Some notes on Ernesto Castro’s presentation on Dialogos de cocina Txiki.
- Cooking traditionally female (parte de los cuidados, del deber reproductivo). But only 14 women in the current top 100 best chefs.
- Artistizacion y cientificacion de la cocina. Can cooking be a science? An art?
- Techne (greek) referred to both art and science: because both were ruled by a complex of techniques.
- They stay conceptually together until modern times, when fine arts are conceived and differentiated (painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, music and dance). The similarity between these is how they are perceived by us: sight and hearing.
- Is it possible to conceive an art style that is conceived differently? (touching, smelling, tasting). Traditional answer is no
- Art is perceived only using sentidos apoteticos (distanced senses), as they are the ones allowing for comparison. The idea is that two people can be sure they are looking at the same painting, but can’t be sure they are perceiving the same flavors in a dish.
- Modernization has pushed cooking into conceding relevance to its visual (dish presentations) and auditory (performative explanations) fronts.
- In those fronts, plenty of art slang is used, e.g. deconstruction, from arquitecture (acques Derrida)
- There is not academic sense in considering modern cooking an art, if following the western traditional conception of art.
- The closest science would be chemistry. The main difference is the lack of categorical closure in cooking; this is, combining two valid cooking elements doesn’t necessarily create a third valid element.
- Cooking falls closer to a prudence, than to art or science: we could say it’s a probabilistic art, parallelizing an ethics (dietetics).
- “Cooking is to ethics what rhetoric to justice” - Plato
- How healthy / ethical are tasting menus? Super size me but with tasting menus
- Cooking in general also unethical from an antispecistic pov.
- In ancient greece, meat cooking was a totally different field, executed by different people and considered something closer to a ritual.