the Art of Cooking

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.