Digital Commons@RISD Home > Division of Liberal Arts > Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive) > Vol. 23 (2025)
Abstract
Is there something special about dessert? Is it the sweetness or sumptuousness or something else? This essay explores the aesthetic layers in our experience of dessert. It will turn out that dessert promises much more than sensuous pleasures. As we savor our dessert, we reach outside the humdrum of everyday life for a taste of all the good things life has to offer. Although dessert is by its nature superfluous, it is precisely its being “unnecessary” that makes it necessary for us.