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Books

Making Sense of Taste: Food & Philosophy by Carolyn Korsmeyer

Is eating “a small exercise in mortality”? Erin McKenna consumes a tasteful but non-fattening book by Carolyn Korsmeyer.

Making Sense of Taste is, at one level, a book about aesthetics. Korsmeyer provides an evaluation of the sense of taste in many contexts. She discusses food as art and shows how metaphors of eating pervade discussions of traditional art forms. She also spends a fair amount of space discussing how taste is often ruled out as a proper aesthetic object because it is too subjective and does not lend itself to the kind of objective standards that ‘real art’ does, a view which she disputes. I find these points to be distractions from a more central theme, however.

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