Philosophy of taste: eating, digesting, and enjoying - Olivier Assouly

In opposition to the norms, this essay develops the idea of ​​a pleasurable experience of food.

Taste as a philosophical object? That the West has hitherto refused to grant taste, a sense considered "primitive" and inferior to sight, a major status seems to be a fact that is a priori insignificant.

However, nutrition could be the blind spot of a rationalist culture that has failed to appreciate its true significance. To deny that flavors contribute to the development of science, truth, or art, is that not to deprive oneself of other ways of experiencing, grasping reality, and being in the world?

Traditionally, the organ of taste responds to the need to live, a purely biological function, which implies that a truly human, praiseworthy and superior, moral and political existence must stand against this living, greedy and hungry body, by rejecting gluttonous excess and destructive consumption.

Faced with concepts resistant to any enjoyment of food, the Philosophy of Taste develops a unique model of gustatory sensitivity that could shake the foundations of metaphysics as much as those of our Western cultures.