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University of Gastronomic Sciences
Seven Conditions for the Gastronomic Sciences
Introduction
Now that they define a whole university (the University of Gastronomic Sciences), the Gastronomic Sciences set a series of challenges that are not only bold and engaging, but also provocative. The first is one of definition, the need to map the uncertain, frayed-at-the-edges dominion of gastronomy, a term round which associated disciplines risk seeing their scientific status weakened rather than corroborated or raised. Secondly, the Gastronomic Sciences, elevated to sui generis university status, lay claim to universalistic perspective that (judging from the doxa, at least) would appear to clash totally with their specific and, above all, lateral nature. The third challenge is didactic in the sense that it is necessary to bring out interstitial or integrated knowledge from different disciplines that are not always entirely prepared to liaise. Finally, the problem arises of finding jobs for the graduates of such a university, the need to define professional competences and versatility ensured by curricula (of the three-year undergraduate program and the two-year graduate program) so new from the academic point of view and that of the institutionalization of professions.
The first two points join as one in an intellectual stake of no small importance. The gastronomic sciences come into being with the problem that the object that they ought to identify (namely, gastronomy) is something that by no means represents a portion unanimously carved out of other regions of knowledge. In this sense, they do not find themselves in the fortunate condition of, say, nutritional science. Nonetheless, as a quid pro quo, they are bound to address the need/opportunity for a relocation/refiguration of branches of knowledge. The gastronomic sciences have come into being to diagnose and denounce an encyclopedic malformation and an epistemological strabismus that lead the different sciences—which, for better or for worse, ultimately explore forms of life to sectionalize their outlooks and no longer see an integrating point of view—capable of welding together the factors in play and relations on different levels into an overall vision. Holism as the descriptive principle of the object, sometimes called into question vis-à-vis the environmental question, has to be flanked by scientific holism; namely, the ability to sit round the same table, never mind the preservation of an internal organization of branches of knowledge closely confined to their own disciplinary ambits. All this means rendering commensurable and integrable scientific observations dependent on a variety disciplinary outlooks and awareness of the fact that the elucidation of one epistemological position (a quartering of nobility of the scientific stance) has again to declare itself dependent of pragmatic choices. In a university such as that of Gastronomic Sciences, practices are acknowledged as the decisive framework for the option of a scientific approach for a series of investigations and become, ex post, the framework for their convergence.
This may make the decision to conceive of didactics as a continuous ‘to and fro’ between classroom training and territorial and thematic stages, or field seminars, as a shrewd and ultimately fundamental one, as an attempt to turn out notions that, paired with the problems experienced in situ, become living knowledge (‘living’ partly in the sense of ‘open to the future and to the indetermination it always expresses’). Didactics may thus be thought of as a perfect circulation among:
a) experiences introjected directly by the students
b) knowledge, where such experiences have an explicit format and can be reconceptualized and compared
c) education, taken as relational knowledge that shrewdly informs its own initiatives
d) training, as full reflexivity of branches of knowledge that reproduce autonomously and plan other value paths
It is precisely this circularity that assigns to the University an anti-ideological calling to train students to critically multiply perspectives over a dominion as complex as gastronomy. By virtue of its capacity to reinterpret consumer society with due radicalness, gastronomy is, de facto, an integrative perspective of the present. For the gastronomic perspective, the minimum common denominator of food and eating is a hermeneutic platform for re-elaborating environmental, economic and identity risks together. Within the gastronomic vision, values of different ambits of society often considered incommensurable find a new common parliament. The introjection of food becomes a metonymy of the introjection of culture, of the sustainability of social choices and of planning compatibilities between forms of individual and community living. This is why the University of Gastronomic Sciences could prove the best place to study and re-elaborate material (or embodied) culture, re-conceptualizing it as social metabolism, in which experiences are fed by the interrelationship of biology and motivation, economy and ecology, technologies and opportunities, identitarian history and destinal perspective.
In this group contribution of ours, the University stands in front of the mirror to reflect on the challenges set and recognize itself in a collective project. It is precisely for this reason that we have decided to draw up a list of the subjects that seem to us to draw a map of a planning skill that never ceases redefining and respecifying itself, while nonetheless, in the few years since the inauguration of the University, is managing to lay relatively solid and shared foundations for training and research activity. (Pierluigi Basso Fossali)
1. Individual/Subjectivity
In common parlance, modern gastronomy is anthropocentric, meaning that it sees the human being as the only active ‘subject’ of a branch of knowledge, the only actor in a culture that he or she constitutes. On the contrary, the knowledge of the gastronomic sciences that we are striving to conceive and practice poses the problem of he who perceives in different terms, beyond the confines of anthropos, which he himself redraws. This is the first preliminary question to be addressed.
The determination of the boundaries and modes of perception (introjection, but more besides) of food objects is anything but obvious: in short, the relationship between what we define as a subject (the so-called side of activity, perception and culture) and what we define as an object (the so-called side of passivity, reception, helpless nature) is far from being pacific and demands specific analysis. Within its rigid nomenclature, the subject/object coupling is assumed as given by modern western gastronomy, which has thus taken on a decidedly anthropocentric and Eurocentric shape, setting forward a discipline and a cognitive practice of pleasure in perfect, specular parallel to technological development. Today, in the era of post-industrial liquid societies, of the ecological crisis and of what has come to be known as globalization, this model is extremely reductive. It is necessary, instead, to start broadening the field of gastronomic investigation of food objects in order to identify a strategy that reframes the question of the individual and subjectivity on new bases.
The gastronomic sciences help to reposition the individual in two different ambits. First and foremost, in that of critical self-reflection, where, on the one hand, the attempt is made to deconstruct the coherent, unitary self (as much in ‘I think’ as in ‘I eat’) typical of a certain modern tradition. This means, above all, that the objective referents of this ‘I’ are no longer seen simply as distant and manipulable, but in relation and inherence. On the other hand, however, the gastronomic sciences also contribute to the rebirth of an idea of the material, historical, concrete, carnal subject. In short, they combat the evanescence of gastronomy into virtual immateriality and any ‘end-of-history’ ideology.
It is necessary to further clarify this first area of reflection. From biology and earth sciences to anthropology and zoosemiotics, the idea that only man (meaning European man) possesses taste and that only human taste is culture (Brillat-Savarin), would appear to have waned for good. The boundaries of gastronomy are broadening: redefining benchmark geography and any pacific opposition between eating as nutrition and gastronomy as choice/pleasure (pleasure is to be found in every act of nutrition, nutrition is to be found in every enjoyment); redefining the distinction between living beings in non-qualitative but communicative terms, of proximity and distance. Through this pattern, we thus enter a pluriverse and versatile dimension of gastronomy, in which the human being is not at the center of the system, but becomes part of the ecosystem. The modern anthropocentric vision is replaced by the cosmocentric vision: the gastronome practices to make the ‘goose-centric’ vision evoked by Montaigne his own. In the chain of beings, the human takes up a position as an ‘object’ that reflects on other entities—human and non-human—and enters into relation with them. The result is no more culture than nature is, a typically modern, western distinction that food objects (not passively helpless but rich in identity, purposeful and symbolic) help to question. It is clear that, even in its most profound structure, this conception is relational and intersubjective: far from being a Leibnitzian monad, the human ‘subject’ is a reticulum or, to quote Gadda, it is full of windows and fissures, substance but scanty substance.
The gastronomic sciences also reposition the human subject in another ambit, that of training. Joining together as a set of heterogeneous knowledge that proposes itself as a training project, they throw down a challenge to the intellectual sensitivity (this too is typical of a certain western modernity) whereby knowledge forms round the rigid sectional barriers that result in a conception of labor just as divided and fragmented.
The heterogeneousness of disciplines that combine to form gastronomic sciences seeks, instead, to conquer a pluriverse, multi-faceted mind, non-sectional and non-inclined—a ‘tête bien faite’, to use the term coined by Edgar Morin. In this sense, the question of such a subject meets the theme of sentience and exercise; it is only through decentralizing training, without a single focus, that it can take form. It may be worthwhile to recall the role that travel plays in the training of this type of gastronome. More generally, though, it is the structurally relational characteristic of this receiving entity that re-emerges here.
Starting from the preliminary problem of the receiver, as an individual and a subject, thus posited, it may be possible, I believe, to conceive differently the theme of his or her vis conativa, capacity to desire and all the other points on which our experts pause to reflect below. (Nicola Perullo)
2. Knowledge/Flavor
1. The expression ‘gastronomic sciences’ prompts, ex abrupto, a courageous and binding discussion on the status of science, or rather of sciences: it suggests that gastronomy is, in a sense, a science or, more precisely, a set of sciences teachable on a university program. On the one hand, this would appear to be a one-sided cultural challenge: converging in a pre-defined nucleus (the objects and acts of eating), all the ‘official’, consolidated sciences (history, technologies, anthropology, economics, chemistry etc.) combine to form a new branch of knowledge, which we define as ‘gastronomic sciences’. In this sense, however, this branch of knowledge simply corresponds to the juxtaposition of many portions of other branches. Yet if, on the other hand, it is true that the new branch of knowledge does not correspond to the sum-total of its constituent parts, but forms a synthesis thereof and irreducible thereto, then the cultural challenge set by ‘gastronomic knowledge’ is of a much greater magnitude and, in this sense, opens the discussion on the status of sciences and branches of knowledge themselves. I would like to highlight here three aspects of the challenge that seem to me to be of paramount importance.
I. The deconstruction of the opposition between ‘Culture’ and ‘material culture’
II. Marginality as a value
III. The difference between knowledge and information
I. The legitimization of all the ‘nameless’ practices that gravitate around food, such as the inductive sensitivities that are part of the expertise of farmers, winemakers and cooks, as sciences—this is the decisive point. For the gastronomic sciences, it is not only important to incorporate portions of already codified disciplines, but also to interweave them with the manifold strands of the vast area of technique and gesture—of know-how—the study of which Mauss argued, in his celebrated 1934 essay Les techniques du corps (Techniques of the Body), is essential for anthropology, sociology and all the human sciences. This stance triggers another decisive consequence, argued with masterly skill in the recent years by Tim Ingold: namely, the impossibility of keeping the hierarchical opposition between Culture (and Science) and material culture on its feet. This opposition, based, in turn, on the opposition between form and matter, grants practical and ‘material’ activities, such as agriculture and gastronomy, the status of cultural products, in the sense that their value has to do with their form—that is, with the intentionality expressed by the human mind—and not to their matter/nature (as such, passive and helpless). Culture is added to matter, endowing it with form, value and dignity: this is the meaning of ‘material culture’. On the contrary, if any type of knowledge cannot but originate from the encounter with reality (even if only to demonstrate its aporias and contradictions), then, insofar as it is packed with symbols and meanings, every type of product—and this is what the gastronomic sciences seek to demonstrate—is a cultural practice right from its origin, down to its very materiality. We have to see in practice, in induction and in concrete working processes not ‘younger brothers’ of theory, deduction and design, but their structurally essential complements—the reverse side of the coin. The realization of this model of knowledge is, of course, complex and clashes with the sclerosis of the most solid, most impermeable disciplinary sectionalities. Yet the gastronomic sciences will make a major contribution here.
II. The question of marginality apparently concerns the close relationship between the gastronomic sciences and other branches of knowledge: invariably accused of lack of focus compared to any one of the ‘monocratic’ branches, the hybrid, multiple gastronomic sciences have to embrace marginality not as a mere contingency to complain about self-pityingly, but as a destiny—transforming it into a value. If we assume the hypothesis I posited at point I, then by definition a part of the field of the gastronomic sciences (the one not comprised by portions of institutionalized, codified disciplines) is not simply measurable, referred to series of operations from this point of view uncertain, clear but ‘confused’ (to use an esthetological term), in short marginal. Not though but precisely because of this, the gastronomic sciences possess an innovative and subversive global epistemological drive, packed with theoretical and empirical, structural and historical potential. The marginal aspects that form gastronomic knowledge are analyzable according to criteria of fuzzy logic and delineate a horizon of knowledge inseparable from practices, examples and experience: in terms of didactics, it is no coincidence that decisive elements for the gastronomic sciences are travel and linguistic/anthropological comparison (which, in his Discourse on Method, Descartes excludes from the path of knowledge). Neither is completely synthesizable or measurable, but this does not mean that they are ‘subjective’: non-measurable objectivity is also a question at stake in this branch of knowledge.
III. This branch of learning—non-hierarchical, parasitic, partly marginalized (in the sense described above)—promotes an ideal of knowledge that does not coincide with information. There is at least one significant difference between knowledge and information. The first requires time and a suitable metabolism, a profound, vertical approach, and the scale to measure it by is not that of immediate profit. Information, instead, is immediate and horizontal, a form of surfing. This aspect allies, or so I believe, the gastronomic sciences to the slow philosophy: in the face of the huge mass of irrelevant information that passes itself off as knowledge, the difficulty and the stimuli of the challenge lie in assimilating, collecting and applying effective knowledge in a synthetic, interconnected perspective. (Nicola Perullo)
2. Gastronomy might appear to be a clearance agency for the branches of knowledge that have intellectualized every relationship with the environment. The very inscription of a sign, the beginning of any semiotics, starts with the furrow of a plow breaking up the soil or with the assembly of ingredients to make the food we use to nourish ourselves in accordance with our taste. Unlike conceptual architectures unpegged from practice, gastronomy encompasses the yardstick of métis (sagacity made to measure for every situation) and the intelligence of phronesis (practical wisdom with an ethical inflection, insofar as it anticipates the destiny of action by prefiguring contingencies). Wherever a symbolization begins, so does the direction of its discursiveness, its transfer to a possible world, which nonetheless ultimately has to achieve concrete rootedness and impact—an introjection. Gastronomy is the radius of this circulation. Savors turn to knowledge, to be assessed in terms of identity and transmitted as cultural memory; but, in parallel, knowledge has to regain sapidity and availability for spending on the plane of experience. The principal site place of attestation of this dual need to convert values is gastronomy. We never cease talking about food or desiring to enjoy it directly, as if a dish or a drink were a irreplaceable key to access certain values. No training in gastronomy can overlook the desire for a repeat experience, a return to direct coupling with food.
The pregnancy of knowledge clings to things, and these things and are invested with branches of knowledge that amplify its significance in terms of price, memorability and heritage. Knowledge is systemic and procedural. It lives in the coupling of world and subject, through the human making that assumes and transforms it (phronesis). Knowledge cannot be static in gastronomy, because gastronomy is unquenched by knowledge, by any organization that believes itself to be autotelic. Dependences (relations and introjections) are a continuous self-production of asymmetries and imbalances, of attractions and appreciations.
A university’s rootedness in practical wisdom (phronesis), whose axiological protection prevents it from confining itself to theoretical knowledge self-satisfied by its conceptual architecture, deconstructs the university as a self-referential organization, prepared to duplicate the world as a cartography of knowledge. It is necessary to import and place at the center of reflection embodied forms of knowledge capable of being critical towards the encyclopedia, not only because they are rooted in action, in the archeology of the possible and the viable, but also because they never cease weaving a relationship of experience, calculation (cognitive re-elaboration), desire and initiative. Moreover, objectified and codified branches of knowledge, whether they belong to a heritage of individual or organizational knowledge, achieve existential sapidity and destinal significance only when they come to terms with an environment that expresses different forms of knowledge and motivations. Branches of knowledge can no longer fit the new and the unknown into pre-formed categories that reduce otherness to mere variety. They have to open out to circumstantial calling, entrusting themselves to inexhaustible investigations in which taxonomies develop into families of transformations. As interpretative anthropology has taught us, man is the integral of all the modes and forms in which he has expressed himself historically according to the most disparate cultural traditions, not the limited package of values common to all the latter. This explains why today relational and contractual branches of knowledge have to return to the center, given that they are the only ones that can correspond to a truly systemic perspective.
Without wishing to discredit the nomological sciences in due pursuit of generalizations, the gastronomic sciences necessarily opt for an idiographic paradigm, that is to say an unexhausted search for the characterization of diversity. The relationship between knowledge and flavor unfolds in the presence of the experience of the impossibility of homologation and the desire to continue to discretisize, to map anything that can further assume identitary value, submitting for appreciation that which is no longer substitutable. (Pierluigi Basso Fossali)
3. Pleasure
3.1 Notions of pleasure
‘The fountain and root of every good is the pleasure of the stomach: and all wise rules, and all excellent rules, are measured alike by this standard.’ (1) Epicurus’ aphorisms in Athenaeus’s compilation The Deipnosophists, ‘sophists at dinner’, written at the end of the second century, may be considered to be at the root of the notion the of pleasure, but it also needs to be qualified. By ‘pleasure of the stomach’, Epicurus meant not being hungry or thirsty, whereas his detractors accused him of putting ‘good in the stomach’. The importance of the Greek philosopher’s aphorisms was realized in a completely different era, at the end of the eighteenth century when Athenaeus’s work was published in French translation as Banquet des savants (1789-1791). It was Voltaire who pleaded his cause—‘Epicure était lui-même un homme de bien’; (2) ‘Epicure fut toute sa vie un philosophe sage, tempérant et juste’ (3)— though he skimmed over the term ‘pleasure’, which the specification ‘of the stomach’ inevitably rendered unseemly. In Paris in 1800, the birth of gastronomie—a term coined in Greek by Archestratus as a title for a poem of his—was to render superfluous not only recourse to the ancient philosopher, but also to Greek literature as we understand it today.
It was Joseph Berchoux who reported the loss of Archestratus’s poem, confessing that he wanted to making amends by singing ‘comme lui, la cuisine, la table’. (4) Gastronomy was refounded by addressing the problem of the stomach and pleasure in different terms from the ancients. At the center of the kitchen, of service, of conviviality and of the resulting literature was the body, not only as the place of the senses, taste and appetite, but also of form and flesh made by foodstuffs. Pleasure and stomach are reciprocally measurable and the growth of the one marks the other. Brillat-Savarin dedicated his twenty-first Meditation to obesity, suggesting that anyone overweight wear a belt ‘qui contienne le ventre, en le serrant modérément’. (5) The effect of the belt would be to cut down food consumption and the distension of the skin; the glutton was forced to observe moderation and wear the belt until his weight returned to normal. But how is it possible to curb the pleasure of eating this way?
In his portrait of Epicurus, Voltaire wanted to make the philosopher, whom the Church regarded as a pig, a man of the world, capable of controlling impulses and calmly enunciating his truths. Brillat-Savarin’s belt was instead a secret of precautionary coercion, designed to save the lover of the pleasures of the table from death by uncontrolled increase in weight. Thought, in the first case, and the representation of the body, in the second, acted as regulators of pleasure—pleasure and not instinct, inseparable from reflection. In the year 1800 in fact, gastronomy was reborn as a hedonistic philosophy from which table and cooking were indivisible, but which was also associated with other arts, such as theater, and the sciences. Dress and physical exercise were also part of gastronomy, or rather helped it manifest itself effectively. Despite satires, parodies and caricatures, the pig is thus, in all his ways of behaving, the anti-gastronome. Nonetheless, the temptation of obesity as an end to itself cannot be overcome with belts (or diuretics). In it is concentrated not only insatiable hunger: some of Sade’s silhouettes of libertines—‘court, trapu, fort large panse’—clearly show that behind individual corpulence was a plurality of pleasures that swelled and distended the stomach. A perfect example, in Justine, is Le comte de Gernande, a mountain of flesh yearning for blood: ‘c’est un des plus grands gourmands de l’Europe; il n’y a pas un mangeur dans le monde qui soit en état de lui tenir tête’. Find out more about his vices and you’ll see. (6)
It is impossible today to define the pleasure of food without acknowledging this philosophy, which formulates its extremes, nutritional habitus and transgression, and which prescribes lines of conduct in any case inseparable from appetite, obesity and death. It is not enough to say that food is insignificant without enjoyment, and that pleasure is harmful without restraint. It is necessary to appraise control and excess in the past, adopting the very models that generated particularly appetizing foods and exquisite wines that we still search out today. For the gastronome, adapting the body to the object of nutrition and vice versa is the mirror-like reason for his very being in time. Early nineteenth-century gastronomes laid the philosophical bases for a repetition of the meal, for an analytical fruition, for a lasting hedonistic confirmation, leaving each successor free to express the appreciation with a different language. Elementary judgment criteria have changed little since two centuries ago: a wine is white or good or fizzy as in the past, so we can speak of unchanging parameters of enjoyment. We are still experiencing a centuries-long digestive process.
The paradox lies in the fact that, as a result of Epicurus’s aphorism, the organ denied, the stomach, a sac full of inedible liquids and excrement in fieri, sometimes designates pleasure. This lowers the hedonistic value down from sight, which is satiated before eating, to the mouth, which makes a morsel vanish, tasting it, savoring it and relishing it, to the oral cavity, which that receives it, breaks it up, moistens it and kneads it, to the further passage whereby, coming back up, the resulting mush, now turned to vomit, becomes disgusting. In this description, it is easy to see that if, from a sensory point of view, the process of gratification happens down there, in the stomach, it has been processed and transmitted to memory elsewhere, and when the food reaches the stomach it is already a recollection. The eminently mnemonic character of the process and its fallouts on the cultural habitus allow us to describe as gastronomic a sensation of well-being that should only be up to the body. In glossing Epicurus’ aphorisms, what emerges as ingenious and refined is taste, seen as an a posteriori esthetic elaboration of the act of nutrition that presides over judgment. But when the matter that nourishes is dissolved and belongs to memory, is it so important to define exactly what it was? Gastronomy was born precisely of this incongruence: in the process of incipient digestion, enjoyment, delight and bliss contribute to the formulation of a judgment.
Why should the gastronomic sciences be concerned with pleasure? Because it is the only way to dominate the field of nutrition, whichever subject you view it from. Since pleasure straddles coercion and transgression, restraint and release, it legitimates the value of food at the moment in which we enjoy it and in its immediate future. Some people are reintroducing the principle of pleasure to gastronomy to attenuate a scientific or methodical or evaluative approach to food, hoping that it will serve to soften the rigidity of appreciation criteria or promote their being shared. They are wrong to do so. The principle of pleasure defends and destroys the body to the extent to which the gastronome is capable of guiding his yearnings and his appetites. To take through to its logical conclusion the idea that Epicurus may or may not have wished to express, or that we anachronistically imagine was his, ‘ingenious and refined’ is not to perceive food but to think food. French gastronomes directed their attention to the table, using single dishes, their symmetrical arrangement and their consequential denomination to reconstruct a ceremony that embraced them all, along with the host, the servants and the accessories. And what if pleasure were to come not just from the body and the object of nutrition, but also from their extension to space and time, immanent and future? If this were so, we might truly say that they concern ‘everything that is ingenious and refined’.
The ultimate simplification of the aphorisms cited above is to consider pleasure a synonym of sharing, community and communion. True, we can taste food enjoyably on our own, but in this case we lack a comparison, a comparative evaluation of its effects. Above all, solitude is a giant mirror that creates compulsions to fast or to eat. Do friendship, fraternity and company enable us to enjoy food better? If pleasure is transgression, it is legitimated by conviviality, which is reinforced by challenging physical limits with rituals and banquets, with the choice of solid and liquid foods. Why join in if not to stretch the limits of our bodies and the norms that restrain it? The way of serving and of serving ourselves, dish by dish or with all dishes present simultaneously, is part of a strategy in which a numerically unlimited supply is controlled by society, and which sublimates renunciation into a social value, into a code of good manners. It is as if the glutton and the libertine found in the presence of their peers a diversification of their role, hence their possibility of extending it beyond the capacity of their stomachs. Joining forces to avert the danger or at least feeding illusion—these are old tricks however, since pleasure is the beginning and end not just of excitation, but of the body.
So will we be able to teach pleasure at the University of Gastronomic Sciences? In view of the disciplines envisaged in the syllabus (none of which for the moment psychological), it is certainly possible to modify the notion of pleasure, refining the language of perception and developing its memory, and thus making it possible to discover a new relationship between the body and the object of nutrition. In a diet attentive to environmental values and oriented towards the well-being of the individual, even pleasure is sustainable. It is more difficult to connect its different values and its manifold manifestations in a not exclusively nutritional field, and to reawaken consciousness of a secular history of taste through pleasure and the study thereof. But triangular relations between teacher, learner and quality food—for study, tasting and observation—lend themselves to a hedonistic stimulation that is neither ingenuous nor subjective, albeit entirely delegated to a cultural context. Breaking silence and the tacit knowledge of its effects—this is the obstacle against which Epicurus and French gastronomes joined forces. The difficulty in teaching pleasure thus depends, in a pedagogic context, on the resistance of personal and collective inclinations and on the ineffectiveness of the custom that preaches it without truly legitimating it. This obviously does not mean that, on a campus, pleasure cannot provoke the nauseating symptoms of a hangover or a stomach ache from bad digestion. For such eventualities, Brillat-Savarin’s belt would be useless. (Alberto Capatti)
Notes/References
1) Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, Book VII, Trans. C.D. Yonge (1854), www.attalus.org/old/athenaeus7.html
2) Voltaire, ‘Homélies prononcées à Londres en 1765 dans une assemblée particulière’, in Mélanges, Gallimard, Paris 1961, p. 1132.
3) Voltaire, ‘Le philosophe ignorant’. Ibidem, p. 922.
4) Berchoux, J., La gastronomie ou l’homme des champs à table, Giguet et Michaud, Paris 1804, p. 104.
5) Brillat-Savarin, J. A., Physiologie du goût, ou méditations de gastronomie transcendante, Sautelet, Paris 1828, t. II, p. 89.
6) De Sade, D. A.F., Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu, in OEuvres, t. II (ed. M. Delon), Gallimard, Paris 1995, p. 286.
3.2 Pleasure/Judgment
It is almost as if, to mend its ways and avoid following the tack of gourmandise, gastronomy has to cancel any reference to the pleasures of the table. If it does have to make concessions to the latter, it must do so in the form of meta-pleasure, that is to say a superior enjoyment that grips intelligence—provided there is a due esthetic distance between it and the goods enjoyed. Well-being carries no authority, not being a source of emancipation from needs and, more importantly, not following a course of training of suitable sublimation. If intellectual legitimacy were granted to pleasure, the latter would become resistant to any criticism, to any way of learning to enjoy differently, in a more refined, civilized way, hence to symbolize, retroactively, the acquisition of (good) taste. The cultivation of pleasure is democratic, but is susceptible to the risk of standardized consumption and prêt-à-porter enjoyment. This is why, in the twentieth century, a strong movement of thought sought to run down pleasure in favor of detached judgment.
Today, should the gastronome keep a critical distance from the object or should he be prepared to be co-implicated in it through his body, which thus remains a legitimate epicenter of optimization? Doesn’t the loss of the right distance compromise any science of gastronomy?
For the gastronomic perspective, pleasure must not be the local index of permissive thinking, an existential parenthesis that is the prerogative of the irrational. Pleasure performs a cognitive function: it decides and joins the worth of values perceived by coupling identities (that of the user and that of the object used). The irreplaceable performance of pleasure is tied to the oxymoron of participatory appropriation, which explains the connection between introjection and the revival of relationality typical of gastronomy.
Pleasure accompanies courses of action in their planning extension: poiesis (pleasure in one’s work, in the significance of doing), aisthesis (pleasure in sentient learning of the world that permits a bilateral semanticization of the competences of subject and object) and katharsis (pleasure for one’s own emotional and cognitive transformation, for the rearrangement or improvement of one’s life form). These pleasures may enter into conflict with each other and become antagonistic, just as I can disarticulate the identity of the subject, in which the pleasure of myself as flesh may clash polemically with repudiation of and disgust for the deliberative self.
At a closer look, pleasure never has an irenic horizon; it is rather an agent of temporal, spatial and identitary asymmetries. The conflict caused by pleasure is partly what makes it an integral part of a training project such as that of the University di Gastronomic Sciences; indeed, the close connection between pleasure and emotion makes the former impossible to simulate, not even to ourselves. Pleasure not only reveals the relationship between the passionate roles we are accustomed to assigning to ourselves and effective experience of affective intensity, but it also sets itself up as a critical demythologizer of common sense and the values wearily predicated by self-celebratory publicization.
What is clearly at stake is by no means the intellectualization of pleasure or the distancing thereof to weaken it, but the exaltation of its possibilities in terms of an ecology of optimizations that again calls into question society. The pregnancy of the values experienced in pleasure reclaims its socialization, and the occasion for pleasures experienced in relational conviviality recreates the opportunity for a resensitization towards society, to the commensurability of feeling under way, beyond the shortcuts of doxa introjected as a common heritage. (Pierluigi Basso Fossali)
4. Tangible/Intangible
With its integrating point of view, gastronomy grasps a conceptual divarication that is at once paradoxical and charismatic: material goods always appear invested with values extraneous to their actuality, to the extent that the appreciating of them ultimately becomes purely conceptual, reducible to a strictly conventional and differential outcome of the object. Contrariwise, the most immaterial goods strenuously seek to find an objectification in order to be grasped inter-subjectively and, finally, to be computable, thereby regaining a certain weight and a certain consistency in economic terms. An emblematic case is the reduction of a product to the brand it displays and, when user rights have to be transferred from one company to another, the need to trace that brand to a quantifiable sum of money.
The problems involved are no longer bound to the divarication between material and immaterial factors; the intellectual labor of the advanced tertiary service sector remains a material good, objectifiable into hours worked and results achieved, just as moral damages are ultimately objectifiable because all of us can expect to embody the position of the person who has lost a dear one or an object of which he or she was particularly fond.
The brand instead expresses itself in a materially objectifiable way (the affixing of the logo onto products or in advertising or for sponsorship), but what is behind it, hidden away, is truly intangible, insofar as it is a pure semiotic simulacrum, a paper subject. If different corporations exchange a brand’s operating rights, the brand will be publicly perceived as having changed. Taking a closer look at many other intangibles of the contemporary economy, such as a company’s customer network or the know-how of its personnel, they owe their status not to the fact that they are materially rooted (customers and personnel are, of course physical individuals) or to the fact that they cannot be immediately objectified, but because their value depends on their translation into ‘communications currency’, just as a brand’s customer loyalty credit or capital do.
Gastronomy is now becoming an essential domain for conducting a critical deconstruction of the cases of both economics and communications. Forced to address heterogeneous capitals together (brand equity is an insoluble mixture of financial and communications capital), economics and communications are brought together by a point of view, the gastronomic point of view, in which the conversion of tangible values into intangible values and vice versa is inevitable, and invariably produces local and ‘intestine’ effects on the life forms of subjects. At the same time, the gastronomic perspective shows how there are no ‘omni-translatable’ parameters (monetary or communications values).
In this sense, the gastronomic sciences study the subjects implicated in social relations as translators of relations into introjections and vice versa. This is why the gastronome is a mediator, though this does not preclude his or her being an enthusiast. Gastronomy does not record consumption: if anything, it sets itself the problem of how values may be ‘spendable’, that is to say ‘contributors of meaning’ to a life form. This availability for spending is at once bilateral and articulatable; that is, it has an inter-subjective and an interior environment, both the fruit of a mixture of the sentient and the intelligent. Gastronomy is thus an object that is the prerogative neither of economics nor of communication, neither of sociology nor of psychology. It is the acknowledgment of a transducer of values that preforms us and roots itself in an ecosystem, given that it depends thereupon.
The ‘rule of the stomach’ is that the assimilation of introjection pertains as much to myself as flesh as to the deliberative self, as much to dependences as to electivities, to alterities metabolized into identities to return another alterity. Introjection as a translational fibrillation, as an inexhausted mobilization of assimilated/dissimilated identities, is not only a great metaphor of social life, it is its real epicenter. This is why the advent of a gastronomic sciences project functions as a restart, a recording of the overview of an ecology of optimizations that, in terms of fashions and comparisons of simulacra of society, becomes rhetorical hypertrophy, devoid of anchorages and destinies. (Pierluigi Basso Fossali)
5. QualitY
5.1 Quality in the plural
Over the last two decades the food sciences (technologies, above all) have developed a dialectic relationship with qualities (in the plural) of foodstuffs and the act of eating. We have left behind (or at least reappraised, since they are now ingrained in modern food production) the concepts of security and storability that steered developments in the way of thinking about food over the last two centuries; we have shelved the concept of ‘convenience’ (that is, facility of handling and use) that has brought so many benefits (but also so much damage! Suffice it to think of the environment) in recent times; we have overridden the ambit of the standardization and optimization of quality characteristics based on market averaging and consumer expectations. So what we have now are the hegemony of nutritional benefit, the empire of the authentication of raw materials and traceability along the food supply chain, consumer science (a modern branch of sensory evaluation) and the contribution of the new horizons of nanotechnologies (with their promise to conserve quality through a modulated use of the relationship between food and storage environment).
The gastronomic sciences (in their most advanced sense) have different approaches to the definition of quality in general, even contradicting the functionalistic vision of the quality of food. By giving single consumers and their experience central importance in the qualitative relationship with food, gastronomy ‘denies’ the existence of one or more egalitarian qualities, recovers immaterial aspects of emotion and suggestion in the consumption of food and posits a complex, anarchical system to define quality. For example, in the gastronomic universe, the expectation of quality depends not only on the complex relationship between the tasting of a single consumer and intrinsic qualities of a specific product (the end-result of the raw material-processing-handling chain). It also depends on the context in which the product is presented and consumed. This, like other horizons of quality (and unlike the qualities intended by functionalistic visions, which can generally be shaped through multivariate approaches) is non-measurable. Arguably, by providing a ‘mobile’ hierarchy of qualitative performances, only the development of fuzzy logic will be able to domesticate these dimensions of quality in the future.
Quality as seen by the gastronomic sciences often conflicts with quality as seen by the food sciences in terms of single functionalistic aspects. Suffice it to consider the universe of nutritional performance: gastronomy proposes moderation, curiosity and often consciousness of nutritional risk, within a holistic framework, in which the best practice is not ‘what you can (or must) eat’ but variety: hence I taste lardo, lark’s eggs (!), goose en confit, Piedmontese tajarin (30 egg yolks per kilo of flour!), wild spinach salad ... Today the food sciences propose functionalistic models (suffice it to consider the goals of the most recent European framework program for the funding of food research: food labeling, functional foods, antioxidants) that give the act of eating a health function (overrated but highly justified by the economic costs of health care). In its diehard-clownish vision, gastronomy reasserts that a happy fat man (and a less preoccupied society) is better than a sad consumer of diet bars and medicinal drinks (and a civilization fraught with anxiety).
Security is another area of dyscrasia: according to quality as seen by the conventional food sciences, it is a prerequisite (I can’t use a wooden board to cut meat because it could be polluted by cross-contamination, I have to use a stainless steel working surface); for the gastronomic sciences, it is a dialectic requisite (I use the wooden board if I eat the meat immediately, partly because the resulting cut does not ‘tear’ the tissues in the same way as would be the case on a ceramic, steel or Teflon plastic surface).
Let us gloss over authenticity/authentication in its current meaning as a spasmodic defense of market potential and often artificially constructed tradition (the Italian tomato, the bresaola of the Valtellina), incapable of overriding this general area to include forms of varietal and technological differentiation. Instead, let us spare a thought for systemic concepts of gastronomic quality, which is built on a balanced relationship between expression of the characteristics of raw materials, handling skill, local area and consumer, that is being rediscovered today by the conventional food sciences. Modern global food often stands for theft, robbery, land spoliation and taste transfer and homologation. The gastronomic sciences study traditional customs, small-scale economies, rigorously local consumption and the synergic use of resources: theirs is not the economy of the past but the economy of the future, that of care for the planet.
All this translates into new opportunities, but also a necessity. The ambits of gastronomy and of the concepts of quality ingrained in itmust free themselves fromrhetoric and secondrate language (the way TV celebrity chefs and culinology pundits talk, for example) to embark humbly on a path that uses the conventional tools and methods of research (including the most advanced) to reassert the principle that qualities (all of them, even if they are not measurable) need to be studied. It was partly to respond to this emergency that we founded an entire university. (Marco Riva)
5.2 Production and distribution quality
Il concetto di qualità dovrà poi superare l’esclusivo ambito delle caratteristiche organolettiche del cibo. Attenzione dovrà essere posta anche alle modalità di produzione agricola e a quelle di distribuzione commerciale. Per quanto attiene al primo aspetto, di primaria importanza sarà la messa a punto e la successiva introduzione di tecniche di produzione a basso impatto ambientale, al fine di soddisfare un bisogno/necessità di sviluppo sostenibile per la nostra società. La qualità della distribuzione dovrà porre particolare attenzione ai materiali utilizzati nell’imballaggio, alle modalità di trasporto e alle implicazioni di carattere finanziario connesse con il mercato del cibo. (Claudio Malagoli)
5.3 For a critique of gastronomic quality
The notion of food quality is too often considered a simple intuitive given, devoid of opacity. Yet the fact that, from a normative and legislative point of view, it is defined substantially in negative terms ought if nothing else raise suspicions, The positive definition of gastronomic quality is effectively equivocal. Complex and procedural and dynamic, gastronomic quality has to be subjected to painstaking research and analysis from each of the three angles from which it is possible to monitor or enjoy it: raw material, processing, consumption/taste. Here is a summing-up of some key features:
a) Quality of raw material. This is tied, in cultivation, breeding, hunting and fishing, above all to the notion of place, seen as the natural habitat whence the organism in question originates and develops, as well as to the biological and genetic patterns that define any organism. Are some places more suitable than others and are some organisms genetically better than others from the point of view of gastronomic quality? Theoretically, yes. But you only have to consider the manifold variables of these two parameters alone—place and genetics—and the picture gets more complicated. Any ‘natural’ habitat is subjected in fact to the damage caused by space and time, to unforeseeable factors (for example, meteorological variables, crossbreeding, changes in deep strata), which make it de facto impossible to make a static, abstract evaluation of quality raw material. A given variety of tomato may be considered to be of good quality only in an abstract way: concretely, it is necessary to verify whether all the variables involved in the process of its growth correspond to those that were considered as ‘standard’ when the quality of the variety was defined. And the quality of the rawmaterial is transformed as places and habits are transformed, in the long term, but also by unforeseeable factors that may happen in the short term. This, of course, is without considering that raw material is a hybrid right from the outset: the human being encounters it and either collects it or guides it according to differentiated and manifold modes and orders of intervention.
b) Quality of processing. This is tied to notions of technique, skill and knowhow, through straightforward manual dexterity and by the technological prostheses that supplement or replace it. There are different ways of processing raw materials to achieve a qualitative goal: they are adopted either in accordance with precise styles of production (artisan or serial) or, as I pointed out at point a), to take advantage of changes or unforeseen features in the raw material itself. Take the case of wine: ‘given’ the raw material, from the choice of harvest time to fermentation and aging methods (type of yeasts, time, temperature, choice of containers etc.), the whole process of processing and transformation responds to techniques, decisions and choices that, in part, respond to precise goals (style of wine, benchmark market etc.), and in part to the variables outlined at point a). Hence ‘hand to hand’ fighting, literal or metaphoric, with the raw material that never boils down de facto to a preset, definitive pattern. No single and simple protocol exists for quality processing because even introducing as a criterion respect for plain material, for the rough product, the notion would refer in turn to different practices responding to a number of spatial and temporal quality needs.
c) Quality of consumption/taste. Here the procedural and dynamic characteristics of quality arguably appear more evident. With regard to the sensory sphere, there are descriptive and evaluation aspects that, theoretically, ought to be kept separate—the qualitative description of the sensory characteristics of a given product does not correspond ipso facto to its evaluation in terms of pleasure or of the lack thereof. And yet, a simple reflection shows that this distinction, which often works as a distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ taste, albeit possible is not always that clear-cut. Descriptors exist that are invested with value characteristics (e.g. a wine for aging), but this can cause problems (why can’t the non-durability of the wine be assumed as a value, as happens with other products?). But the question of quality of consumption/taste extends beyond aspects of sensory sensitivity to encompass the sphere of the symbolic, hence all the historical and identitary value that we attribute to gastronomic objects. An objective meaning for gastronomic quality in terms of consumption/taste does not correspond to an absolute normative paradigm.
The purpose of these brief notes is to stress how the gastronomic sciences have to promote a critical conception of quality; that is to say a conception that is complex, procedural and dynamic, that does not boil down to the pacific acceptance of current ideologies passed off as a-temporal ‘givens’ (according to the biased models of food and wine journalism and the disciplines of sensory analysis). Gastronomic quality cannot be described according to the epistemological models that assume fuzzy logic as a tool of their own: models, that is, which are open, self-reflective, continuously reviewable and, from my particular perspective, studiable by the ‘clear and confused’ science of knowledge that for just over 250 years has responded to the name of esthetics. Among its other characteristics, esthetics does not analyze its objects of study according to the analytical method, whereby objects themselves are the sum of their component parts, but according to the synthetic method, whereby the object—in this case, the gastronomic object seen from the quality concept point of view as raw material, processing and consumption—exceeds the sum of its component parts. (Nicola Perullo)
6. Time
6.1 Time in cooking: tradition and complexity
Just a few generations separate us from the time in which tradition was characterized by a deeper, more proper relationship with the rhythms of nature. The seasons, the stars and, in particular, the moon punctuated the ‘rough’, liturgical, qualitative, cyclical peasant calendar in contrast with the lay, chronometric, fragmented, linear, metropolitan conception of time of the calendar imposed by contemporary society.
In the course of the last few decades, from the 1970s onwards, we have seen a constant attempt to recover the rhythms of the traditional calendar. The revival of interest in the country world and the rediscovery of nature are strengthening and asserting themselves all the time. The individual who lives the highly domesticated, instrumental times and spaces ofmodernity on an every day basis is beginning to consolidate a pendular process that leads him to anchor his existence and cultural survival to the rhythms of tradition. He is investing affectively in this ‘place’ of memory and roots to recover an identity lost in complexity. Tradition thus becomes the means for finding a direction of meaning, a cognitive framework for living.
The complex new path man is following certainly represents a considerable commitment, certain aspects of which have been studied exhaustively. The fair or feast is, in all likelihood, the folkloric institution to which the individual has turned most passionately to resume his role as an actor in the theater of life. Active participation enables him to tie himself down, to live and relive the placed called community, in which the time of tradition is still an active practice, in which ethnic drums still roll, in which orality updates the tribal encyclopedia generated by gesture and word every day.
In this process of domestication and re-domestication, of the return to one’s place of origin, to one’s roots, food is taking on ever increasing importance. Passing from the time of tradition to the time of modernity, from orality to writing, traditional forms of knowledge have invariably altered their function. The cooking of tradition is, in all probability, the only traditional cultural system that we have inherited without solution of continuity. While the ritual calendar and every other tradition tended to disappear or lapsed into relatively long periods of oblivion that, on occasion, spelt their end, the forms and practices connected with traditional eating habits have never been interrupted. Now that the individual in complex society is, as we have seen, pursuing tradition as a spatial and temporal site of affectivity and identity, the community has found in gastronomic knowledge an important means for reinventing itself and building a new sense of belonging. As modern man becomes an actor in the popular feast in order to be readmitted to the collective memory of an area, he rediscovers the cooking of tradition, the peasant recipes, the fruits of the land that still grow seasonally, seeking to reconstruct the scattered fragments of the food rhythms of a peasant world bound to nature.
When we speak of tradition and its revival in the present, we speak above all of invention and re-invention, of re-proposition and re-functionalization of peasant culture. One example is the feast or fair. The revival of traditional cooking fits into these interpretative categories, developed recently to contain the original new processes that underpin the recovery of traditional knowledge—albeit by nomeans in the same way. In the forms and practices of tradition, food is less acquainted with these complex processes of invention and re-invention insofar as it still conserves—at least in part—active memory of its past. In many respects, as is the case of other folkloric institutions, most of the functions it performed in the past are changing.
Traditional peasant cooking was part of the complex reproductive system that was largely managed by women, who had to produce a lot of children, possibly males, so that the farm could count upon labor for the fields and enjoy solidarity and mutual aid for generations. Women also saw to feeding the family. This was a no less important reproductive act, especially when farm produce was sold out to feed better-off families.
Meat appeared on the peasant table only on the feast days that the calendar occasionally reserved in the course of the year. The woman of the house was thus assigned the incumbent, exacting and, at times, desperate task of providing for the family and of putting together enough calories to ensure its survival. She had to combine the ‘vocabulary’ of biological reproduction with that, no less important, of the ritual reproduction of which food is a bearer.
Today a new actor, man, is taking the stage of traditional cooking, especially in his leisure time. He tends to occupy a gender space that once did not belong to him because it was the woman who took charge of domestic affairs. Man largely takes part in the ‘exceptional’ time of cooking, preparing the food with strong ritual connotations for festive occasions, for the special days of the calendar. He recovers recipes and seeks out the genuine natural produce of the land in a game of philological rediscovery of the material and immaterial gastronomic past.
A variety of reasons determine this new phenomenon. In general, research into traditional cooking suggests how food is an important commutator that enables the contemporary individual to tie himself organically to the temporal rhythms thatmake up the calendar of tradition, to find affective, identitary, community-generating traits in the dishes of the past. The rediscovery of cooking does not refer solely to the need for calories that has always conditioned humanity; more importantly, it lays symbolic tables, and generates and builds memory more than any other part of tradition.
We might also hypothesize that this new form of male self-representation is one of the results of the crisis of solitude of the contemporary family, without or with only a few children. With no reproductive strategy to implement, in the kitchen seeks to somehow interpret a sort of biological reproduction, a substitute, life-generating theater, through the preparation of genuine food.
Last but not least, gastronomic practice offers man the chance to recover a piece of traditional knowledge which used to belong to him, but which complex fragmented society, characterized by an exasperating division of labor, has denied him. The peasant used to be able to put together parts of worn out products and new objects creatively. The function of this practice of exploiting waste was to not produce refuse or at least to delay its release into the environment. Traditional cooking was largely based on the skill, creativity and manual dexterity of women, who knew how to make use of farm produce creatively and carefully. What remained of a meal was reinvented in a combinatory culinary process which, in the course of time, has generated peasant cuisine, at one and the same time exceptional yet parsimonious. In this gastronomic project, which women are still capable of implementing actively, man seems to rediscover a knowhow that the division of labor and complex metropolitan living had expropriated.
These are just some of the reasons for the widespread, authoritative revival of the time of tradition, which is taking place, above all, through food. The phenomenon is, on the one hand, characterized by deeply philological traits and the pursuit of an ‘original past’, as extreme as it is impossible; on the other, it reveals an interesting attempt to combine tradition with present and future.
Hybridizations, contaminations, traffic in cultures—these are some of the characteristics of contemporary daily living, which is now becoming increasingly global. Bricolage, the creativity of peasant knowhow, which traditional cooking has wisely brought with it into the present, also provides a fertile base for authoritative liaison and interaction with other no less authoritative gastronomic cultures, hence for exchanging knowledge and innovating taste.
If these are some of the results of the rediscovery of the time of tradition and the new functions food is assuming in complex society, it is reasonable to think that the increasingly wide-felt need to protect biodiversity is partly the fruit of this new gastronomic consciousness. This need connects and integrates organically with the protection of ethnodiversity, the need to protect the plurality of knowledge of tradition and ethnic traits.
To protect and combine these two complex heritage systems is a central question and an anthropological urgency for the gastronomic sciences. (Piercarlo Grimaldi)
6.2 The absolutized present
There can be no doubt that in contemporary western society the temporal dimension is conjugated almost exclusively in the present, the past and the future being reduced to abstract entities or terms devoid of all meaning. More specifically, convinced as we are that the speeding up of history and technological conquests make the handing down of the specific technical competences of trades and professions useless in a continuous, constant flow that leaves no room for traditions and acquired experience, we no longer recognize historical memory. The past is forgotten about and far away; at best, it is mythicized by the cultural and media industry for commercial ends.
The interweaving of phenomena of globalization with processes of individualization and crises of societal coexistence fosters precariousness, disjointedness and insecurity. The future thus appears uncertain and risky. True, individuals react to this situation in different ways, but in most cases they live in the ‘absolute present’, incapable of—and perhaps prevented from—planning a future, which appears devoid of hope and ideal references anyway.
In the present too, our relationship with time is as complex as ever. We are in fact capable of somehow casting it loose from its natural limits, from the regular rhythm of the succession of days and seasons, but then we are overwhelmed by our lack of leisure time for interpersonal relations, for our cultural and artistic interests, for simply mulling over the events in our lives.
In this context, the gastronomic sciences may help significantly to recover the fundamental temporal dimensions of the past and the future, with positive consequences for the present in the daily lives of people.
By promoting the quality food products typical of specific local areas, it is possible to reappropriate traditional wisdom and techniques, to restore prestige and social function to ancient crafts and tomake populations otherwise abandoned to themselves or victims of the mirage of global homologation aware of their identity once more. Educational and training institutes can help the younger generations to rediscover the cultural, social and commercial importance of local gastronomic production at every stage in the supply chain, thus avoiding, on the one hand, an exodus to more attractive urban areas and, on the other, a retreat into localistic forms of protest. The need is to convey the material and immaterial resources that, having accumulated in the area, characterize its evolution, determine its environmental heritage, and develop it socially, culturally and physically. Seen from this perspective, the past is closely bound to the present insofar as it assures the growth and economic revival of a given locality, involving different professional categories and age groups on different levels in a shared project in which roles, responsibilities, competences and operating tools are clearly defined.
The local network of subjects that operate in the area then uses the tools of modern-day technology, such as the internet, to display its identity to the global network. It thus enters increasingly vast markets on which short and long networks interweave constantly.
Furthermore, a local development project based on gastronomic products must respect the economic, social and environmental sustainability of its area. Here we have the point of contact between past, present and future. The node is a delicate one, given that in a society dominated, as we have said, by the ‘absolute present’, it is difficult to imagine anything else but the rapid, immediate consumption of every local commodity and resource without too many worries about the effects and consequences. The concept of disposability is applied to every field of social life and has also extended to interpersonal relations. Yet, this is precisely why the function of the gastronomic sciences—a return to eating together without excessive time limits, no longer consuming food, but finding out about it, tasting it and appreciating it—is important as a means of adding pleasure to sociality. Partly thanks to the convivial get-togethers of tourists, locals and food and wine producers, the growing success of gastro-tourism is, in this sense, reassuring.
Another important aspect is the creation of small enterprises or local producers’ cooperatives to oversee the typicality and the quality of gastronomic resources. This is a way of promoting identity, creating job opportunities and avoiding speculation and imitation, a constant hazard on an aggressive and sometimes deregulated market.
Seen through amore global lens, sustainabilitymeans being aware of the problems that hit the gastronomic supply chain, interdependent with other business sectors (energy, transport) and certainly influenced by political choices (or non-choices) and the decisions of other particularly influential institutions and organizations. It is possible to say that never as in the twenty-first century has the future depended on the virtuous and sustainable behavior of the present. Hence even the rapidly changing relations between the North and South of the world depend to a large extent on the ways in which agrifood resources are used. (Paolo Corvo)
6.3 Temporal/intemporal
Gastronomy exemplifies a point of convergence between the untimeliness of food consumption and the timing of digestive processes, between the punctuality of the gesture of eating and the durativization of tasting, between the present of taste and the memory of the food product. The list could go on, but it is possible to assert that gastronomy offers sciences the observative parameter of a ‘recording’. With respect to a social world so concentrated on monitoring the present as to immediately translate the appraisal of future trends into initiatives (shifting of capitals), gastronomy shows the orchestration of actors directed with different timing and does not disdain the inversion of the succession of events, it becomes ‘archeology’ of traditions and product processing, but also of the possible left unattended to. Gastronomy as a nomological science that studies the introjection of relations (the science of cultural assimilation) and the interrelationship of introjections (the science of social taste) chiasmatically is thus joined by ‘gastrography’, the science of traces of acts of eating as agricultural acts, that is to say an ideographic science that seeks to characterize practices, reconnecting them to an archeology of the possible (history) and a destinal anticipation (ethics).
In this sense, gastronomy does not accept the reduction of temporality to a selfmonitoring present, thereby also criticizing the perspective typical of advertising promotion, which cannot be ethical precisely insofar as it must not, constitutively, embrace any destinal vision in order to keep the ‘fire’ of desires and interests alive, hic et nunc. To the intemporal present of self-observing cultural fashions, gastrography opposes the stratification of outcomes and ever renewed introjective possibilities, capable of favoring centrality for an ‘insatiable’ subject without the typically postmodern obsession with the enthropy of the ‘consumable’. In parallel, cyclicity is a productive time for the gastronomic perspective and reteaches a hermeneutics of the self that can believe in the fertility of the paths. Against that, the mutagenous anxiety of cultures is matched today with an identitary experimentation without a pilot and without a map. (Pierluigi Basso Fossali)
7. Ethics
7.1 Food ethics
Even foodstuffs have an ethical content. More specifically, in order to achieve truly sustainable development in the agrifood field, it is necessary to take care about the methods with which food is produced. From this point of view, it is necessary to be proper experts. The fact is that nowadays we might provocatively argue that ‘traditional food’ doesn’t exist any more. In the wine field, for example, we find wines that are DOC, DOCG, VQPRD, TGI, PGI, PDO, ‘made from organic grapes’, ‘made from biodynamic grapes’ and so on—the list could continue. The same applies to the majority of fresh and processed foods. Then there is the general problem of choosing highly innovative food; think, for example, of the problems tied to the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), micro-filtered milk and so on.
The variety of food available has become so vast that to assert that the consumer is disoriented is a euphemism for saying ‘nobody has a clue what’s going on’. Hence, in the food ambit, it is important for us to make ethical choices to adopt virtuous ways of behaving, from both a personal and a social point of view, conscious of the fact that our choices may have fallouts on other individuals and on future generations.
Each of us has to be aware of the fact that when we consume a food of a certain type (meat or vegetables, say, or eggs or cheese), our behavior could have ethical connotations. When we buy a product from countries that do not adopt our social protections, do we realize that in this way we might favor the exploitation of child labor and even, in certain extreme cases, the reduction of children to slavery? When we buy a foodstuff from countries that do not adopt our production rules (the use of growth hormones in livestock breeding, of pesticides that are not allowed here, of coloring agents and so on) do we realize that maybe ‘it isn’t actually the same foodstuff’? When we consume a foodstuff from countries with problems of undernutrition, do we realize the consequences (decrease in domestic supply and consequent price increases, hence exacerbation of the problem of undernutrition) this simple gesture might determine? When we consume meat, do we realize the social and environmental costs this can have? When we consume food products made with highly intensive agricultural techniques as opposed to products made with agricultural techniques with a low environmental impact (organic, integrated etc.), do we realize the effects this might have on the environment?
The real possibility thus exists that even food can determine ethical choices. To buy one product rather than another could mean favoring given production techniques (more or less respectful of the environment, more or less in tune with our social rules), or it could mean defending and protecting given traditional crops in a given local area (the raising of local breeds, land terracing in Liguria or the Valtellina, local cheeses, wines made with native cultivars etc.), or it could mean, finally, being sensitive to the defense of animal rights and more besides. (Claudio Malagoli)
7.2 Ethics/anoethics/morals
In our society self-consciousness may become ‘neurosis’. Hence the revival of the centrality of the body which, once varied with suitable artifices, may ensure us a nomadic, albeit, maybe, ‘hysterical’ existence. The body can add meaning beyond the self that should be in control of it, thereby opening up an anoethical territory in which the application of right and wrong, of admirable and reprehensible, is no longer actualizable and, arguably, no longer pertinent. This sometimes appears as a liberation. That the conquest of an anoethical dimension often depends on the introjection of substances is a given fact. The alterity assumed detonates inside us to reveal something about us that responds to it, and this response is all the more revealing the less it is rationalizable.
Of course it is possible to proceed with a symmetrical perspective and grasp something of the self-affirmative strategies that reduce any legitimate claim to a sense of the body, subjecting the latter, precisely and above all in eating, to all sorts of intensive and extensive degustatory ‘violence’.
Ethics thus opens up into a welding together of ego and body in a common sense plan. This is not enough, of course, because the intersubjective question comes into play with respect to which knowledge and flavor need to recover a relational perspective. The second ethical given is thus the fact of being called on by the other to an inexchangable role, to a responsibility that cannot but stem the ‘nomadic’ temptations of the self. Ethics thus opens a symmetrical horizon of self-ascription (what one is is implied in what one can do for the other) and imputation (that which the other is is implied in what the other can do to me).
The first response to the need for a common parametric framework to decide the fairness of decisions and investments comes from morals. It is a peculiar feature of morals that they codify themselves and enter into polemic with other morals that have to do with and define different cultures. Nonetheless, one wonders whether the ethical stake is that of application/observation of morals when they appear as an untranslatable Babel of binary codes (right/wrong, admirable/reprehensible etc.). Ethics is exactly what pushes us outside codes; that is, it sets itself the problem of rendering morals commensurable and mutually moot. Here the question arises of ‘going beyond the world, that is beyond significant language’; to speak of ethics is ‘to fling oneself against the limitations of language’ up to a blind spot of gnoseology where we can recognize that ‘Good is outside the space of facts’ (Wittgenstein).
The desirable and the obtained are thus a small-scale circuit of meaning which always finds itself lapped by an interpretative plot and an identitary narrativization that confides in interpersonal meaningfulness, recognized and appreciated (Ricoeur) as having a translatable destinal background. Destinal symmetrization yields the advance on a redemption of the inequivalences of life forms; it supports, that is, the sensible character of what is admitted as due (Tugendhat), albeit in the most lacerating asymmetry. Ethics is not built on consensus, but in the radical emergency of a co-meaning, ineludibly practiced, albeit unperceived, from which it may benefit or form which it may be exiled.
Ethics is the border of a life form that has to observe itself beyond the limits of its functions, goals and its own finitude. For this reason, the apparent intractability of ethical questions for the gastronomic sciences becomes evident, a primary field of study, once the tension of life forms beyond ourselves is acknowledged as the primary, albeit tacit, structuring of a culture: the crossing of destinies. (Pierluigi Basso Fossali)
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