ASFS Presidential Address 2015, Chatham University

Abstract

Productive new openings can be found in food studies through provincializing European and American conceptualizations of the aesthetics of good taste and the ethics of foodwork. The liberal arts can be reinvigorated for the twenty-first century by drawing on feminism and everyday Hinduism of care-work and devotion, in part by using the immigrant body not merely as an object of analysis but as a tool kit to open up the epistemological discussion on how we know what to do.

Keywords:

• liberal artisan
• critical thinking
• creative contribution
• food studies
• feminism
• care-work
• everyday Hinduism
• rasa aesthetics

Notes

1. A different version of this piece will be published as the preface to my forthcoming book The Ethnic Restaurateur (Bloomsbury 2016).

2. To see is to separate the object from the subject. Reason from feeling, emotion, which of course is the Kantian project of saving beauty from Humean feeling and opinion by developing rational criteria of judgment by eliminating flavor and taste. We need to pay attention to other theorizations of taste. We need a lot more of the mouth, the tongue, the nose. We need the intermingling of the subject and the object, and the context, company, and performance. Eating is about socially constructed taste. Taste is about the aesthetics of pleasure. It is preceded by the ethics of feeding. Both ethics and aesthetics are a relationship between feeder, partaker and audience. That is the frame for the pleasures of good food, emotion, affect, company, and context.

3. Heidegger offers “riss” as a manufactured compound, in his attempt to wrest art, especially drawing, from aesthetics. Riss evokes Aufriss (contour or elevation), Grundrisse (outline or floorplan), and an opposition that does not let the opponents fall apart but pulls them together in a unitary whole (Umriss) (Heidegger 1970). I am appropriating riss here only as the rift that connects, a productive strife. The relation, the riss, is the coming together through antagonism, opposition. I link it to “trials of strength” in Bruno Latour’s equally post-Heidegerrian project where the matter hinges on the strife between humans, animals, bacteria, viruses and things, and humans are not the only dramatis personae (1986, 276).