Plato called my trade a knack. Why did philosophy decide taste and smell don’t count?
I have run kitchens for fifteen years and I've started reading the philosophers on food because I'm tired of being told it's ‘just subjective’ by people who have never had to fix a split sauce on a Friday night.
What I found surprised me. In the Gorgias, Socrates sorts cookery with flattery: medicine is a real art that knows what is good for the body, cookery is a knack that only knows what pleases it. Later writers mostly agreed. The ‘higher’ senses, sight and hearing, could support beauty. Taste and smell were too bodily, too close, too private. Kant's example of the agreeable is someone liking a particular wine, which he contrasts with judging something beautiful.
Carolyn Korsmeyer's Making Sense of Taste goes through the reasons one by one. Taste needs contact, not distance; but why should distance be required for attention? Food can't represent; but a dish can refer to a season, a region, a grandmother's version of itself. Taste leaves no lasting object; neither does a performance of a song. And expertise is plainly real. My sous-chef can taste a stock and tell me what's missing. A new cook cannot. That is the profile of skill, not mood.
So here's what I'd like to talk about. Was the exclusion of taste ever a good argument, or was it a hierarchy of the body dressed up as one? And are there traditions that never made the exclusion in the first place?