Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy Book

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.