuses on a different aspect of the philosophy of food. Chapter 1, "Savoring Disgust," explores the role of disgust in our reactions to food and the cultural and moral dimensions of disgust. Chapter 2, "Gustatory Perception," examines the nature of taste perception and the ways in which we use our senses to understand and appreciate food. Chapter 3, "Food and Memory," explores the role of memory in our understanding of food and the ways in which food can evoke memories. Chapter 4, "Food and Identity," considers the relationship between food and identity, including the ways in which food can reflect cultural and national identities. Chapter 5, "Food and Art," examines the ways in which food can be considered a form of art and the implications of this view for the appreciation and evaluation of food. Finally, chapter 6, "Food and Ethics," explores the ethical implications of our food choices and the ways in which food can reflect our moral values.

Throughout the book, Korsmeyer draws on examples from a wide range of culinary traditions, including French, Italian, and Japanese cuisine. She also engages with the work of prominent philosophers and cultural theorists, such as Immanuel Kant, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu.

One of the key themes of the book is the idea that taste is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that is influenced by a variety of factors, including cultural, historical, and social contexts. Korsmeyer argues that our understanding and appreciation of food is shaped by our experiences, memories, and cultural norms, and that these factors can both enrich and limit our culinary experiences.

[Andrew Spear · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting discussion of taste in what is arguably its most literal and primary sense: the taste for food and drink, as opposed to (so the history tells us) the aesthetic sense of taste, which is supposed to be analogous to but more sophisticated than literal taste, having for objects, as it does, works of visual art, music and literature.

I began reading this book on the airplane during my last trip to Europe (nothing like reading about taste as an aesthetic phenomenon while eating airline food!), and since returning I've become a bit distracted by the book on wine, but I plan to return to this one and finish it up soon.

The basic project of the book is to challenge dominant attitudes towards the literal sense of taste, as well as the other "bodily senses" of smell and touch, especially in the Western Philosophical Tradition. Korsmeyer's basic project is to argue that, contrary to much of the received philosophical tradition, the phenomena associated with taste, eating and drinking are as rich, cognitively challenging, aesthetic (in the higher sense of the fine arts) and integral to human nature as many of the traditional fine arts, and for this reason they deserve more philosophical consideration and respect than they have traditionally received.
In chapter 1, Korsmeyer analyzes the roots of the idea that vision and hearing, the "distal" senses, are more epistemically significant and richer in information than are the "bodily" senses of taste, touch and smell; and traces it form its origins in Ancient Greece through the Enlightenment and into contemporary times. In chapter 2, she explores both the analogies and the dis-analogies between literal and "aesthetic" taste, ultimately arguing that the exile of literal taste from the philosophy of aesthetics proper was motivated largely by the project of Enlightenment thinkers to establish aesthetic taste, along with other values, in an objective way that would render truths about them independent of the vicissitudes of subjective preferences and cultural differences. Chapter 3 explores various facets of recent scientific investigations of the nature of taste, and begins to challenge some of the standard assumptions about taste. Chapter 3 culminates with a fascinating analysis of the phenomenology of taste in which Korsmeyer identifies 6 different factors that will play a role in determining how a given subject will experience the taste of something at a given time (I'm seriously thinking about writing these up on an index card and carrying them with me when I go out to eat ;-). I've been enjoying this book a great deal and look forward to finishing the second half.

[Louis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very spirited effort to dislodge the sense of taste from the bottom of the sense hierarchy, a position that Plato and Aristotle gave it. Though focusing heavily on aesthetics and pleasure, Korsmeyer argues well for re-thinking food as a more legitimate topic of philosophical study.