DATE:
5.00pm (Milan Time) April 9, 2025​

LOCATION:
Online, ZOOM

Please find here the full program of the Spring 2025 online colloquia series
Abstract: I will propose a different approach to food criticism through a relational theory of taste. I would like to show that what is now routinely understood as "gastronomic criticism" is actually - and, of course, with exceptions - a distortion of it, reducing it to a mere exercise in reviews and evaluations. This distortion is tied to a corresponding conception of the gustatory experience, in which those sensitive aspects that refer to an objective and static interpretation of food are taken into account mainly, if not exclusively. I will call this conception optical taste, to emphasize both the prevalence of the visual element in all its medial aspects, as is evident today, and the fact that the gustatory experience itself is modeled on the standard conception of sight as a distal and objective sense. Instead, I propose a haptic, that is, engaged and participatory, taste as a model for a different approach to gastronomic criticism.