Had nihilists been
as common in the kitchen as they are in artistic circles, then no one
would have dared deny cooking its rightful place among the Arts. What
would I care? I'm
not worried about the (lack of) dignity of my trade. And as a matter
of fact – as I hope to make apparent in the following – I am
probably able to enjoy both cooking and eating more under the present
circumstances. So it is for the
sake of the art,
rather than for the sake of food that I will argue here that it does
deserve that exalted place.
I´ll have to start with a definition of art: a representation of
elements from reality that evoke meaningful feelings or emotions in
the context of the observer's life. A movie depicting a heroic
adventure would qualify. As would a painting about a child's
wondering. Or a statue that visualizes life's burden. A song or
symphony that captures the joy of summer. Music, like food, doesn´t
use concepts to suscitate emotions. And I am not referring to
´conceptual art´, the bric-a-brac'ed mini essays that flood the
modern art world. Conceptual art is boring – and it misses the very
point in art's function in life – because it is an intellectual
exercise and instead of provoking feelings of any kind, they make a,
usually political, statement. Even literature, that in its matter
consists purely of concepts, a series of words, aims to transmit
emotions.
Now for all the difficulty in understanding what sensory and cerebral
mechanisms allow 'sounds' to have such an effect on people, nobody
would challenge music as a form of art. Probably it is the force of
the emotions that we all know music can cause that works as a first
and final argument. All through - auditive – tension and
release. Food, on the other hand, does not seem to have the
same emotional impact – less even does it provoke a comparable
affectional variety. Ironically one could consider music the most
frivolous of the arts, in the sense that it is hard to connect its
principles with our inherited mechanisms of survival, with the
modalities of human life. Our relationship with food, on the other
hand, is as relevant, as urgent as it was when we still swung from
tree to tree.
Indeed, if cooking is an art at all, it most certainly is 'applied'.
Architecture is an applied art, in the sense that it translates
furless man's need for shelter. Eating, of course, is not unique to
humans, but cooking is. Our taste, and smell, our tactile sense, and
our sight originally were instruments with which we were able to
estimate nutritional value, toxicity, digestibility, etc. While these
functions have been taken over by intellectual means, our senses are
still there to be stimulated. And we do. Cooks and other mortals have
developed innumerable ways to create sensuous pleasures by preparing
our food in specific ways. The final purpose remains feeding,
and the overriding feeling created will be fysical satisfaction.
There are many ways towards this gastro-intestinal sensation, I'd
even say this feeling itself has variations – from the porridge's
solid inertia to the light'hearted' contentment of sushi – but one
could say this final purpose is the great limiting factor for
cooking as an art.
To return to the comparison with architecture: imagine a building
that does not provide shelter. It might be pretty as hell, but it
would miss its purpose completely. Now with the incredibly raised
level in welfare that a lot of us can celebrate daily, a number of
foods and drinks are consumed that are not intended to feed, but
rather to entertain. This development does enlarge the scope of food,
but limitedly so. After all, it will have to taste good,
right? And if it doesn´t exactly feed you, it shouldn't poison you
either. Now, think of Rietveld's chair – a chair that is actually
so horrible to sit on, that it only supports its claim to being art.
Similar phenomena in the world of food are few. I can only think of
Japanese dishes with blowfish. As much as food, these are a flirt
with danger and death. And they are a culinary example of a certain
value in Japanese culture. Pushing our powers of imagination a bit
further, we could extend the comparison to the use of bitter in
cooking. Bitter is the most ´acquired´ of tastes. Our bitter taste
receptors originally are an alarm-system for poisonous substances.
Compare the 'medicinal' effects of bitter substances on our stomach.
But bitters can also be used to create tension in a dish,
admittedly not such a strong emotion as the stylized fear of death
provoked by blowfish sashimi; and if it cannot be properly termed an
emotion, still an affective appraisal of the eater's perception. And
if not an emotion, it most decidedly is human, inasmuch as it
cannot be equated with an animal or ´digital´type of appreciation
like/not like. As part of a composition, an ingredient that
may be repellent by itself, can add to or improve something in an
ingredient that is good by itself. This is an aspect of
tasting as an active process, of consciously 'digesting' the
olfactory data.
Now if I were to cook the inedible, I might risk my position in the
kitchen, but at the same time I could hope to be taken seriously in
'artistic circles'. I'd serve the soon-to-become infamous
tart-tartes, chew-long beef, in: the nutshell,
low-heat fritters, grilled cucumber, and of course a char-manger.
I'd leave my guests - or my comience, if I am permitted a neologism –
furious, frustrated, appalled. Some of them would be utterly
confused; especially those sensitive to other people's opinion. At
some point during this whole sequence – all arts depend on some
build-up of tension, after all – I might suscitate a feeling of
relief, of homecoming, of triumph even. By serving anything good.
I could have considered 'cooking' for the event by randomly throwing
ingredients in the pot – rather like I did as a four-year-old. But
surely that would have been too 'naturalist' a meal, to inspire
people with any strong emotions.
One could argue that the emotions I'm speculating on here are not the
same kind as we hope to experience through the other arts; that these
are meta-sensual, the result of a reflection on perception(s),
and not immediate emotional reactions to tastings. If the comience
hadn't suspected that I knew better, or, really, if they
hadn't known any better, they wouldn't have experienced anything
beyond mild disgust. But then, isn´t knowing better the
basis, the proper context for all (emotional) appraisal of art? As it
is for creations of taste, our most primitive sense. We might share
taste, chemical detection, with bacteria, but as human beings we are
capable of comparing new data with an enormous archive of previous
perceptions. Whether we analyze and compare fully consciously or not,
isn't really relevant, inasmuch as we must distinguish an infinity of
tastes with a rather finite number of olfactory receptors. Is this
why complexity of taste is one of the greatest compliments
made of food and wine? Because to deserve this title means
stimulating our senses intensely, to cause a treasury of perceptions
the size and shape of a Southern villa, and to permit our mind to
roam through it. And our body to digest. The villa changes each time,
but it always harbors well-being, since it is pleasurable to feed
ourselves. It is our roaming through the house of perceptions that
constitutes our enjoyment as human beings. You could compare this
type of enjoyment to the one we experience by listening to music; in
our head we are able to compare sounds to spatial, geometrical
relations that – besides provoking emotions – confirm our
functioning as human beings. Then, of course, we can experience
'meaningful' emotions upon listening to music, whereas food grants us
a series of sensual stimuli and a degree of physical satisafaction.
Until you run into a cook as perverse as I described above.
Comments and ideas are most welcome.
