The Taste Culture Reader

The main focus of this volume, consisting of nearly forty selections, is, the editor explains, ‘the experience of flavour in all its dimensions’ (p. 3). As the book's subtitle also indicates, it is, therefore, with taste in the gustatory sense, not in the derived sense of aesthetic sensibility at large, that the authors are concerned. Some of them, however, do address the puzzling question of why the gustatory sense should, as Carolyn Korsmeyer puts it, have provided ‘the metaphor for the finest cultivation of perceptual experience’ (p. 6). It is not, significantly, only in European languages that words for gustatory taste (goût, gusto, etc.) also apply to aesthetic sensibility. As B. N. Goswamy's article on the Indian concept of rasa points out, this term, originally applied to saps and juices, came to refer to aesthetic experience at large (p. 216). This rather spoils Wolfgang Schivelbusch's suggestion that its origin in the medieval European enthusiasm for spices of a later cultivation of ‘taste in the broadest sense of the word’ explains the ‘metaphorical’ extension of the concept of taste (pp. 125–126). It is, perhaps, Kant, in an extract from his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, who offers the most intriguing explanation. So important is it for the dinner party host to ‘make a universally acceptable selection’ of dishes and flavours for his guests that ‘taste’ becomes the name, not only for ‘the feeling of an organ through a particular sense’, but for ‘a sensory, universally valid choice in general’ (p. 214

Aesthetics · Art · Enthusiasm · Epistemology · Feeling · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Perception · Sensibility · Taste · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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