Gordon Shepherd explains in his compelling Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters1 how complicated a construct taste actually is. There are five basic flavors: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami, that is, a savory, meaty taste. While children are born with a predilection for sweet flavor and a pronounced aversion to sour and bitter tastes, people’s gustatory preferences are also culturally conditioned. The human biological apparatus and the neurological mechanisms behind the generation of flavor are substantially complemented by social factors. Our tastes are not permanently fixed. We can learn to appreciate new flavors, and come to relish the bitterness of strong coffee, to give one familiar example.
That we associate certain flavors with certain foods results from an interplay of multiple stimuli and complicated processes which all add up to taste sensations. Shepherd cites numerous experiments in order to argue that the perception of flavors hinges not only on the taste buds but also – indeed, to a large extent – on smell, with touch, sight, and even hearing considerably involved in the enterprise. When zigzagging among stands at a produce market, we select fruit by touching it to check whether it is ripe for eating. But touch denotes more activities than simply the movement of the fingers feeling a pear or an apple. When ingesting food, we touch it with our teeth, tongue, inner cheeks, and palate. They shower us with knowledge about the texture of foodstuffs, and channel the pleasure of them crunching or melting in the mouth. Surprisingly few people realize how much of the gustatory sensation depends on the smells foods exude. A simple experiment will make us understand that the sweetness of a candy will be lost on us if we hold our breath. We will be able to feel its size, weight, and crunchiness or, alternatively, glutinousness, but not its flavor. How food looks and what shape it has also affects our sensation of taste, with colors exerting the greatest influence in this respect. Brightly colored substances give an impression of smelling more intensely, and white wine will taste like red wine to us if tinted with a tasteless red dye. Hearing also makes its own considerable contribution to the process. Pondering what food sounds like, Shepherd
Shepherd relies on neurological explanations to account for how gustatory sensations are produced. Relevant and convincing though these findings are, taste should be explored as a manifestation of the body’s integrated activity in its socio-cultural context.2 The neurogastronomer himself gestures at such a context when discussing the production of olfactory sensations. Feelings and memory hold a profound sway over our perception of smells and, consequently, over our experience of the flavors of foods. Paradoxically, taste does not come from food alone. While it originates in a holistic, sense-channeled experience, the intensity and character of taste results from the joint work of memory, emotions, associations, and social impacts.
Neurogastronomy intriguingly shows how taste came into being as an effect of adaptive evolutionary processes, but the fact that we sometimes resist evolutionary processes in an attempt to meet cultural demands is too patent to be overlooked. Lord Byron insisted that women should not be seen while eating.3 The only exception he allowed was a meal of lobster salad and champagne.4 This ludicrous injunction was evidently misogynistic, but Byron’s redeeming grace may be that he visited equally restrictive measures on himself. He did not abide by the lobster-cum-champagne diet, but nutrition was one of his central preoccupations. Byron was prone to weight gain, and his predicament was that Romanticism envisaged poets as slender and pale, with soulful and melancholy-ridden faces. Eating huge quantities of white rice was supposed
1 Ambitions and Temptations
Our societies are harmed by the expansion of the so-called Western dietary style, which involves the excessive consumption of industrially processed foods, where calorie intake overshadows other nutritional values. Such eating habits lie at the root of the increasing incidence of obesity and a range of other civilization diseases from allergies to cancers. However, weight-related problems are by no means our contemporary monopoly. Foxcroft cites stories of several historical personages who struggled with their weight (usually being overweight), and faced the dilemma of gastronomical pleasure vs. abstinent discomfort. This alternative is well exemplified in the culinary preferences of Friedrich Nietzsche, who reportedly loved sausages. Unfortunately, he was also obese as a result of his sedentary work. Nietzsche seriously considered going on diet, and consulted Luigi Cornaro’s The Art of Living Long, a very popular
Nietzsche became particularly interested in Cornaro’s exceptionally slow metabolism, which he believed was similar to his own. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche refers to this, remarking “My blood flows slowly.”8 On second thoughts, however, he concluded that the gastronomical minimalism advertised by Cornaro would not do because “[s]cholars in this day and age, with their rapid consumption of nervous energy, would be destroyed by a regimen like Cornaro’s.”9 This belief stemmed from the general notions of Nietzsche’s philosophy of life, in which intellectualism and asceticism stood for a depletion of life. While there is a long philosophical tradition which recommends integrating theory and practice, Nietzsche’s philosophical choices and life practice did not go hand in hand.10 Today, nutrition is increasingly frequently addressed in public debates and made part of social policy agendas as a result of the problems it may and does cause. Nourishment is explored by neurologists, dieticians, historians, anthropologists, aesthetics researchers, and artists, to name but a few interested groups. Though food is admittedly attracting more and more attention from social scientists and humanities scholars, the interrelated cultural, social, and biological dimensions of the cooking and eating of food call
Cooking has become a veritable media craze, and chefs belong among celebrities today. Cooking shows are watched by millions of viewers, and mass social movements preoccupied with nutrition arise, as illustrated by the slow food movement in the previous chapter. In spite of this, we still do not fully realize what a complex activity eating is and how destructive Western nutritional modes may be. While absolutely fundamental to our biological existence, eating is far more than just the ingestion of food. It is a complicated cultural and social process whose multiple dimensions call for interdisciplinary studies. We need a debate on the best diet for us because, as civilization develops, our lifestyle changes. While it is a sheer impossibility to come up with a detailed “recipe” for a diet catering to everybody’s needs, it is possible to formulate general principles of eating aligned with melioristic philosophical investigations.
2 Somaesthetics as an Art of Living
Contemporary culture is obsessed with the body. We spend a lot of time and money on improving and shaping our appearance, for example, by combating the signs of aging. Given this, Richard Shusterman, the author of Pragmatist Aesthetics and Body Consciousness, may sound preposterous when he bemoans the fact that we still do not devote enough attention to our bodies. However, what Shusterman is concerned with is the dearth of in-depth reflection which should lead to a melioristic reinforcement of life practice. This failing is to be redressed by somaesthetics,12 which builds on “the pragmatist insistence on
Shusterman is one of the few thinkers who delve into the philosophical significance of everyday routines.14 Interested in aesthetics as a discipline which focuses on perception, awareness, and sensing,15 he primarily attends to the kinetic aspect of human functioning, but the somaesthetics perspective may naturally be fruitful in theoretical investigations of food, as exemplified in Shusterman’s “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating” (2016).16 Before going into the details of his meticulous and thorough argument in this paper, let us examine how Shusterman’s pragmatist theory helps incorporate reflections on gastronomical practices into aesthetics and, furthermore, how it recognizes these practices as art.
Shusterman’s books time and again dwell upon the idea of an integral human experience in which the aesthetic, the ethical, the political, the practical, the cognitive, and the somatic interpenetrate and condition each other. His Practicing Philosophy revisits the ancient ideal of philosophy as an art of living17 in order to produce a holistic account of human existence. Shusterman believes that the best effects are achieved by combining philosophy as theory with philosophy as an artistic life practice. In this way, he surmounts Western philosophy’s entrenched reluctance to ponder the body. When tackling one of the perennial philosophical questions, namely, “How to live better?” he
Shusterman shares John Dewey’s belief that the mental elements cannot be separated from physical action. Shusterman approvingly quotes Dewey’s essay “Body and Mind,” in which the act of eating is taken to exemplify an integral action: “Eating is also a social act and the emotional temper of the festal board enters into the alleged merely physical function of digestion. Eating of bread and drinking of wine have indeed become so integrated with the mental attitudes of multitudes of persons that they have assumed a sacramental spiritual aspect.”19 Our moods are influenced by what we eat and drink and by how our digestion works; at the same time, out bodily fitness, which depends on what we drink and eat, determines our mental states. Attempts to sever these two orders may lead to problems: “When behavior is reduced to a purely physical level and a person becomes like a part of the machine he operates, there is proof of social maladjustment. This is reflected in the disordered and defective habits of the persons who act on the merely physical plane.”20
Dewey’s words could suitably depict the situation of the protagonist of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Chaplin’s movie features a factory worker who loses his sanity in endeavors to handle the demands of specialized assembly-line labor, which prioritizes economical action and seeks to maximize profit. After a day of work, he is unable to stop performing mechanically repeated operations. Chaplin’s images are indeed hilarious, but they also tell a painfully insightful story of alienation that afflicts eating. Namely, practically-minded scholars use the protagonist in trials of a machine designed to spoon food directly into workers’ mouths. In the experiments (and the future they herald), eating is stripped of its entire social and cultural aura, and reduced to energy-supplying feeding alone. Devised as effective and hygienic, the machinery falls to pieces in its ultimate demise. The only thing that the “streamlined” dining for modern times accomplishes is exacerbating the worker’s torment.
A philosopher should study our situation in the world in its entirety, without privileging one aspect of our existence at the cost, if not the exclusion, of others. Our wellbeing is premised on competently balancing the needs of both the mind and the body. Can the two actually be separated? Such aspirations, which add up to the pursuit of a good life, were on Shusterman’s mind when he set out to illumine the components of the art of eating.
3 The Art of Eating
Animals feed themselves; men eat; but only intelligent men know the art of eating.
anthelme brillat-savarin
“In Aristotelian terminology,” Shusterman writes, “cooking is poiesis, the making of an object with skill,” and “eating resembles praxis, the performing of an
The art of eating rests on three pillars: the art of cuisine, the art of food appreciation and criticism, and the art of eating proper. In Shusterman’s classification, the art of cuisine covers the processes of the preparation and presentation of dishes.26 The second component of the somaesthetic art of eating, which Shusterman proposes calling the art of food appreciation and criticism, revolves around choosing foods and selecting ingredients. Competent decision-making in this respect is predicated on one’s knowledge of the quality of food, its gustatory properties, its nutritional values, and its health-related effects. Expertise in composing meals also requires knowledge about the socio-cultural position and connotations of foods, and thus depends on cultural competency.27
Game also draws a great deal of its value from the nature of the country where it has matured: the flavor of a red partridge from Périgord is not that of one from Sologne; and while a hare killed on the plains outside of Paris makes but an insipid dish, a young one born on the sunburned slopes of Valromey or the upper Dauphiné is perhaps the tastiest of all four-legged game.28
Shusterman often refers to Savarin’s ideas when underscoring the importance of gastronomical art and the ways of cultivating it. He agrees with Savarin’s insistence that to account for the pleasures of the table one must not stop at explaining the olfactory and gustatory qualities involved; one must also consider “the visual beauties of food-presentation and the auditory harmonies of music that often accompany our dining to enhance its overall satisfaction.”29 In spelling out the conditions for harmonious and intense pleasures of the table, Shusterman both explores the conventionally listed senses (of taste, smell, sight, and hearing) and interprets the impact of touch and proprioceptive sensations on the final form of culinary experiences. In this way, the American pragmatist rounds off the investigations of the famous French gastronome. Shusterman foregrounds the importance of tactile pleasures, which derive from touching various surfaces and textures of both the victuals and the implements we employ in the act of eating. We touch things with our hands, lips, teeth, and tongues. Delight can be occasioned by warmth spreading through our bodies or by refreshing chilliness caused by cold drinks, cooled fruit, ice-cream, and cold dishes and desserts. Tactile stimuli are provided by the chopsticks we lift between our fingers, by the weight, shape, and surface of the cutlery we hold in our hands, by the texture of a napkin with which we wipe our palms and mouths, etc. When we break off a piece of a baguette, we know, even before it lands in our mouths, whether it is crispy, whether its crust is crunchy, and whether it is fluffy or solid inside.
Cooking sections in bookstores teem with publications on cooking techniques, recipes, the history of cuisine (including the history of cookbooks, kitchen utensils, restaurants, chefs, food migrations, etc.), and the description and evaluation of food products. The originality of the methodology underlying Shusterman’s project lies in adopting another, most unconventional lens
He identifies five major defining elements of the thus-conceived art of eating. These are one’s posture at the table, the dynamic of eating, the accessories involved in eating, the kinds and serving sequence of courses, and the modes of appreciating foods, beverages, and the pleasures offered both by festive banqueting and by ordinary everyday meals. Shusterman also stresses how important it is to know when to stop eating and drinking.
To commence his discussion of the somaesthetic art of eating, Shusterman ponders what body posture optimizes the experience of eating and maximizes its aesthetic quality. He scrutinizes the advantages and discomforts of the various positions our bodies take while eating, wherein he goes back to a range of their historical variants and looks over their contemporary forms specific to various cultures. His examination brings into relief the deeply contextual nature of the art of eating, which depends on culturally determined styles and norms, with disparate versions of the same behavior often being accepted within one culture. For example, the European tradition prioritizes eating in the sitting position, but prefers standing in some particular circumstances, such as buffet receptions and cocktail parties. At Italian and French cafes, visitors can choose between two styles of having their coffee and/or breakfast: they may either sit at a table and be served by a waiter or stand at the counter and directly order their drinks and snacks from a bartender. The latter is Shusterman’s favorite. His preference for having his morning coffee in this particular way is not dictated by time pressure or economic reasons; he opts for it, because
this position offers the multisensory pleasure of hearing, seeing, and smelling how your espresso is made and delivered at close range; further there is a sense of dynamic mobility, of stretching one’s legs before one’s long day of work at a desk; there is also an agreeably special sense of momentary, noncommittal solidarity with other diners at the bar, most often strangers, an option of sociality that one can take or leave, depending on one’s mood.31
Shusterman marshals a panoply of examples from various cultural contexts to illustrate how the selection of cutlery and various accessories depends on the circumstances in which we eat and on the dishes that are served. The choice of the physical properties – materials, sizes, shapes – of the utensils affects our tactile and proprioceptive pleasure. For instance, as Shusterman rightly notices, quite different experiences are produced by drinking coffee from a Styrofoam mug and from a china cup. He regards the soft wood of Japanese chopsticks as better attuned to bringing rice into the mouth than the cold metal of a fork or metal chopsticks, which he finds more suitable for hot Korean dishes. The sensory is interlaced with the cultural at this level as well: “Besides these sensory aesthetic differences there are aesthetic differences of cultural symbolism in one’s choice of implements: using a fork for some kinds of noodles and chopsticks for others.”34
The selection of victuals and the sequence of serving courses add up to another important dimension of the art of eating. In this respect, our decisions are again determined by the culture in which we are brought up, as every
The fifth defining element of the art of eating, which Shusterman refers to as “perceptions,” is partly implicated in the other four. Perceptions are generated through operations of the “complex sensorimotor systems” in our bodies. These systems perform multiple roles, ranging from the coordination of limb movements to the reception of gustatory, olfactory, tactile, and proprioceptive stimuli so as to enable “appropriate recognition and handling of eating accessories; and they govern our selection and sequencing of foods by identifying them and their qualities through diverse sensory perceptions.”37 To sort this tangled abundance of operations into more ordered categories, Shusterman proposes a simple division into external and internal perceptions. In his framework, the former result from our engagement in relations with the world outside, and the latter encompass sensations coming from inside our bodies. Shusterman recommends “cultivating and sharpening perceptions of inner bodily space, especially those within the mouth, nose, and throat where biting, tasting, chewing, smelling, and swallowing take place,”38 which he believes will promote the optimization of culinary experiences, making them more intense, more complex, and more rewarding. Attention to proprioceptive experiences stemming from body posture and physical contact with food will enhance the
Art, and therein the somaesthetic art of eating, presupposes the intentionality of action. Nonetheless, Shusterman does not insist that we should invariably mobilize our awareness to focus on each and every crumb we put into our mouths. The point is that art also presupposes improvisation, free play, and intuitive acts. Therefore, “[t]hat many selection and sequencing choices are made spontaneously by habit (rather than through reflective deliberation) does not entail their being unaesthetic choices. Habits can be intelligent and aesthetically creative if they are the sedimented product of intelligent aesthetic training in how to eat.”39 The results of this training will persist in our bodies, which know and remember.
4 Body Memory
My body is truly the navel of my world.
juhani pallasmaa
When asked how she had learned to cook, Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch answered: “I never took any lessons. I learned the most from my mother. I went to her, watched what she was doing, and then started to do just the same. Finally, it turned out all of a sudden that I could cook this or that myself.”40 Łukasz Modelski quizzed her: “But surely it wasn’t that your mother or grandmother took you to the kitchen, saying: Look, this is how you make duck, and this is how you make ratatouille?”41 She replied: “No. Not really. Rather, I watched them cook and then tasted the food; after all, I ate at home every day … I don’t know how to put it, but all this sat in me, somewhere deep inside. This sense of taste and cooking savvy.”42
“Know how” very obviously has a dual meaning in the kitchen. Intellectual knowledge is interlaced with manual knowledge in cuisine. Even the most meticulous, step-by-step description of making pierogis will not surpass showing how the fingers actually move when folding them and pinching their edges together, and even this will not give a beginner any guarantee of success.
“Muscle memory” is a term commonly used in everyday discourse for the sort of embodied implicit memory that unconsciously helps us perform various motor tasks we have somehow learned through habituation, either through explicit, intentional training or simply as the result of informal, unintentional, or even unconscious learning from repeated prior experience.44
Shusterman identifies six species of latent muscle memory, which is sometimes called “procedural memory” or “motor memory” in scientific discourse. Memory linked to the sense of the continuity of one’s self is called “the memory of the self” by Shusterman. Related to it is the second memory type, which is responsible for remembering place. Owing to this, we know how we got to a given venue and how we can leave it. The third variety of body-recorded, implicit memory is described by Shusterman as “interpersonal, or more broadly as intersomatic, so as to include non-human companions like animals.”45 The remaining memory types listed by Shusterman are memory of social role, performative memory, and the memory of the vestiges of traumatic events. Importantly, memory of the social role and performative memory are activated both while cooking and while eating. Below, I briefly examine these two forms of memory.
Body memory concerning social role is filled and updated from childhood on. Starting in our earliest years, we are trained for a range of culturally
From the groping experience of my initial gestures, my trials and errors, there remains this one surprise: I thought that I had never learned or observed anything, having obstinately wanted to escape from the contagion of a young girl’s education and because I had always preferred my room, my books, and my silent games to the kitchen where my mother busied herself. Yet, my childhood gaze had seen and memorized certain gestures, and my sense of memory had kept track of certain tastes, smells, and colors. I already knew all the sounds: the gentle hiss of simmering water, the sputtering of melting meat drippings, and the dull thud of the kneading hand. A recipe or an inductive word sufficed to arouse a strange anamnesis whereby ancient knowledge and primitive experiences were reactivated in fragments of which I was the heiress and guardian without wanting to be. I had to admit that I too had been provided with a woman’s knowledge and that it had crept into me, slipping past my mind’s surveillance. It was something that came to me from my body and that integrated me into the great corps of women of my lineage, incorporating me into their anonymous ranks.52
This passage perfectly illustrates both the memory of social role and performative (or procedural) memory, capturing the interdependence of the various kinds of muscle memory, which condition and reinforce each other. Our bodies brim with encoded procedures for doing things, which are spontaneously implemented while performing customary, quotidian activities, such as putting a jumper on or tying our shoes. It is due to the effect of performative memory that we can act without taking time to think on the consecutive component-actions we need to undertake to complete the task.
Such an automatic approach is obviously useful in daily life, because it imbues our movements with smoothness and enables us to invest “always-limited resources of explicit consciousness”53 in more challenging tasks. The
The insights compiled in this chapter imply that culinary art is both an expression of submission to the demands of the body, tradition, and routine as well as a creative manner of transforming the world; culinary art is as much a site of coercion as a space of pleasure. Ancient Greeks regarded proper nutrition as inextricable from strivings to attain harmony with the universe. This notion was embodied in a symposion – a banquet where eating was an important part of the conversation in which the interlocutors sought to attain self-knowledge and comprehend the world. Notably, as Shusterman claims, the very act of eating leads to self-examination and to the acquisition of “somatic self-knowledge.”55 Consequently, it may be highly relevant to philosophical considerations, which have always defined self-knowledge as their goal. Self-knowledge is a prerequisite for self-improvement, in which more conscious and thoughtful responses to the needs of the body are developed along with the competent use of one’s sensory apparatus.
Dietary practices impart meaning and profundity to existence, enhancing its authenticity. Yet the aesthetics of eating should not be reductively confined to special occasions and sumptuous feasts. Every common meal may have an aesthetic dimension. Ultimately, any culinary experience may contribute to creative self-fashioning: “Through such artful dining, even a simple meal becomes an artwork of improvised group choreography whose silent yet
Gordon Shepherd, Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
That neurological findings should be interpreted in this context is Antonio Damasio’s conclusion in Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam, 1994).
This ostensibly absurd principle is in fact still quite vibrant in contemporary culture, as psychological research indicates (cf. Marrie H. Bekker and Kirsten Boselie, “Gender and Stress: Is Gender Role Stress? A Re-examination of the Relationship between Feminine Gender Role Stress and Eating Disorders,” Stress and Health 18, no. 3 [2002]: 141–49). Opposite tendencies are in place as well. For example, the American artist Alison Knowles converted public eating into a work of art. She would have a tuna fish sandwich for lunch every day, because, as she claimed, it was the best cheap lunch available in her neighborhood. The invariable order of “a tuna fish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo, and a large glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup” transformed a daily meal into a performance to be called Identical Lunch. Associated with the Fluxus, Knowles first spotted a potential for art in her eccentric habit of ordering the same dish every day in 1967. For many years to follow, she would daily repeat it at the same venue (Riss, a now non-existent restaurant on New York’s 8th Avenue) at more or less the same time. With time, she was joined by other artists, whose experiences and impressions were recorded and published in Journal of the Identical Lunch. Alice Knowles, Journal of the Identical Lunch (San Francisco: Nova Broadcast Press, 1971), 1.
See Louise Foxcroft, Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over Two Thousand Years (London: Profile Books, 2013), 53.
Foxcroft, Calories and Corsets, 52–53.
Foxcroft, Calories and Corsets, 52.
Cf. Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2009); Massimo Montanari, Food Is Culture, trans. by Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are, in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 75.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 176 (italics original).
This dissonance is poetically contemplated in “A Supple Wreath of Myrtle,” a poem in which Robert Hass portrays Nietzsche as an individual torn between his pessimism about the future of culture and civilization and small pleasures of life. Prophesying the end of man, Nietzsche can enjoy a delicious sausage and Bizet’s light music even in the face of impending doom: “Poor Nietzsche in Turin, eating sausage his mother/Mails to him from Basel. […] /Dying of syphilis. Trimming a luxuriant mustache./In love with the opera of Bizet Alexandre-César-Léopold.” Robert Hass, “A Supple Wreath of Myrtle,” in Robert Hass, Time and Materials: Poems, 1997–2005 (New York: Ecco, 2007), 4.
Knowledge about proper nutrition is key to healthy living. However, putting this knowledge into practice in one’s own life and the consistent observance of dietetic recommendations may be a serious challenge. People with eating dysfunctions may need help from both dieticians and psychologists specialized in psychodietetics.
For a detailed depiction of the tenets, goals, and development plans of somaesthetics, see “Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal,” a chapter added to the second edition of Richard Shusterman’s Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Lanham, Boulder, New York, and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 262–83. Somaesthetics is discussed at length in Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, 3.
This theme is extensively studied by Yuriko Saito, who suggests following the philosophical traditions of the East so as to merge the “what” with the “how.” See Yuriko Saito, Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). A philosophical investigation of everydayness is also proposed in Jolanta Brach-Czaina, Szczeliny istnienia (Warszawa: piw, 1992). This strategy is widely adopted by philosophers working with the concept of somaesthetics. See, e.g., Robert Dobrowolski, “Somaesthetic Encounter with Oneself and the Other,” in Beauty, Responsibility and Power, ed. Leszek Koczanowicz and Katarzyna Liszka (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014).
Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, 3.
Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” in Body Aesthetics, ed. Sherri Irvin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 261–280.
Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 1–16.
Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetic Awakening and the Art of Living,” in Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, 289.
John Dewey, “Body and Mind,” in John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, Volume 3: 1927–1928, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 28.
Dewey, “Body and Mind,” 29.
Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy, 21.
Foxcroft, Calories and Corsets, 15.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 265.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 263.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 263.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 261–62.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 262.
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, trans. and ed. M[ary] F[rances] K[ennedy] Fisher (New York, London, and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 95.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 267.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 262.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 275–76.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 270.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 270.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 271.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 272.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 272.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 273.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 273.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 272.
Łukasz Modelski, Piąty smak. Rozmowy przy jedzeniu (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2014), 251.
Modelski, Piąty smak, 252.
Modelski, Piąty smak, 252.
Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life. Volume 2: Living and Cooking, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 200.
Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, 91.
Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, 95.
De Certeau, Giard, and Mayol, Practice of Everyday Life 2, 151–52.
Julian Barnes, The Pedant in the Kitchen (London: Atlantic Books, 2003), 4.
Barnes, Pedant in the Kitchen, 1.
Barnes, Pedant in the Kitchen, 3.
Barnes, Pedant in the Kitchen, 3.
De Certeau, Giard, and Mayol, Practice of Everyday Life 2, 152.
De Certeau, Giard, and Mayol, Practice of Everyday Life 2, 152–53.
Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, 99.
De Certeau, Giard, and Mayol, Practice of Everyday Life 2, 200–201.
Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, 113.
Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” 267.