Food as Art (First Draft)

I remember the first time I tried sushi. My aunt usually takes my siblings and I out on special occasions. This was my 12th birthday. I had never had “real” sushi before, only Costco’s California rolls. We started off with a bowl of Udon soup with a piece of fried shrimp in it. The soup was the most relaxing thing I’ve ever tasted. It practically put my mouth to sleep. The shrimp was a perfect complement to it. It was cooked perfectly, making it slightly crunchy on the shell with a delicate inside. The best part of course when the sushi came. We got a few different kinds of rolls. The tuna roll changed the way I think of tuna altogether. Instead of the over salted canned fish it was now a silky smooth morsel that wasn’t like anything I’d ever tasted before.

One of my favorite things to do is try new foods from different cultures. And I don’t mean Chinese takeout. I mean authentic food that was created from a different view point. The art of a culture is like a window into what their life is like. It’s part of human nature to be curious about the way people live, and about people’s ideas that seem foreign to us. To taste what people eat gives us a unique view into the way they think, not just on a cultural level, but also on an individual level. Just like can use different colors and mediums to communicate their ideas, a chef uses different flavors and textures to let you taste what their thinking.

You might be thinking that food is just designed to taste good. Well that’s totally true. Every form art is meant to be enjoyed to some extent. If a painting was just plain ugly nobody would look at it. However the way people interpret art is filled with subjectivity as with anything else. A friend of mine who composes music told me a story about a successful musician in Africa named Salim. Some of Salim’s western friends wanted to show him what a symphony orchestra was like, so they took him to London to watch Beethoven’s 9th preformed. He watched with fascination during the course of the symphony. At the end His friends asked him what his favorite part was. “The first song” Salim replied. At first his friends assumed this meant the first movement, but after further questioning they realized he meant the part where the orchestra was tuning, and he liked how all of the sounds blended together. What his western friends thought was chaos, Salim had interpreted it as music. The same is true with food. Most of us wouldn’t enjoy some exotic tribal cuisine, and they probably wouldn’t think hot dogs and apple pie are fit for eating.

Most of the food we eat is processed now days. Processed food doesn’t have flavors of its own, so it has to be added. That’s where flavor artists come in. It turns out that the distinct flavors in food are attributed to a few chemicals unique to that flavor. So scientists-chefs have to design flavors chemically to add to food. This allows companies to nearly have ultimate control over how people experience processed food. Without flavor scientists Mt Dew would just be colored sugar water with thickener and preservatives. The same is true for burgers and chips. Next time you pick up something from the vending machine, think of how everything you taste is designed by someone in a lab. You do not taste potatoes with barbeque sauce, you taste what someone’s perspective on what that should taste like. In some ways this makes preparing flavors more “pure”. Rather than depending on the flavors inherent in food already, chefs can add whatever they imagine to the food.