From Gluttony to Enlightenment by Viktoria von Hoffmann

Author:Viktoria von Hoffmann [Hoffmann, Viktoria von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252082146
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2016-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

5Toward an Art and Science of Taste

The animals feed; the man eats; only the man of wit knows how to eat.

—“Aphorismes du Professeur pour servir de prolégomènes à son ouvrage et de base éternelle à la science,” in Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du goût, 19

After exploring the multiple metaphors of taste, we still need to understand why taste was the object of such intellectual enthusiasm in the seventeenth and even more in the eighteenth centuries. Which specific cultural, social, political, economic, and culinary contexts could explain this transformation regarding the meanings and values of taste? What made the emergence of this new sense modality of taste possible in early modern Europe? To answer this, we need to get back to eighteenth-century social history and especially to the history of food—from beauty go back to bouillon. The aim here is to examine how concerns about spiritual taste would interact with discussions on taste as a gastronomic sensation. We have seen indeed that debates on spiritual taste often included discussions on the bodily sense of taste. Likewise, did discourses on food, cuisine, and material taste include developments on spiritual taste? These debates provide a complementary picture of the complex and numerous relations between the taste of the body and the taste of the mind.

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