| Seminar Series: Food for Thought |
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Thursday, November 25 2010, 11:30am - 12:45pm |
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Seminar Series: "Food for Thought" by the Department of English and Humanities. Shahnewaz Kabir, Senior Lecturer of the department, will present a draft paper entitled, "Food for Thought" on Thursday, November 25, 2010.
Food for Thought
Is there an art of cooking, or food and drink? It is common to find people talking about food and drink described as a variety of aesthetic experience. For example the food writer M.F.K. Fisher suggests that when it is combined with herb and butter, "eating meat becomes not a physical function like breathing or defecating but an agreeable and almost intellectual satisfaction of the senses." It is quite common to find people talking about food and drink, and their preparation, and presentation, in the sort of language that we typically use to discuss works of art and their production.
However, how seriously should we take them? When someone describes a fluffy omelet with fine herbs, or a plate of chatpati decorated with crashed fuchka, slices of boiled egg, green chili and coriander leaves as something beautiful, or the bottle of wine, or a small bowl of colorful faluda as a work of art, is this merely pretentious hyperbole - or could what they say be literally true?
Posing these questions raise larger issues of what makes an exercise a form of art, and a particular thing into a work of art. This is indeed quite important to ask that if our experience of food and drink ever correctly thought of as aesthetic experience? Is cooking better thought of as a craft than an art? Aren’t food and drink too functional to be thought of as work of art?
The presentation plans to raise these questions and engage the audience to think about them methodically instead of reacting with preconceived opinions. |
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Location: Room 401, Campus A |
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