Narratives and Aesthetics of Cooking: Culinary Humanities

Dear Colleagues,

The relationship between “art” and cooking has been treated and problematized since very ancient times of Western and Eastern thought, even as an exemplification of more general reflections, as it is the case in Plato or in Indian, Chinese and Japanese traditions. In fact, cooking is a universal, everyday activity, and, at the same time, site-specific and embedded in social practices and cultural codes. This duplicity is also to be found in the arts and in the artistic practices; for this reason, the expression “art of cooking” (which is historically determined in itself) opens up questions such as: What is meant by art in such expression? Is it correct to distinguish between major and minor arts, and why? Is there a difference between art and craftsmanship, and, if so, which category does cooking fall into?

Between cooking and art, different relationships are established and they can be grouped into three main domains. (1) The representation of food and cooking in the arts (primarily but not exclusively the visual arts): many artists use food and cooking—their representational powers as well as their materiality—to communicate different messages, styles, or poetics. (2) The collaboration between artists and cooks in order to create performances and aesthetic experiences. (3) The possibility to understand the very act of cooking as an artistic expression, and the cook/chef as an artist.

These three different domains are, however, inextricably intertwined, and raise a field of problems, that concerns more general philosophical issues as well as cultural, historical, anthropological and sociological ones. From Roman and Medieval banquets to artistic movements and gastronomic avant-gardes of the 20th and 21st centuries such as Futurist cuisine and Eat Art, rethinking the convergence of food, cooking and art requires a cross-disciplinary perspective, unfolding new paths rich in philosophical and cultural repercussions. Encouraging such multi-faceted analyses is the goal of this Special Issue, aimed at enriching the debate around food and art and at detaching it from the naïvete of some journalistic discourse and from a too often trivial ordinary conversation, that today plays a powerful role in the media.

Prof. Dr. Nicola Perullo
Guest Editor

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