Hunger as a Constitutive Property of a Culinary Work
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Hunger as a Constitutive Property of a Culinary Work Fabio Bacchini1 Accepted: 3 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In this paper I attempt to show that a certain degree of hunger, intended as a material and psychological condition of the diner, can become a constitutive property of a culinary work. One may believe that the best possible argument supporting this thesis is one relying on the general assertion that an author’s stipulative authority over the features of his or her work, if adequately exercised, is absolute. Quite the contrary, I show that we should prefer a different and more specific argumentative strategy based on the twofold fact that the conventions ruling over culinary works are peculiarly less stringent than in many other art fields, and that hunger has a very special status with regard to culinary works, in the sense that fixing the degree of hunger of the diner may serve to fix the appropriate conditions for any minimally acceptable perceptual experience of a culinary work to take place. Keywords Hunger · Satiety · Culinary work · Food ontology · Ontology of art · Author’s stipulative authority Hunger can be defined as “the array of physiological and psychological states that distinctively promote, accompany and follow the human act of eating” (Borghini 2016). Such a definition has the virtue of considering the physical pangs of weakness and discomfort that we get when we need something to eat, and the psychological longing for food, as equally fundamental components of hunger (Telfer 1996). Of course we also “need to take seriously the very slipperiness of hunger” as a cultural category (Vernon 2007, p. 8). It is reasonable to assume, however, that rejecting the idea that hunger be merely a condition grounded in the material reality of the body, and paying close attention to its psychological aspects, necessarily results in taking into account its changing and historically specific forms. This paper deals with a very particular question: can a cook successfully fix a certain degree of hunger, intended as a material and psychological condition of the diner, as a constitutive property of the culinary work he or she is the author of? Imagine that Miriam—a chef in a restaurant or hotel—creates a new culinary work and publicly declares that a diner can truly assert to be having a perceptual experience of that culinary work only if he or she is experiencing hunger pains while eating the edible matter plated up and * Fabio Bacchini [email protected] 1
University of Sassari, Alghero, SS, Italy
served. If, on the contrary, the diner is not very hungry while eating, what he or she is having a perceptual experience of is just food, and possibly another culinary work—but certainly not hers. The question I am raising is whether and under what conditions Miriam can successfully stipulate this feature of her work. Trying to answer this question will force us to focus our attention on the relationship between hunger and the aesthetics of food—an issue that remains largely unexplored—and, at t
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