Does Food Express Emotion?

The great French chemist and gastronomist Hervé This has a lot of interesting things to say about cuisine in his many books, but he sometime gets a bit far out over his skis. In his book Cooking: The Essential Art (with chef Pierre Gagnaire) he writes:

” To the extent that it detaches itself from tradition (which works to consign it to the status of an artisanal trade or craft, based on repetition) and insofar as its purpose is to stir the emotions, cooking—which alone among the arts stimulates all of the senses at once—cannot be excluded from their company.

It is the reference to stirring the emotions that is problematic.  Is that really the purpose of artful cooking? Perhaps he simply means giving people joy. But he seems to have something more extensive in mind. As an example he says that “a meal is capable of touching us as a love song does, of giving us joy, occasionally even moving is to anger.”

But a love song touches us in part because it is about love. Is cooking about love in the same sense?

A cook can express love through her cooking but she is doing the expressing, not the food. Musicians may love what they are doing, play their music with great feeling, and care deeply that their audience appreciates what they do. But regardless of how much loving care they devote to their performance, Radiohead’s “Creep” or Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” are not about love. What a song is about is different from the conditions of its composition or performance. The same applies to food. Food made with love is not necessarily about love.

If food is about anything other than flavor, it is about conviviality and the making of community. Perhaps that is what This had in mind but that has little to do with food that aspires to be art.

The food that has the best claim to be art is found in Michelin-rated restaurants where creativity and innovation reign. But I hardly think those chefs are expressing love. Presumably they love to cook but in that case they are experiencing love not expressing it or representing it.

Of course food gives us joy and that is one of the primary motives that drives cooks and chefs to do what they do. But to say that food gives us joy is not to say it expresses joy as a love song expresses love. Love songs express love but (typically) don’t cause us to fall in love. Expression and causation are vastly different concepts. Furthermore, that something gives us joy is not sufficient to make it art. Many things that are not art give us joy.  And I’ve been moved to anger by a bad or overpriced meal but that hardly makes the meal a work of art.

Hervé This is not the only writer to engage in this confused way of speaking. Chefs’ commentary is replete with claims that their food expresses emotion. I suppose some foods do express emotion if it functions as a symbol of an emotion. Chocolate on Valentine’s Day is a symbol of love. A pretzel resembling entwined lovers may represent love. Gant Achatz’s flaming dish of sweet potatoes cooked in blue corn for a charred look and served with a plate of house-made marshmallows was designed to to evoke feelings of roasting marshmallows over an open fire.

No doubt some foods can express or represent emotion and the aim of artful cooking is in part to give joy. But it goes too far to say the aim of  artful cooking is to stir a wider range of emotions.