The Eight Basic Tastes of Food: A History & Tasting
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In this talk, I discuss the multiplicity of basic tastes or flavor - going beyond the four typically distinguished today (sweet, sour, salty, and bitter) - that were commonly referenced in ancient, medieval, and early modern treatments of flavor. The story starts with ancient philosophical and medical writers, leading up to Aristotle, who distinguished eight basic flavors - sweet, oily, pungent, astringent, rough, sour, salty, and bitter - a schema that would be continue through the early modern period in European and Islamic discussions about food, flavor, and the senses. In the course of the lecture, we engage in a tasting centered around these eight basic flavors. I also discuss some of Aristotle's other thoughts about food, flavor, and health, and narrate the story of how we arrived much later (in the 19th and 20th century) at the four-taste schema. The majority of the authors we discuss fall into the disciplines of philosophy, medicine, and natural history. Culinary arts and gastronomy are relative latecomers to the game. We discuss in particular the ancient medieval thinkers Democritus, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Galen, Nemesius, John Philloponus, John, Damascene, Ibn Sayyr Al-Warraq, Ibn Sina/Avicenna, Vincent of Beauvais, Urso of Salerno, Thomas Aquinas. We then move into the Renaissance and Modern periods, in which the treatment of the "tastes" or flavors expands considerably, to the point that the father of modern gastronomy, John Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, maintained that there were infinite or uncountable basic flavors. Where then did our contemporary four-flavor orthodoxy emerge from? That is a question that we discuss as well - having to do with scientific reductionism, and the misinterpretation of the tongue map, among other things. Here are links to the handouts provided for the talk: https://www.academia.edu/26497331/Handout_-_Aristotles_Distinction_Between_Flavors_or_Tastes_Khumoi_ https://www.academia.edu/26497324/Handout_-_Basic_Flavors_in_Greek_Natural_Philosophy_and_Medicine_Prior_to_Aristotle
Comments
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Do you ever consider speake about philosophy of heavy metal, that can be very interesting (and awesome) talk.
Question to everybody, does someone read books from "Popular Culture and Philosophy"? If so, how good they are? If they not very good, this is still good that someone take this topic. To me popular culture was one of probably three-four biggst sources of problems and ideas in my life. -
Yay! Arts!
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coool. is Hippocrates writting about the egyptians in on ancient medicine ?
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Amazing job! I would like to see the handout. :-D Maybe you can scan it in, and hook it at the end of the video, so viewers can enjoy it too.
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Very engaging, thanks very much. Do you have any thoughts about the relationship between taste as an aspect of gastronomy to the other sense of 'taste' as an indicator of social status or cultural acceptability? Obviously Bourdieu has written on that but I'm curious about historical antecedents. I'm currently working on insect eating (entomophagy) which seems to occupy the overlap between these.
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