The Art Of Taste

The Taste of Art offers a sample of scholarly essays that examine the role of food in Western contemporary art practices. The contributors are scholars from a range of disciplines, including art history, philosophy, film studies, and history. As a whole, the volume illustrates how artists engage with food as matter and process in order to explore alternative aesthetic strategies and indicate countercultural shifts in society. The collection opens by exploring the theoretical intersections of art and food, food art’s historical root in Futurism, and the ways in which food carries gendered meaning in popular film. Subsequent sections analyze the ways in which artists challenge mainstream ideas through food in a variety of scenarios. Beginning from a focus on the body and subjectivity, the authors zoom out to look at the domestic sphere, and finally the public sphere. Here are essays that study a range of artists including, among others, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys, Al Ruppersberg, Alison Knowles, Martha Rosler, Robin Weltsch, Vicki Hodgetts, Paul McCarthy, Luciano Fabro, Carries Mae Weems, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Janine Antoni, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Liza Lou, Tom Marioni, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Michael Rakowitz, and Natalie Jeremijenko.

This engaging and approachable (and humorous!) guide to taste and flavor will make you a more skilled and confident home cook. How to Taste outlines the underlying principles of taste, and then takes a deep dive into salt, acid, bitter, sweet, fat, umami, bite (heat), aromatics, and texture. You'll find out how temperature impacts your enjoyment of the dishes you make as does color, alcohol, and more. The handbook goes beyond telling home cooks what ingredients go well together or explaining cooking ratios. You'll learn how to adjust a dish that's too salty or too acidic and how to determine when something might be lacking. It also includes recipes and simple kitchen experiments that illustrate the importance of salt in a dish, or identifies whether you're a "supertaster" or not. Each recipe and experiment highlights the chapter's main lesson. How to Taste will ultimately help you feel confident about why and how various components of a dish are used to create balance, harmony, and deliciousness.

From the bestselling author of Traffic, a brilliant and entertaining exploration of our personal tastes--why we like the things we like, and what it says about us. Everyone knows his or her favourite colour, the foods we most enjoy, and which season of The Sopranos deserves the most stars on Netflix. But what does it really mean when we like something? How do we decide what's good? Is it something biological? What is the role of our personal experiences in shaping our tastes? And how do businesses make use of this information to develop and sell their products? In You May Also Like, Tom Vanderbilt dives deep into this complex and fascinating world. He explores the physiology of eating to reveal how our taste buds, which can only recognize five tastes, interact with our olfactory systems and our memories to create an astounding array of flavours. He shows how difficult it is, even for experts, to pinpoint exactly what makes something good or enjoyable, and how companies like Netflix can make or lose millions based on their ability to predict what we will enjoy. Like his bestselling book Traffic, Vanderbilt's new book takes us on a stimulating and surprising intellectual journey that helps us better understand our world and ourselves, and the things we so often take for granted.

The Invention of Taste provides a detailed overview of the development of taste, from ancient times to the present. At the heart of the book is an intriguing question: why did the sensory attribute of human taste become a social metaphor and aesthetic value for judging cultural qualities of art, fashion, cuisine and other social constructions? Unique amongst the senses, taste is at once a biologically derived sense, private, personal and individual, yet also a sensibility which can be acquired, shared, and communicated. Exploring the many factors that defined the evolution of taste – from medieval morals and medicine to social and cultural philosophy, the rise of aesthetics, birth of fashion, branding trends, and luxury worship in the age of mass consumption – Luca Vercelloni’s ambitious text provides readers with an outstanding introduction to the subject, making it the cultural history of taste.Now available for the first time in English, Taste features a new final chapter and a preface by series editor David Howes. Rich in detail and examples, this interdisciplinary work is an important read for students and researchers in sensory studies, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies, as well as gastronomy, fashion, design, and branding.

What's the secret relationship between the strawberry and the pineapple? Between mint and Sauvignon Blanc? Thyme and lamb? Rosemary and Riesling? In Taste Buds and Molecules, sommelier François Chartier, who has dedicated over twenty years of passionate research to the molecular relationships between wines and foods, reveals the fascinating answers to these questions and more. With an infectious enthusiasm, Chartier presents a revolutionary way of looking at food and wine, showing how to create perfect harmony between the two by pairing complementary (and often surprising) ingredients. The pages of this richly illustrated practical guide are brimming with photos, sketches, recipes from great chefs, and tips for creating everything from simple daily meals to tantalizing holiday feasts. Wine amateurs and connoisseurs, budding cooks and professional chefs, and anyone who simply loves the pleasures of eating and drinking will be captivated and charmed by this journey into the hidden world of flavours.

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the social practice of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste. For the first time, this book unites sociologists and other social scientists with artists and curators, art theorists and art educators, and art, design and cultural historians who engage with the practice of taste as it relates to encounters with art, cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life, in national and transnational contexts. The volume is divided into four sections. The first section on ‘Taste and art’, shows how art practice was drawn into the sphere of ‘good taste’, contrasting this with a post-conceptualist critique that offers a challenge to the social functions of good taste through an encounter with art. The next section on ‘Taste making and the museum’ examines the challenges and changing social, political and organisational dynamics propelling museums beyond the terms of a supposedly universal institution and language of taste. The third section of the book, ‘Taste after Bourdieu in Japan’ offers a case study of the challenges to the cross-cultural transmission and local reproduction of ‘good taste’, exemplified by the complex cultural context of Japan. The final section on ‘Taste, the home and everyday life’ juxtaposes the analysis of the reproduction of inequality and alienation through taste, with arguments on how the legacy of ideas of ‘good taste’ have extended the possibilities of experience and sharpened our consciousness of identity. As the first book to bring together arts practitioners and theorists with sociologists and other social scientists to examine the legacy and continuing validity of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste, this publication engages with the opportunities and problems involved in understanding the social value and the cultural dispositions of taste ‘after Bourdieu’. It does so at a moment when the practice of taste is being radically changed by the global expansion of cultural choices, and the emergence of deploying impersonal algorithms as solutions to cultural and creative decision-making.

Who doesn't dream of leaving everyday life behind and really experiencing nature with an adventure in the wilderness... and a delicious campfire supper to round off a perfect day? Enjoy the beauty and stillness of breathtaking shots, taken on location in the National Parks of Vancouver and Banff, of the lakes, cascading waterfalls, rivers, canyons, mountains and deep, green, tranquil forests for which Canada is renowned. This is the stunning natural backdrop for recipes and short extracts from Charles Dickens, Margaret Atwood, Chris Czajkowski and Anne Michaels inspired by Canada's incredible landscapes. Whether it's fluffy blueberry pancakes with maple syrup, or tender salmon fillet on a cedarwood board, hearty campfire stew with craft beer or the unique national dish of Canada, poutine, these ingredients and recipes evoke bounty, simplicity, campfires and wilderness.

Taste, perhaps the most intimate of the five senses, has traditionally been considered beneath the concern of philosophy, too bound to the body, too personal and idiosyncratic. Yet, in addition to providing physical pleasure, eating and drinking bear symbolic and aesthetic value in human experience, and they continually inspire writers and artists. Carolyn Korsmeyer explains how taste came to occupy so low a place in the hierarchy of senses and why it is deserving of greater philosophical respect and attention. Korsmeyer begins with the Greek thinkers who classified taste as an inferior, bodily sense; she then traces the parallels between notions of aesthetic and gustatory taste that were explored in the formation of modern aesthetic theories. She presents scientific views of how taste actually works and identifies multiple components of taste experiences. Turning to taste's objects—food and drink—she looks at the different meanings they convey in art and literature as well as in ordinary human life and proposes an approach to the aesthetic value of taste that recognizes the representational and expressive roles of food. Korsmeyer's consideration of art encompasses works that employ food in contexts sacred and profane, that seek to whet the appetite and to keep it at bay; her selection of literary vignettes ranges from narratives of macabre devouring to stories of communities forged by shared eating.