THE "CAN FOOD BE ART" QUESTION

Baco "el toron" at Baco Mercat in Los Angeles. Photo by author, December 2012.

In recent years, critics of food and art alike have been asking, can food be art? As a historian of contemporary art who regularly gets--and deeply dreads--questions from students, friends, and relatives about whether or not this or that contemporary practice is really "art," I consider the question a tired beast. The beast keeps getting fed, however, so now I have to respond.

My problem with the question, can food be art, is not just that I'm a culture snob impatient with uninitiated folks who can't see what's obvious to me--namely, that food, or, rather, cuisine, can be art. It's that the arguments inspired by the question rarely get past a certain stalemate.

A recent example of the logjam is the dialogue between Jacquelyn Strycker, in "From Palate to Palette: Can Food Be Art?" (createquity.com, 1-7-13), and William Deresiewicz, in "A Matter of Taste" (nytimes.com, 10-26-12). Deresiewicz sparked the dialogue by claiming that food--while similar to art in the sociological sense that it offers foodies a means of social competition through knowledge, connoisseurship, and conspicuous consumption--can't be art because it doesn't possess art's essential traits. These include, he says, the capacity for narrative or representation, for tapping into emotions precisely, and for rich symbolism.

Challenging this argument, Strycker insists that food indeed is art. Food, after all, does what all of the arts do. It creates sensory experience--if anything, even more richly than the other arts owing to food's engagement of all the senses--and cuisine can be creative, it can express philosophies, evoke narratives, and allude to complex ideas. What's more, food can inspire multiple interpretations.

I'll admit that I'm partial to Strycker's essay. Her criteria really do apply to both food and art, as we know them historically. I am flummoxed by Deresiewicz's claim that food doesn't evoke specific emotions or narratives. Don't we regularly speak of "taste memories" a la James Beard, and hasn't smell, which is approximately 90 percent of taste, been long understood as having memory-evoking (that is, narrative and emotional) powers? The idea that food doesn't have a rich symbolism misses the fact that cuisine, like any human manipulation of materials, has a communicative dimension or that foodstuffs and cooking methods and culinary genres, not to mention the rituals surrounding meals, don't themselves come loaded with symbolism.

But to fixate on the criteria is to get stuck on the very impasse that is the problem with the debate.

Both arguments stake their claims on what aestheticians call "honorific" definitions of art. These classify objects as art based on a fixed set of attributes. They also imply that giving something the title "art" bestows judgment that it is good art.

Honorific definitions won't lead us to much understanding of either food or art. I say this based on my background as an art historian. Artworks testing the limits of prevailing notions of art have driven the story line of art history for nearly a century and a half. It's axiomatic among art historians that the definition of "art" is ever evolving. Honorific definitions don't hold up over time.

Also, they yield little insight into the things that really matter, even to those making honorific definitions. Arguments based on them tend to get passionate. That's because they aren't really motivated, as they pretend to be, by academic concerns about taxonomy. At stake instead is whether or not something deserves to be valued and, therefore, to enjoy all of the recognitions and resources accrued to things so classified. Honorific arguments hide social agendas.

What do we or should we value in food, whether or not we call it "art"? This is the real question.

BITTER

Photo by author of chocolate-bar packaging, front lower portion, October 2012.

Photo by author of chocolate-bar packaging for Fearless brand, back upper portion, October 2012.

I am bitter, perhaps, but so is the chocolate. Could it be that today's chocolate is more bitter the more it's trying to do good? I'm beginning to think so. That's my (admittedly impressionistic) conclusion after (unscientifically) sampling over ten brands, what I roughly guess is just under half, of the chocolate bars lately sold at my local Whole Foods.

An admirer of good package design as much as a lover of indulgent chocolate, I found myself drawn to trying as many brands of bars as I found flavors and visuals to intrigue me. I was also tempted by the eminently Whole Foodsian prospect of reconciling my hedonism with my desire to do good. Save the world by eating the best of it? Win-win.

Almost all of the chocolate brands now available at Whole Foods have some ethical angle. And the angles are gorgeously wrapped. Since nearly all brands print company stories on the verso--a packaging quirk chocolate shares with specialty juice and water drinks--the consumer "experience" of chocolate brands has a literary layer. So much care is taken, as well, with materials that to hold the narrative tablet is as texturally thrilling as a trip to a handmade-paper boutique.

For some of the exquisitely swaddled, it's enough to be organic. However, these bars are starting to seem like dinosaurs in a market where the social causes are multiplying. I see brands that save rainforests and endangered species. Others assure me they are "fair trade." The brand I've pictured above crowdsources for its causes. Organic is merely a baseline.

Still, every such brand that I've tasted is overwhelmingly bitter. Of course, I expect dark chocolate to be more bitter than milk, and I recognize that, in recent decades, there's been a mainstreaming of this more "adult" (read: bitter) taste for dark chocolate. But these facts still beg the question of why so many do-good brands fall into the bitter camp and are intentionally more bitter than commercial brands (e.g., Dove) of dark chocolate.

I associate this bitterness with medicine. I then associate medicine with something that's not pleasant but is supposed to be good for you. Could the bitterness of so much "ethical" chocolate be engaged in a kind of moral-sensory trade off, and could it be that fans of these bars, however few there may be, want their chocolate to taste of piety?

Do the bars have a puritanical streak...on purpose? I'd like to know what do you think.

Special Post: VOSS for DINNER?

     On leap day--February 29, 2012--a panoply of Los Angeles food bloggers and magazine writers gathered at FIG restaurant, in Santa Monica, for a special chef's tasting menu. Sensory pleasure and good company were not, however, our only motives. The festivities were designed to benefit the VOSS Foundation's "Give a Drop" campaign.

Company at table

Glaum Ranch Hen's Egg with Truffle and Asparagus

     The event was a reminder of cultural contrasts. Chef Ray Garcia is well known for highlighting, with a spare grace, local and bountiful foods. He stocks his walk-ins from the overflowing Santa Monica Farmer's Market, and, through the restaurant's regular forager, taps other fecund fields in California. Note the captions under the special-tasting-menu items pictured here. They all emphasize the local origins of ingredients.

Rabbit with McGrath Farm's English Peas

Sonoma Lamb with Carrots and Harissa

Pudwill Farm's Blackberry Pavlova with Vanilla Mousse

Contrast this situation of local abundance and easy access to high-quality foods with the focus of the dinner's sponsor--the distant and unyielding terrain of Sub-Saharan Africa. There, even access to clean water, never mind the likes of humanely raised lamb, is a daily challenge. 

VOSS  Foundation banner

     VOSS has been addressing this discrepancy. Since 2008, VOSS has helped construct thirty-two water access points in five African countries. With their "Give a Drop" campaign, you can help the cause by texting DROP to 89544 on any U.S. mobile phone. $5 will be donated automatically to the campaign. See? Even this is easy-access for many of us over here!