I haven’t had time to cook in the last week. I’m too busy reading, mostly about food, to finish my Gallatin degree. [Don't ever go to Gallatin, unless you're 35, the smartest person you think you've ever met, and you want to write a dissertation without anyone bothering you with their crap program. If you believe you're a candidate, come talk to me and I'll set you straight.]

My final class at NYU was called Food in Performance Art. I believe its original intent was to augment the very dry curriculum of the nutrition studies majors, and not for the whatever-strikes-your-fancy students of my college. [If you're unfamiliar, NYU has maaaany colleges. At one point the university owned the most real estate in NYC second to the Catholic Church.] In class we read, watched, and viewed works of art that “interpreted the role of food” or “used food to make a political statement.” As you (or at least I) would expect, many of the performance artists were feminists commenting on the role of housewives, hunger as lust, food as expression, body as canvas, and characters like Kim Basinger’s Elizabeth in Nine 1/2 Weeks. It all seemed so heavy-handed. Let alone the fact that the class was about live performances, and yet we were only given written critiques of the pieces. We had our own imagination (and patience) to piece the original together after the critic had their way ripping it apart. When many people don’t understand food as nourishment, its primary function, it seemed really pretentious to me to use it as a tool for artists to speak about politics and feminism.

Yesterday I was re-reading Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” from the 60s. In the time of her essay she argued that interpretation was only further dulling our “senses” of the arts, and that people needed to get back to a place where they could have an emotional and visceral (erotics) experience of artwork. Interpretation, she said, was first “summoned, to reconcile the ancient texts to ‘modern’ demand.” People who searched for meaning in modern works, she said, were simply dissatisfied with what they actually saw, and inferred new meaning to make the piece acceptable. Both the artist and the audience were guilty in this matter, the latter for not coming to terms with the piece, and the former for not making the thing itself of any interest.

After art school I tried my hand in creative writing, but found both majors too full of “interpretation” and “style” and lacking in the practice of technique and form. My seven year stint in the web turned out similarly. Part of what compelled me about food is that it doesn’t need to be cloaked in meaning. Or so I thought. Raw ingredients exist in nature, and we cook and prepare them to make them palatable, and they serve us with nourishment. Diluting this palate with words, like “Organic,” “free-range,” and “local” or experiences like themed restaurants just gives license to the artist to back political statements or put on a show and not focus on taste and quality. Our bodies don’t care about politics, “deconstruction,” or the latest advancements in science. Some will argue all the body needs is energy and water, no more, no less. I will argue our bodies also care about balance, diversity, quality of ingredients, and maybe antioxidants. Our senses want complex smells, tastes, and textures, and care for beauty and appealing sounds. Everything else is just dressing to fuel the ego and the mind.

Our culture has evolved since the time of Sontag’s writing, including a “food revolution” that helped us to focus on our own country’s heritage. Yet our fascination with interpreting the things we eat, reinventing them, dressing them up in ridiculous settings and exotic or “local” ingredients, politicizing them, and finding endless analogies for comparison many times falls short. What we really need to start with is good food that reawakens the senses, no more, no less.