Why Care about Food and Wine as Art

Our capacity for generosity and renewal rests on inspiration, and beauty is among the things that inspires us most of all.

As life in our increasingly diseased and fractured world begins to resemble the bleak cityscapes of our worst science fiction fantasies, the search for meaning becomes an abiding preoccupation. The joining of art and life is one way to restore that meaning. Art and life fuse in the culture of the table.

In the not too distant past, Friday was the end of the work week, 5:00 P.M. was the end of the work day, loyalty mattered, and bosses cared. Some things were just too valuable to trade off for greater efficiency. Today we work 24/7 just to stay ahead of the robots that don’t complain about being used as efficient profit maximizers. The intrinsic value of activities that produce nothing but their own internal goodness has fallen by the wayside in a mad dash for money and fame.

A life devoted to beauty is one way of recapturing that sense of intrinsic value.

But that beauty cannot be limited to the gallery, museum, or the stage. If meaning and value are to be recaptured in our lives beauty must penetrate everyday life. And perhaps nothing is more ubiquitous in everyday life than food and drink.

The means of transcendence are as close as the cupboard or the refrigerator.