Throughout most of its history, Western philosophy has had a persistent problem with food. Philosophy has traditionally been regarded as an intellectual activity in the purest sense of the term, which has meant having nothing or little to do with the body. Therefore, philosophy is often considered antithetical to food. To put it simply, the mind resides in the head, while food goes to the belly. Despite their shared location in the bodily frame, the head and the belly symbolize two discrete domains: one intellectual and the other physical. However, food has not been wholly eschewed by philosophy, and inquiry into the nature of food is in fact as old as Western philosophy itself. Notably, the issue was already explored by Plato in numerous works, including Phaedo (64d), where Socrates rhetorically asks Simmias whether it is appropriate for a philosopher to care very much about pleasures, especially those of eating and drinking. Of course, the answer is negative: real philosophers should despise such delights because their pursuits must be linked to the mind and to the soul, rather than to the body.
This passage is the archetypal locus of a long and still abiding tradition in which food is thought of as opposed to the “high” reflections of philosophy, science, and art. The reasons for this exclusion have varied across historical periods and philosophical schools. A two-fold schema can be sketched to elucidate this idea. The need for sustenance is a universal trait of all living beings. Consequently, eating and drinking do not embody the qualities and intellectual skills that set humans apart as rational beings endowed with language. Besides, the line between necessity and enjoyment is often blurred so that, while essential for survival, eating and drinking invariably carry the risk of engendering pleasure. As Plato reminds time and again, the pleasures derived from eating, like those derived from physical love, may be perilous, futile, and fundamentally illusory. In Timaeus, Plato claims:
The authors of our race were aware that we should be intemperate in eating and drinking and take a good deal more than was necessary or proper, by reason of gluttony. In order then that disease might not quickly destroy us, and lest our mortal race should perish without fulfilling its end—intending to provide against this, the gods made what is called the lower belly, to be a receptacle for the superfluous meat and drink, and formed the convolution of the bowels, so that the food might be prevented from passing quickly through and compelling the body to require more food, thus producing insatiable gluttony and making the whole race an enemy to philosophy and music, and rebellious against the divinest element within us.
72e–73a
Also, as Plato expounds in Gorgias (e.g., 462–466), cookery is a form of deceptive flattery whose effects are at variance with authentic physical wellbeing, which is achieved through the practice of medicine. Similarly, the culinary arts are contrary to the genuine social virtue that is cultivated through politics.
The relationship between knowledge and pleasure is a primary preoccupation in the philosophical discourse on food (Perullo 2016). As Saint Augustine of Hippo insists in his Confessions, what we must guard against is not so much the consumption of food as a necessary medicine for the body, but rather a failure to recognize where everyday need subtly transitions into uncontrolled desire. This paradigm has loomed large in the history of philosophy, mostly preventing any connection between the stomach and the mind, and framing the assimilation and incorporation of food as external to intellectual processes. Nevertheless, a few philosophers have highlighted the significance of food not merely as a physiological necessity but as a foundation of knowledge, pleasure, education, and cultural and social values. In the Western canon, Epicurus is paradigmatic in this respect, and his approach will be discussed below. Charles Fourier and Friedrich Nietzsche are more recent examples of thinkers appreciative of food. However, these and some other like-minded philosophers are a minority as compared with the proponents of the dominant position, which cautions against unlimited and immoderate pleasure. The latter view is indeed the most pervasive and enduring one, persisting from ancient philosophers, such as Aristotle and the Stoics, up to contemporary thinkers; it also resonates with numerous ideas embraced in other disciplines. For example, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, conceptualized an individual’s developing ability to moderate and regulate pleasure instincts as the hallmark of the ego or self. This notion underscores the potential for societal and individual evolution.
As a matter of fact, relationships between philosophy and food form a more intricate, less predictable, and not so schematically straightforward landscape. Indeed, to practice moderation, one must accept the pleasures of food to a (tempered) degree. Without this, individuals would not be able to implement the necessary diverse strategies for averting the potential pitfalls of loss of control. The idea was principally advocated by Epicurus, a proponent of a moderate approach to pleasure, whose philosophy pivots on a precise conception of earthly happiness as linked to the ability to manage and master the legitimate pleasures of the body. However, in the popular reception of his doctrine—from immediately after his death until the present day, as reflected in common language (an epicure means a person devoted to sensual gratification)—Epicurus has been pictured as a supporter of a dissolute and extreme attitude to life, exclusively dedicated to the pleasures of sex and food. This misrepresentation has been buttressed by an arguably scandalous thought, perhaps erroneously ascribed to him: “The origin and root of all good is the pleasure of the stomach; and all excessive efforts of wisdom have reference to the stomach” (Athenaeus 1854, 875). In contrast to Plato’s theories, Epicurus advanced a monistic and continuist project, where the human being was conceptualized as an inseparable unity of passions and reason, body and mind, belly and head. In this theoretical framework, food plays a central role in promoting not only mental and physical wellbeing, but also convivial happiness.
The enjoyment of food has also been rejected for more internal and general theoretical reasons, including the subordination of taste within the so-called hierarchy of the senses. The relegation of food, as well as sex, to the domain of external and superficial delights inferior to the internal and profound pleasures associated with the intellect and theory can be attributed to the connection of food with the body. The senses associated with nourishment are thus inherently—and, in some cases, exclusively—rooted in the body. Since Aristotle, touch, smell, and taste have consistently been regarded in philosophy (with some notable exceptions, though) as inadequate means of understanding and objectifying the world. Touch, smell, and taste are classified as proximal senses, while sight and hearing as distal ones. According to Plato and Aristotle, the latter are superior because they can operate at a distance, with the spatial separation between the object and the perceptual organ fostering an attention disengaged from the body. The conceptual shift from a focus on the perceiving subject to the perceived object, which is external to the body, is believed to enhance the certainty and reliability of knowledge. In contrast, the senses of taste, touch, and smell are experienced as being inside the body and entangled in its states. Therefore, the inferior senses appear to be susceptible to error and subjectivity, as they are closely associated with the instincts and passions of the body. Conversely, the superior senses of sight and hearing are linked to the intellect, thinking, and the rational and cognitive nature of humans.
The medieval adage De gustibus non est disputandum (“There is no disputing about taste”) epitomizes the enduring conflict between philosophy and food in the context of the hierarchy of the senses. Contemporary thinkers and philosophies, including Richard Shusterman and his somaesthetics, have profoundly challenged this paradigm. Nevertheless, the dominant view continues to be endorsed in many areas; mainstream epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have been reluctant to fully incorporate gustatory processes into their respective domains so far. Since this volume’s objective is to contribute to the advancement of studies in food and somaesthetics, a more thorough examination of aesthetics and the concept of taste is in order.
In Europe, the term “taste” was almost exclusively employed in its literal meaning as the sense of the palate until the 17th century. Then, it underwent a semantic shift, emerging in the philosophical lexicon and precipitating the establishment of aesthetics as a distinct discipline. The noun “aesthetics,” derived from the Greek term aisthesis (“sensation”), was coined by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1735. In his view, the term aisthetikè, a feminine adjective, was associated with episteme, implying the notion of aesthetics as a science of sensibility. In his influential work Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas (1684), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz pioneered the concept of sensuous knowledge as a form of representation different and separate from rational analysis. He contended that our perception of flavors and aromas came only from the senses of reference, thereby establishing a novel framework for understanding sensory perception. This shows that at the beginning, aesthetics was, potentially at least, open to incorporating taste and smell as its objects of study. However, over time, the term “taste” came to be used metaphorically to describe the ability to recognize and appreciate beauty in art and to navigate elegantly and discerningly in the various domains of human experience.
During the 18th century, which is often labelled as the Century of Taste, the notion of taste was extensively analyzed by philosophers. Paradoxically, the rise of the concept of taste in aesthetics was not accompanied by a similar success of food in philosophy. Defined as the ability to recognize and discern flavors, the literal meaning of taste initially served as the foundation of its metaphorical use. However, the former gradually faded from the philosophical landscape. This decline can be attributed to the emphasis on the distinction between the gustatory experience of food and the aesthetic experience of art, with many scholars highlighting the purportedly irreducible differences between these two domains. The hierarchy of the senses played a pivotal role in this paradigm. Kant and Hegel, who exerted a profound influence on modern aesthetics, firmly entrenched this model. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant (1966, §7, 46) asserts that people’s varying preferences for wine from the Canary Islands are attributable to nothing other than private and individual predilections. The gustatory pleasure associated with wine, as posited by Kant, is not aligned with the notion of truly aesthetic taste, which is characterized by disinterest. This conception of taste has been embraced by much of the subsequent philosophical discourse, albeit to varying degrees and with nuances. In his Aesthetics, Hegel reiterates that what is sensible in art refers exclusively to the two theoretical senses of sight and hearing and claims that the proximal senses are too material to ascend to the realm of art. Interestingly, Kant, himself an enthusiastic proponent of culinary excellence, was renowned for holding prominent luncheons. Hegel, too, was known to have a penchant for fine wine. Thus, the crux of the debate does not lie in personal gustatory preferences or the personal appreciation of food and drink; rather, it lies in the value ascribed to pleasures and experiences beyond the purely intellectual domain.
The historical consensus on food among prominent philosophers such as Plato, Kant, and Hegel has been sustained in contemporary discourse. On one level, attention to food is deemed unworthy of a philosophical life. On another level, gustatory pleasures are acknowledged in the private sphere, but deemed irrelevant to the public sphere. In aesthetics, some contend that gustation is humanly and culturally significant, but do not acknowledge it as an aesthetic phenomenon. For instance, Roger Scruton (2008, 120 ff.) has insisted that despite the cultural relevance of wine, its consumption cannot be regarded as an aesthetic experience. Scruton argues that palatal taste is by nature incapable of expressing feelings such as joy, gaiety, and melancholy. Wine can evoke those feelings, but they can only be expressed by visual and auditory objects.
Nonetheless, a minor alternative canon exists within this story, stemming from some writings produced in the very Century of Taste, then spreading, and today branching out into Shusterman’s somaesthetics, Yuriko Saito’s everyday aesthetics, Arnold Berleant’s aesthetics of engagement, and contemporary relational and gustatory aesthetics. David Hume’s fundamental Of the Standard of Taste (1757) stands as a preeminent exemplar of this canon. According to Hume, taste operates in a similar manner in the palate and in the critical appreciation of artworks. This perspective encapsulates the exploratory and empirical spirit that characterized early 18th-century philosophy, a spirit that is also evident in the Encyclopédie by Diderot and D’Alembert.
In the 19th century, Ludwig Feuerbach emerged as a prominent advocate of the philosophical importance of food. In his review of the Dutch-Italian physiologist Jacob Moleschott’s theory of nutrition Lehre der Nahrungsmittel für das Volk (1850), Feuerbach, who famously said “Man is what he eats” (2007), argues that food is the paradigmatic proof of the connection between the body and the mind; specifically, without food, there is no thought and therefore no possibility of philosophy. Feuerbach’s argument also suggests that food is not only a vital necessity but also a sign of civilization and culture. Within this theoretical framework, gustatory pleasure can be on par with aesthetic appreciation. This claim dovetails with Nietzsche’s tenet that the body, including its nutritional concerns, is not separate from or inferior to the mind. In The Gay Science (2006, 23, 84), Nietzsche deplores Plato’s philosophy as a misinterpretation of the body and underlines the need for a future philosophy of nutrition that does justice to the value of food.
The genesis of contemporary gustatory aesthetics as such can be traced back to John Dewey’s foundational masterpiece Art as Experience (1934). To elucidate his concept of aesthetic experience, Dewey pictured a dinner at a French haute cuisine restaurant and drew a portrayal of a food expert—an epicure—which was decidedly ahead of his time and is still extremely interesting today:
Even the pleasures of the palate are different in quality to an epicure than in one who merely “likes” his food as he eats it. The difference is not of mere intensity. The epicure is conscious of much more than the taste of the food. Rather, there enter into the taste, as directly experienced, qualities that depend upon reference to its source and its manner of production in connection with criteria of excellence. As production must absorb into itself qualities of the product as perceived and be regulated by them, so, on the other side, seeing, hearing, tasting, become esthetic when relation to a distinct manner of activity qualifies what is perceived.
1980, 49
The senses of sight, hearing, and taste become aesthetic when their perception is related to a specific activity. Dewey’s philosophical standpoint is in direct opposition to the hierarchical model of the senses expounded above. According to his alternative model, any sense has the potential to be aesthetic, provided that the sensory activity is directed in ways that make it possible to discern the quality of the objects perceived. Eating exemplifies this phenomenon, and it is in this domain that the most promising philosophical potential of aesthetics lies. In Dewey’s day, his philosophical perspective clearly suggested a possibility of an alternative aesthetics, a project that has been taken up and elaborated by pragmatist aesthetics and Shusterman’s somaesthetics.
The emergence and the subsequent reception of the philosophy of food and, in particular, the aesthetics of taste are situated in a broader context. Indeed, the second half of the 20th century witnessed a surge in historical, anthropological, and sociological research on the values embedded in food. In this regard, psychology has proven a pivotal field, particularly through the contributions of the American psychologist James Jerome Gibson. In his The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966), Gibson demonstrated that tasting and smelling constitute a complex, multisensory, and multimodal perceptual system. According to Gibson, the definitions of taste and smell must be understood pragmatically, in terms of their functions in an organism that produces knowledge as a selection of information grasped from the environment. Within this framework, the so-called lower senses evolve and develop as intricate, multisensory gastronomic values. Posited by Gibson, the multisensorial dimension means the concurrent engagement of all sensory modalities in gustatory experience. It is evident that sight, hearing, and touch influence the recognition and appreciation of food, if to different extents and over time. Gustatory experience is further impacted by extrinsic factors, including people’s biographies, memories, expectations, and contextual differences, which contribute to the recognition and appreciation of taste through the process of extraction and selection. This approach rendered the notion of palatal taste as a “minor sense” obsolete.
In the same period, Emmanuel Lévinas made food and taste relevant elements of his metaphysics. Here, taste is axial to the subject’s openness and exposure to otherness; consequently, the act of relinquishing one’s own bread in order to offer it to the hungry takes a central position (Lévinas 1998; see also Goldstein 2010). In a different philosophical framework, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, author of the 1979 “Gusto” entry in the Einaudi Encyclopedia, reclaimed the palatal dimension of taste, defining it as “knowledge that enjoys and pleasure that knows” (2017, 22).
If the conceptual framework for the philosophy of food substantially developed in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was not until the 1980s that an explicitly dedicated space for such explorations emerged. Among the trailblazers was Michel Onfray, whose critically acclaimed Appetites for Thought (2015, originally published in 1989) built on Nietzsche’s insights to offer a comprehensive interpretation of philosophy through the motif of food and a critique of traditional academic philosophizing. Since then, food philosophy has expanded in multiple directions. At present, it comprises an array of miscellaneous and even contrasting contributions from authors affiliated to diverse intellectual schools (for a good review, see Kaplan 2019).
Gustatory aesthetics began to flourish in the literature from the 1990s onwards, notably coinciding with the burgeoning of feminist theories and the study of difference in the U.S. and the English-speaking world. This development was particularly influenced by the work of female philosophers, who highlighted the historical bias towards hierarchical and gendered conceptions of physical taste in Western philosophy. The practices of tasting and cooking are intrinsically linked to proximity, materiality, intimacy, bodily pleasures, and passions. As such, they are behaviors and ways of being that patriarchal cultures have historically assigned to women. Remarkable exponents of this line of inquiry include Lisa Heldke and Deane Curtin, who co-edited Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food in 1992, Elizabeth Telfer, who published Food for Thought in 1996, and Carolyn Korsmeyer, whose unprecedentedly comprehensive and insightful Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy surpassed the contributions of her predecessors. With its rigor and full endorsement by the academic community, the study sought to broaden the scope of philosophy and aesthetics through the lens of taste and food. Regarded as a pioneering work, it has become a “classic” and an indispensable reference for researchers in the field. The book presents a thorough historical-critical account and offers a novel theoretical framework that firmly establishes gustatory aesthetics as a legitimate domain of inquiry in philosophy and academia. For Korsmeyer, food, taste, and cooking are instrumental in deconstructing the prevalent philosophical discourse, developed, as it long was, by males. Korsmeyer shows that this narrative has historically prioritized rational thinking over bodily sensations, theory over practice, and distant senses over proximal ones. Consequently, culinary practices such as cooking have been predominantly designated as the domain of women in domestic and everyday contexts. This has been a salient factor in the marginalization of culinary thought in serious philosophical deliberation. It is no coincidence that discourse on culinary art in French gastronomy arose in the late 18th century, concurrently with treatises on taste for beauty and within a mostly masculine model. In this model, the chef as a male artist or an otherwise socially recognized figure was an adult man who followed a professional path where cooking and eating were elevated to a higher, almost intellectual level (Perullo 2017).
Somaesthetics is based on the assumption of the inseparable unity of the mind and the body, seeks to dismantle any hierarchy regarding sensibility, and upholds the possibility of aesthetic experiences. As such, it is perfectly in tune with the philosophical valorization of food and with the development of gustatory aesthetics. Food can be explored by philosophy along different paths: the ecological study of the relationship between food and personhood, the socio-cultural perspective on the symbolism and meanings of food, the ethical engagement with food habits, and the aesthetic examination of the quality of life, happiness, and conviviality. From this perspective, philosophy of food is not just an intellectual exercise, but a practice that opens up to a different involvement with life: eating and drinking are not just actions to be performed, but experiences that continually shape our relationship with the world and our perception of it.
The nexus of gustatory perception and consumption is an issue of profound interest. Similarly, the relationship between food and art has been a topic of considerable exploration (see Koczanowicz 2023). The central question guiding this kind of inquiry is whether food and, more specifically, culinary practices can be considered an art form. This enduring philosophical question continues to provoke debates and reflections, particularly in the contemporary context, where food-related careers have gained considerable social esteem, which was unthinkable a few decades ago. Themes as different as care and creativity, body consciousness and mindful eating, the controversial relationships of art, craft, technology, and savoir-faire, food production, environmental challenges, and artistic experimentation are central to this intriguing research domain today. This variety is reflected by the contributions collected in this volume as they address a range of different topics, demonstrating and expanding the richness and the potential of food philosophy through the lens of somaesthetics.
Nicola Perullo’s chapter titled “Food Consciousness: Its Importance to Human Life and the Three Main Obstacles to Its Development” offers a comprehensive background and a compelling interpretation of the concept of taste and of food aesthetics, at the same time highlighting the role of pragmatism and somaesthetics. As the reevaluation of the so-called minor and proximal senses, of gastronomic pleasure as aesthetic pleasure, and, more generally, of the ethical, political, and cultural significance of food has been completed, Perullo claims that it is now necessary to move beyond sensibility and materiality and to focus on the importance of the invisible and extrasensory, but real, aspects of food. Perullo’s proposal to redefine taste as a task and a destiny is based on the overcoming of the idea of the modern subjectivity as “I” and of taste as something stable and private. The discussion of the problems that beset taste and food consciousness and of the new trajectories to pursue provides a broad, detailed, and radically relational perspective that can illuminate and contextualize the other contributions in the volume.
Yuriko Saito’s “Everyday Foodscape: a Site for Practicing Care” highlights the importance of attentiveness to quotidian daily chores. Saito believes that cultivating an awareness of the aesthetic qualities of everyday objects and practices can enrich our lives and foster a deeper connection with our surroundings. She insists that our crucial task is to expand the network of relations and interdependences. She embeds her argument in somaesthetics and Zen Buddhism, two approaches that share careful attention to everyday activities and call for a caring and conscious life. Shusterman’s somaesthetics appreciates mindful somatic engagement in eating and related activities, which is in fact relevant to the collection as a whole. Zen Buddhism teaches us how eating and cooking can be transformative practices. Involvement in the world is inextricable from care relationships, which can be practiced in everyday activities, including the preparation of meals, eating, and cleaning. Saito emphasizes the relation-fostering potential of food and portrays cooking as an act of cooperation, which requires respect for the ingredients, the tools, and the surroundings. Saito’s focus corresponds to the idea of promoting sustainable dietary practices, such as reduction of food waste, support for local farming, and curbing the impact of industrial food production on the environment. These concerns are at the center of the three chapters that follow, each dealing in different ways with the climate crisis.
Dorota Koczanowicz begins her “Embodying Responsibility: Somaesthetics, Art, and Eating for the Climate” by exploring to what extent the language of art can be a remedy to the communicative limitations of the sciences in raising awareness and encouraging action for environmental protection. Artistic practices boast a unique capacity to embody abstract concepts and lend palpability to the often-invisible consequences of human behavior and decisions (such as climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and industrial farming). To offer an example of effective somaesthetic tools that can help to foster people’s commitment to environmental action, she discusses the work of Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe), a British artistic collective dedicated to raising consciousness, inspiring dialogue, and promoting solutions for sustainable and fair future.
In “Unpacking Disembodied Meat: Technology-Mediated Human Predation,” Małgorzata Dancewicz-Pawlik reflects on the production of laboratory meat as a meliorist response to climate change caused by factory farming. She examines the ways and areas in which biotechnology and new media art correspond to cultural, environmental, and ethical debates on meat-eating, vegetarianism, and lab-produced meat. The latter is presented as a potential solution to the ethical and environmental issues linked to the traditional production of meat. However, because tissue-cultured meat depends on animal-derived media, “victimless consumption” remains a complicated and contestable notion.
Anna Kwapisz builds on somaesthetics to interpret the underlying notions and actual productions of critical food design in her “Mindful Experience Design: a Somaesthetic Perspective on Critical Food Design.” In Kwapisz’s view, the somaesthetic aspiration to improve embodied experience and challenge habitual consumption patterns is also pursued by the practitioners of critical food design, a design discipline located at the intersection of design and critical art. Unlike utility-focused affirmative design, critical design tends to rely on discursive and experimental forms. Critical food designers seek to intrigue users and undermine their traditional ideas of what food design is in order to invite them to reconsider their attitudes to food and the ways in which food is produced, presented, and experienced. In this way, critical food design works as a medium for raising aesthetic and ethical awareness.
Art as a point of reference in somaesthetic inquiry is also discussed in the three following chapters, which investigate the food-related senses. In “The Licking Eye and the Seeing Tongue: Haptic Taste in Polish Contemporary Art,” Marta Smolińska explores embodied perception of art through the metaphors of the “licking eye” and the “seeing tongue.” Smolińska analyzes a range of artworks by contemporary Polish female artists, such as Natalia LL, Anna Królikiewicz, Iwona Demko, Angelika Markul, Elżbieta Jabłońska, and Urszula Kluz-Knopek, who foreground licking as a mode of perception in order to challenge aesthetic and cultural norms, overcome the taboo on female sexuality and desire, and deconstruct the traditional hierarchy of the senses. In their projects, the artists highlight the potential of the tongue as a sensory organ relevant to embodied and multisensory somaesthetic knowledge. Smolińska caps her argument with the poignant assertion “I lick, therefore I am.”
Addressed in the contributions by Saito, Koczanowicz, and Kwapisz, the salient motif of fostering community around food reappears in Renata Tańczuk’s “Sounds of Eating: the Art of Food in David Rodríguez Vélez’s Artistic Sound Projects,” which primarily concerns the building of community as related to the difficult experiences of migration. Tańczuk looks at the overlaps of food, sound, and politics, prompting the realization that tasting is not only a bodily act but also a cultural phenomenon that involves value-judgments, feelings, and identity formation. Tańczuk examines the ways in which the Colombian artist David Rodríguez Vélez uses the aural dimension of cooking and eating to foreground resistance, emancipation, and community-building. The chapter situates Vélez’s work in a broader context of somaesthetics by illuminating the embodied, multisensory, and political aspects of food preparation and consumption. Tańczuk proposes regarding Vélez’s artistic practices as a form of “weak resistance,” in which sound and food are employed as tools for challenging exclusion and promoting solidarity.
Elena Mancioppi’s “Food Flavors in Italo Calvino: towards an Olfactory Somaesthetics” takes the exploration of the somaesthetic research on eating practices into literary studies and offers an account of the perceptual, emotional, and cultural aspects of taste in Italo Calvino’s writings. Her chapter begins by analyzing the epistemological and aesthetic significance of flavors in texts by Calvino, who espouses the idea of sapore/sapere—savoring as the source of pleasure and knowledge alike. Calvino’s narratives perfectly lend themselves to readings that illuminate the importance of perceptual culinary experiences conscious of the cultural and environmental context. His texts vividly picture an array of complex food-induced emotional responses, ranging from nostalgia and delight to frustration and disgust. Mancioppi argues that Calvino’ work is an opulent resource for the discovery of the somaesthetic dimension of food and flavors. By focusing on smell and taste, like Smolińska, Mancioppi challenges the traditionally privileged position of sight and hearing in Western aesthetics, advocating for a more inclusive understanding of aesthetics.
The following two chapters share the insistence on adopting an ecological and embodied perspective that views the body and the environment as reciprocally influential. In her “Embodiment, Eating, Environment: a Somaesthetic Approach to Obesity,” Maddalena Borsato underscores the need for a new perspective on obesity that moves beyond stigmatization and reductive medicalization. Borsato emphasizes the importance of embodiment, mindfulness, and environmental contexts in understanding obesity. Her argument draws on somaesthetics as a discipline that integrates body consciousness, perception, and action, in this way supporting a reconsideration of obesity as a relational and embodied experience, rather than as a purely medical or moral issue. Disturbed body consciousness may not only contribute to obesity but also breed the sense of disintegration linked to non-acceptance of one’s own body, lack of control, and the sense of deficient agency. Somaesthetics provides a framework for understanding obesity as a complex interplay of embodiment, eating practices, and environmental factors.
Raymond Boisvert’s essay “Ecological Somaesthetics: beyond Self- Enhancement” discusses the concept of ecological somaesthetics, which underscores interdependence, embodied life, and the communality of human existence. Boisvert critiques the dominance of Cartesian dualism and calls for abandoning the binary separation of the mind and the body and for relinquishing the notion of an isolated self as an autonomous and self-reinforcing entity. Instead, he champions a philosophy in which humans are considered integrated, physiological, cultural, and social beings deeply embedded in their natural and societal environments. Looking through this lens, he regards food as a metaphor for interdependence that brings together the physiological, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions of life.
The volume concludes with a poetic essay by the Polish visual artist Anna Królikiewicz. Her “LITTLEIMPORTANCE” portrays “the kitchen cosmos” and relies on metaphorical rumination to picture a range of relationships which are made possible by the kitchen. Królikiewicz fathoms ensembles of meanings and ambivalences involved in the preparation of food and nourishing oneself and others. She dwells on the meals she cooks and documents in social-media posts, a practice she does not consider to be art in the strict sense of the term. Nevertheless, food and eating are among the media she uses in her artistic projects. Palatal taste has often featured in her installations as a stimulus to revive time-eroded memory or to complete the jigsaw puzzle of identity. The essay is accompanied by the photos Wojciech Korsak took in the kitchen of Królikiewicz’s apartment in Sopot.
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