Over at Culture Making Nate Barksdale references an article from 3 Quarks Daily called Penne For Your Thought.
By and large two central interests in my life–food and philosophy– have gone their separate ways. I propose in this essay to combine them by considering the question in aesthetics of whether cooking can be considered an art form.
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Objection: Great art must be capable of expressing deep emotions. We can be moved and transformed by art. Art is capable of stretching our knowledge by harnessing the power of imagination–particularly poetry and fiction. Having read Remains of the Day I know understand what it is to have a professional ethics–in this case that of a manservant– in a way which I did not before.
Reply: I saved this for last because I think there is something right about it. . As the aesthetician Frank Sibley puts it: ” …flavors, natural or artificial, are necessarily limited: unlike the major arts they have no major connections with emotions, love or hate, death, grief, joy, terror, suffering, yearning, pity or sorrow.”
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I would like to think about this some more. But my tentative conclusion is that, at most, what this shows is that cooking is what might be called a minor art form. It is not as deep as literature, or music, or painting. It is what it is, and our lives would be less rich without it.
