Digital Commons@RISD Home > Division of Liberal Arts > Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive) > Vol. 21 (2023)
Abstract
Sarah Worth argues that philosophy should take gustatory taste seriously. While taste has played a central role in philosophical aesthetics, “aesthetic taste” is a trope referring to our judgments about the value or merit of an object, typically a work of art. What, then, about the literal sense of taste — the perception of flavor when we have something like food or drink in our mouths? Because our wide range of gustatory experiences and the kinds of judgments we make about them are so intimately connected to the kinds of things we eat, I look at fast food versus slow food and the kinds of tastes associated with these two ways of making and serving food. I consider the manufacturing techniques involved in ultra-processing in order to ask exactly what it means to report that we “like” the taste of foods that are designed to be hyper-palatable. I conclude by questioning whether knowledge about how our foods are produced can affect our judgments about whether or not a food “tastes good.”