Food is Not Like Art. Food is Art.
What’s the Latest Development?
The similarities between cooking and recognized artistic mediums, from composing to sculpting, are increasingly catching the eyes of the art world. Community gardening projects which have taken a more creative tack, appointing ‘lead artists’, have recently received funding from the San Francisco MOMA as well as theFleishhacker Foundation. On the culinary front, molecular cuisine has become an outlet for organizations looking to explore ‘the importance of taste from the perspectives of the culinary arts, sociology, art history and theory, anthropology, as well as the cognitive, material and biological sciences.’
What’s the Big Idea?
Combining and transforming materials is an essential part of any artistic medium so it seems only natural that many countries’ governments consider culinary organizations important to a collective cultural heritage. Peru’s Pubic Diplomacy department, for example, lists gastronomy as an important cultural export. “[I]n 2010, The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) honored the ‘gastronomic meal of the French’ as part of the ‘intangible cultural heritage of humanity.'” And perhaps more than any other discipline, food is able to appeal to all of our senses.
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