#Carolyn Korsmeyer

[cor-ardens-archive]

When disgust or revulsion is confronted and overcome, what was at first disgusting can become delicious.

Carolyn Korsmeyer, ‘Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 60, no. 3 (2002)

#Carolyn Korsmeyer #food #appetites #m. lit.

[anaxerneas]

Taste, perhaps the most intimate of the five senses, has traditionally been considered beneath the concern of philosophy, too bound to the body, too personal and idiosyncratic. Yet, in addition to providing physical pleasure, eating and drinking bear symbolic and aesthetic value in human experience, and they continually inspire writers and artists.

In Making Sense of Taste, Carolyn Korsmeyer explains how taste came to occupy so low a place in the hierarchy of senses and why it is deserving of greater philosophical respect and attention. Korsmeyer begins with the Greek thinkers who classified taste as an inferior, bodily sense; she then traces the parallels between notions of aesthetic and gustatory taste that were explored in the formation of modern aesthetic theories. She presents scientific views of how taste actually works and identifies multiple components of taste experiences.

Turning to taste's objects—food and drink—she looks at the different meanings they convey in art and literature as well as in ordinary human life and proposes an approach to the aesthetic value of taste that recognizes the representational and expressive roles of food. Korsmeyer's consideration of art encompasses works that employ food in contexts sacred and profane, that seek to whet the appetite and to keep it at bay; her selection of literary vignettes ranges from narratives of macabre devouring to stories of communities forged by shared eating.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Making_Sense_of_Taste.html?id=kSLmAAAAIAAJ

#carolyn korsmeyer #books #taste #food #sensation #aesthetics

[eyesofthesphinx]

essay collection recommendations?

Virginia Woolf’s essay collections are a definitive must-read. Bolded, stressed, and underlined.

My other tried-and-trues:

Adrienne Rich’s Essential Essays,

Susan Sontag’s Againts Interpretation and On Photography,

Rebecca Solnit’s Mother of all questions

My to-reads based on what I know about the authors:

Carolyn Korsmeyer’s Aesthetics: The Big Questions,

Helene Cixous’ Coming to writing,

Anne Boyer’s A handbook of disappointed fate,

Annie Finch’s The body of poetry,

Laurie Penny’s collections,

Ursula K Le Guin’s The wave in the mind

Jeanette Winterson’s Art objects : essays on ecstasy and effrontery 

And—at your peril—Andrea Dworkin’s essays

#i will be adding to it #i suggest starting with le guin and solnit they’re easier reads

[gracemulhollandstudio]

references

Korsmeyer, Carolyn. “Perceptions, Pleasures, Arts: Considering Aesthetics.” In Philosophy in a Feminist Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions. Ed. Janet A. Kourany. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. 145-172.

The Concept of the Aesthetic

“The fundamental idea behind any such theory—which we may call the immediacy thesis—is that judgments of beauty are not (or at least not canonically) mediated by inferences from principles or applications of concepts, but rather have all the immediacy of straightforwardly sensory judgments.”

“Because of the highly complex natures or structures of many beautiful objects, there will have to be a role for reason in their perception. But perceiving the nature or structure of an object is one thing. Perceiving its beauty is another.”

“Beauty or deformity in an object, results from its nature or structure. To perceive the beauty therefore, we must perceive the nature or structure from which it results. In this the internal sense differs from the external. Our external senses may discover qualities which do not depend upon any antecedent perception… . But it is impossible to perceive the beauty of an object, without perceiving the object, or at least conceiving it. (Reid 1785, 760–761)”

“By contrast, the pleasure involved in judging an object to be beautiful is disinterested because such a judgment issues in no desire to do anything in particular.”

“Yet the employment that became widespread was not exactly Kant’s, but a narrower one according to which ‘aesthetic’ simply functions as an adjective corresponding to the noun “taste.””

“aesthetics could not explain why one was a work of fine art and the other not, since for all practical purposes they were aesthetically indiscernible: if one was beautiful, the other one had to be beautiful, since they looked just alike. (Danto 2003, 7)”

Noël Carroll, “Chapter 4: Art and aesthetic experience” in _The philosophy of art: A contemporary introduction_(London: Routledge, 1999)

#studioiva

[spisserum]

Carolyn Korsmeyer-

“because eating is a repetitive and transient experience, because food does not last but spoils, because it not only nourishes but poisons, eating is a small exercise in mortality. Rather than transcend time, as romantic ideas of art suggest is the goal of masterworks, food succumbs to time—as we do ourselves”

[aalvaronavarro]

(una) Moda como arte 

El estado de la moda de vestuario como una forma legítima de arte sigue siendo un tema muy debatido. Anne Hollander considera axiomático que el vestido es una forma de arte visual, una creación de imágenes con el yo visible como medio. Habría que pensarlo más como un fenómeno cultural y medio estético para la expresión de ideas, deseos y creencias que circulan en una sociedad.

El arte, en términos de la lógica histórica del arte, se compone de conceptos clave como representación, expresión, cualidades formales, estética y, finalmente, de la influyente "teoría institucional". En cambio, aparte de la cualidad autoexplicativa del arte, también debemos considerar la naturaleza relacional de nuestra definición de arte, que presupone su institucionalización: 'una obra de arte es 1. un artefacto, 2. un conjunto de  aspectos por los cuales se confiere el estatus de ser apreciado por alguna persona o personas que actúan en nombre de una determinada institución (el mundo del arte). Siguiendo a Arthur Danto (1), la respuesta por la cual una moda puede ser arte es proporcionar una "narrativa histórica". Proporcionar una historia del arte presupone una idea clara y distintiva de qué tipo de cosas es la historia en concreto, y de lo que no trata la historia.  En este sentido, se cae en la legitimación de la historia del arte como disciplina académica.  De esta manera, también proporciona la justificación para una definición histórica del arte, estableciéndola como un enfoque válido. 

El estudio de la ropa desde una perspectiva histórica es un esfuerzo aún más reciente y, por lo tanto, aún no ha adquirido un estatus igual al de las bellas artes. Sin embargo, el estudio histórico de la ropa está intrínsecamente vinculado y depende del arte visual por una simple razón: su naturaleza perecedera. Para los estudios visuales, la ropa proporciona pistas importantes sobre cuestiones de clase, género, estatus social, o de las tendencias y comportamientos de los sujetos de un determinado momento.

La conclusión que surge es que, como el arte, una moda concreta puede ser objeto de investigación histórica y estética, y el surgimiento de una problemática social y/o económica concreta. 

(1) -Danto, Arthur. (1998). The Art World. In Carolyn Korsmeyer (ed) Aesthetics: The Big Questions, pp.33-44. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 

-Sanda Miller (2007). Fashion as art; is fashion art? pp.25-40. Fashion Theory volume 11, Issue 1.  

[neworoldnews]

Relics, keepsakes, artworks, heirlooms, mementos, memorials. Despite their variety, all of these objects share a distinctive common feature: it matters to us that they are genuine, authentic, real. I have an insignia ring that belonged to my father. A replica or replacement wouldn’t do, because then it wouldn’t be my father’s ring. It is an object that, as Carolyn Korsmeyer puts it, embodies the past. However, not everything that matters to us really matters: especially in cases where we can’t tell the difference between the real deal and a replica, some are skeptical that there could be any difference worth caring about. In such cases, allegiance to the original can sometimes seem like a fetish or a kind of magical thinking, as if the touch of an original creator or owner imparted a mystical aura to an object that renders it special and unique.

Korsmeyer’s aim in Things: In Touch with the Past is to vindicate our concern with Real Things (as she emphatically refers to them). She does so by artfully evoking the ways in which real things matter, responding to skepticism about their significance, and sorting through a dizzying array of complications that we face once we acknowledge the value of the Real. Her thesis is complex, but in a nutshell, she argues that genuineness is a property of objects that possess a range of values (cognitive, ethical, and aesthetic) through their ability to embody the past.

Taking a nod from the character of our experience with real things (“a shiver, a thrill, a poignant acknowledgement, a small dose of awe”) Korsmeyer argues that there is an important aesthetic and affective dimension to our experience of the genuine. This might seem surprising, because, as we have noted, being genuine or real is not itself a perceptible property of objects: even the most discerning eye can be fooled about what is genuine and what is not. So why think that realness itself has an aesthetic dimension? Korsmeyer argues that it is touch primarily, as opposed to vision, that is most aptly invoked when describing our experience of the genuine, even when it is “almost entirely non-sensuous,” as when we are merely in the proximity of a real item that we are prohibited from touching. This is because the thrill of genuineness lies less in what the real thing looks like (though signs of age can certainly enhance our experience) and more in the mere fact that we are in the presence of the real thing. Because this is not primarily a sensory experience, it can be difficult to characterize in familiar aesthetic language, but anyone who has had the experience knows it: as Korsmeyer puts it bluntly and amusingly, “it is more like Wow”. The fact that this affective presence is destroyed by the revelation that an object is a fake underscores the point: even though something might look old, “when we learn that the patina was not earned, as it were, the thrill of contact with antiquity diminishes”.

But are we justified in treating the real thing so reverently? In one compelling line of defense, Korsmeyer documents how utterly familiar such a response is in human experience. As she puts it: “My goal is to confirm that appreciating one and only one thing because of what it simply is has several affective companions”. For instance, through a fascinating (and sometimes disturbing!) discussion of “bedtricks” in literature, Korsmeyer illustrates how familiar it is for some of our most important emotional responses to be “non-fungible,” that is, responsive to only a singular object. The fact that Zeus might appear as indistinguishable from your husband does not make Zeus the proper object of your love! By reminding us that concern for the genuine is commonplace in a range of contexts, Korsmeyer turns the tables and makes the skeptics out to be the ones with the implausible view.

That being said, Korsmeyer is also sensitive to the complications and strangeness that attend our concern with the genuine. Handling the hair in a mourning brooch from her grandmother’s jewelry box, Korsmyer remarks upon the “mildly weird sense of contact” it imparts. Most significantly, Korsmeyer discusses the diverse ways in which objects can fall away from straightforward attributions of genuineness: objects can be damaged, disrupted, fragmented, repaired, and reconstructed in ways that challenge, though do not necessarily extinguish, the aura of the genuine. As she puts it, the assessment of genuineness “operates on a pendulum”, a metaphor that runs through the later pages of the book, and it is only through careful examination of actual examples that we can trace the pendulum’s movements. Korsmeyer offers such cases in spades, an explicit tactic that grounds her thoughtful reflections and distinguishes the book from the more familiar philosophical terrain of thought experiments. We are taken from the terminus of the Erie Canal to the Gettysburg address to Napoleon’s teeth to the reconstructed arch of Ancient Palmyra, and all manner of cases in between. Fittingly for a theory that foregrounds the importance of touch, Korsmeyer offers us an opportunity to get a grip on the full complexity of Real Things. We come away with a new feel for the genuine and an enhanced understanding of its importance.

[aesthesisblog]

BRITISH SOCIETY OF AESTHETICS ANNUAL CONFERENCE

BRITISH SOCIETY OF AESTHETICS ANNUAL CONFERENCE

2nd CALL FOR PAPERS The British Society of Aesthetics Annual Conference 21-23 September 2018, St Anne’s College, Oxford Deadline for submissions: 1 March 2018

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Sally Haslanger (MIT) Carolyn Korsmeyer (University at Buffalo) Clio Barnard (University of Kent & filmmaker: The Arbor (2010), The Selfish Giant (2013), Dark River…

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[eng279]

The Gaze

Like other major forms of cultural critique, feminist film theory seeks to reveal habitual assumptions in the way we look at our society, particularly the gender & sexuality of its members. One common feminist critique is that the representations of women in media historically have favored a heterosexual male perspective. Less generally, (the critique argues) these representations have commonly been subservient to the desires of heterosexual males, which suggests that the status of women in society ought to be dependent upon male desire. Laura Mulvey contributed greatly to this critique with her concept of the male gaze. This concept, first applied to the cinema, is intriguing because it holds that the way films make us look at women is itself gendered. Gaze incorporates three perspectives. The first is the actual perspective of the audience gazing upon a woman on screen. The critique typically chooses examples which directly focus on the woman’s physical appearance, or in which the woman serves as an object of desire for one or more male characters. The second perspective is the imaginary perspective of a male character. Identifying with this character, the audience desires the woman through him. This second perspective thus provides a form of role play for the audience. However, the gaze is not male simply because of the gender of the characters whose romantic interests we follow. Films regularly abandon the first-person perspective, which means that what we see on screen is less often a faithful representation of how the protagonist sees the world, and more often a calculated visual effect orchestrated by the filmmaker. Therefore the gaze is male because the perspective of the camera, the third perspective, caters to male tastes. As Mary Devereaux writes, this has happened whenever the interests of men have taken precedence in the film industry1. Mulvey credits Hitchcock for putting the gaze itself on display in such films as Vertigo (1958), allowing the audience to consider the “moral ambiguity of looking”2. This is achieved because the audience witnesses how the voyeuristic nature of Scottie’s investigative work precedes his obsession with transforming Judy (back) into Madeleine, and its grim consequences.

1“Oppressive Texts, Resisting Readers, and the Gendered Spectator: The ‘New Aesthetics’”, found in Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, eds Peggy Zeglin Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer, p 126.

2“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, found in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, pp 50 – 51.

#gaze

[bizarrefoods-blog1]

Master Bibliography

“Bizarre." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web.

Bizarre Foods: Philippines. Prod. Shannonn Demers. Perf. Andrew Zimmern. DMAX, 2007. Web.

BuzzFeedVideo. “Americans Try Balut (Duck Embryo).” YouTube. BuzzFeed, 25 Dec. 2015. Web.

BuzzFeedVideo. “Americans Try Vietnamese Street Food.” YouTube. BuzzFeed, 22 June 2016. Web.

BuzzFeedVideo. “People Try Dinuguan For The First Time.” YouTube. BuzzFeed, 16 Feb. 2016. Web. 13 Mar. 2017.

Cheong, Wendy and Aureliano Davilla. “Authenticity.” Asian American Studies 150 Asian American Cultures. Feb 2017.

Chez, Keridiana. “Popular Ethnic Food Guides as Auto/Ethnographic Project: The Multicultural and Gender Politics of Urban Culinary Tourism.” The Journal of American Culture 34.3 (2011): 234-46. Web.

Curtis, Valerie. “Why Disgust Matters.” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 366.1583, Disease Avoidance: from Animals to Culture (2011): 3478-490. JSTOR. Web. 24 Mar. 2017.

Dinh, Annette Loan. “Giò Thủ (Vietnamese Head Cheese).” Blog post. The Spices Of Life. N.p., 25 Jan 2011. Web.

Dinh, Annette Loan. “The Spices of Life…” Blog post. The Spices Of Life. N.p., 01 Jan 1970. Web.

Harris, Marvin. Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture. London: Royal National Institute of the Blind, 2005. Print.

Huang, Eddie. "God Has Assholes For Children.” Fresh off the Boat: A Memoir. New York: Spiegal & Grau, 2015. 30-31. Print.

Jansson, A. and Berggren, A. 2015. Insects as Food – Something for the Future? A report from Future Agriculture. Uppsala, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).

Jones, Michael Owen. “What’s Disgusting, Why, and What Does It Matter?” Journal of Folklore Research 37.1 (2000): 53-71. JSTOR. Web. 24 Mar. 2017.

Kelly, Casey R. “Bizarre Foods: White Privilege and the Neocolonial Palate.” (2014): 1-26.

Kelly, Casey R. “Bizarre Foods: White Privilege and the Neocolonial Palate.” Race and Hegemonic Struggle in the United States: Pop Culture, Politics, and Protest. Ed. Michael G. Lacy and Mary E. Triece. N.p.: n.p., 2014. 43-68. Print.

Kelly, Casey R. “Exoticizing Poverty in Bizarre Foods America.” (2015): 3.

Kim, Monica. “First Kombucha, Then Matcha, Now Bone Broth: What Will Be the Next East Asian Superfood?” Vogue. N.p., 3 Mar. 2015. Web.

Korsmeyer, Carolyn. “Disgust and Aesthetics.” Philosophy Compass. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 12 Oct. 2012. Web. 14 Mar. 2017.

Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.

Lakshmi, Padma. Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir. Ashland, OR: Blackstone, 2016. Print.

Lam, Dylan, Allen Lim, and Malinda Pang. “Food.” Asian American Studies 150: Asian American Cultures. Feb 2017.

“List of American Foods.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Web. 07 Mar. 2017.

Mariani, John F. The Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print.

McEwan, Jean A., and David M.h. Thomson. “A Behavioural Interpretation of Food Acceptability.” Food Quality and Preference 1.1 (1988): 3-9. Web. 7 Mar. 2017

Mintz, Sidney. “Eating American.” Food in the USA: A Reader. Ed. Carole Counihan. Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2013. 23-33. Print.

Prescott, John, and Graham Bell. “Cross-cultural Determinants of Food Acceptability: Recent Research on Sensory Perceptions and Preferences.” Trends in Food Science & Technology 6.6 (1995): 201-05. Web. 7 Mar. 2017.

React. “KIDS vs. FOOD - PORK BLOOD STEW (DINUGUAN).” YouTube. YouTube, 27 Sept. 2016. Web. 13 Mar. 2017.

“Recipes Search: American.” SORTEDfood. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Mar. 2017.

Rozin, Paul. “Social and Moral Aspects of Food and Eating.” Legacy of Solomon Asch: Essays in Cognition and Social Psychology. Ed. Irvin Rock. Place of Publication Not Identified: Psychology, 2016. 97-109. Print.

Rozin, Paul, and April E. Fallon. “A Perspective on Disgust.” Psychological Review 94.1 (1987): 23-41. Web.

Simon, Ed. Balut. Digital image. Watch Appetite. N.p., n.d. Web.

“THE ULTIMATE PASTA BATTLE.” SORTEDfood. Youtube, 12 Aug. 2016. Web. 7 Mar. 2017.

“THE ULTIMATE USA FOOD BATTLE | FRIDGECAM.” SORTEDfood. Youtube, 2 Nov. 2016. Web. 7 Mar. 2017.

USMALE68. “DINUGUAN (PORK BLOOD); TASTING THE BIZARRE.” YouTube, 07 May 2014. Web. 13 Mar. 2017.

Watchcut. “American Kids Try Filipino Food | Ep 9.” WatchCut. YouTube, 06 Dec. 2016. Web. 13 Mar. 2017.

[gracemulhollandstudio]

References

Korsmeyer, Carolyn. “Perceptions, Pleasures, Arts: Considering Aesthetics.” In Philosophy in a Feminist Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions. Ed. Janet A. Kourany. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. 145-172.

The Concept of the Aesthetic

“The fundamental idea behind any such theory—which we may call the immediacy thesis—is that judgments of beauty are not (or at least not canonically) mediated by inferences from principles or applications of concepts, but rather have all the immediacy of straightforwardly sensory judgments.”

“Because of the highly complex natures or structures of many beautiful objects, there will have to be a role for reason in their perception. But perceiving the nature or structure of an object is one thing. Perceiving its beauty is another.”

“Beauty or deformity in an object, results from its nature or structure. To perceive the beauty therefore, we must perceive the nature or structure from which it results. In this the internal sense differs from the external. Our external senses may discover qualities which do not depend upon any antecedent perception… . But it is impossible to perceive the beauty of an object, without perceiving the object, or at least conceiving it. (Reid 1785, 760–761)”

“By contrast, the pleasure involved in judging an object to be beautiful is disinterested because such a judgment issues in no desire to do anything in particular.”

“Yet the employment that became widespread was not exactly Kant’s, but a narrower one according to which ‘aesthetic’ simply functions as an adjective corresponding to the noun “taste.””

“aesthetics could not explain why one was a work of fine art and the other not, since for all practical purposes they were aesthetically indiscernible: if one was beautiful, the other one had to be beautiful, since they looked just alike. (Danto 2003, 7)”

Noël Carroll, “Chapter 4: Art and aesthetic experience” in _The philosophy of art: A contemporary introduction_(London: Routledge, 1999)

#studioiiib

[bizarrefoods-blog1]

Durian, Natto: Bizarre foods as Superfoods

Natto. Digital image. What Is Natto? N.p., 14 Apr. 2011. Web. <https://meguminatto.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/how-we-make-natto/>.

So called superfoods are all the rage. These are foods that apparently have very high nutritional value per serving. Typically these foods come from overseas and are then imported into the united states. A Vogue magazine article exclaims:  “ First Kombucha, Then Matcha, Now Bone Broth: What Will Be the Next East Asian Superfood?” (Kim) This article list several so called superfoods, and gives another analogous food that could possibly be the newest trend. In particular it lists natto

Natto is a Japanese dish of soybeans fermented with a particular type of bacteria to create tendrils of protein. It is considered very healthy, with high protein and low calories.  This food, like of the others discussed on this blog is considered strange and even disgusting. Like many of the other foods here, Americans have used this repulsion as a form of entertainment, with videos of people trying, and reacting, to the food. Yet it is tapped as a superfood, with it’s benefits being extolled even against it’s acceptance by the western palate.

Similarly, durian, a melon from South East Asia that is spiky and known for its pungent smell, is tapped as a superfood. It is said to contain vitamins, good fats, and high calories per unit. It’s usage as a health food is juxtaposed by the fact that for most Americans it is only a novelty to try and disgust other’s with. This use, as a novelty, works as Korsmeyer said, “Disgust is an affective response that can be mustered to patrol social boundaries and norms- for instance, to reinforce proscriptions on what should be eaten...”(Korsmeyer, 5).

While it may seem that foods like natto or durian are too outside of mainstream American tastes when it comes to food, there is the possibility that it can lead to a trend. This would have the benefits of expanding the palate of Americans, while also allowing those who enjoyed the food to do so without societal repercussions. Yet there are downsides to having an imported food become trendy in the US. A main one would be increasing costs, and scarcity in the  food’s native land. Similar to what has happened with quinoa in South America, the value of it’s importation outside of the country has meant that people who had used it in their traditional diets can no longer do so. This, of course, is speculative, but a distinct possibility for food that is trendy. 

Bibliography:

Kim, Monica. "First Kombucha, Then Matcha, Now Bone Broth: What Will Be the Next East Asian Superfood?" Vogue. N.p., 3 Mar. 2015. Web.

Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.

#ASAM150 #ASAM #Natto #Durian #Superfoods

[bizarrefoods-blog1]

Entomophagy: Insect eating

Waterbugs from the restaurant Typhoon

Arriola, George. Waterbugs. Digital image. Atlas Obscura. Web.

Insect eating (also including arachnids despite not being insects) is a common practice in much of the world outside of the west. According to a 2015 report on insect eating and its future  by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences,  "Insects are part of the diet of at least two billion people in the world and more than 1900 insect species are currently used as food."(Jansson and Berggren, 7). This a varied alley of cuisine that is often overlooked in the united states. Insects, unlike other invertebrates  such as crustaceans or other seafood, are viewed as being very unacceptable as food, and even frightening. Many entertainment outlets, from Buzzfeed articles to videos on Youtube, use the consumption of  insects to shock and disgust their audience. By marketing the disgust, these pieces of entertainment are complicit with the normative ideas that insects are not a natural thing to eat. This also works to create a sense that those who do take part in entomophagy are likewise unnatural or wrong. This leads to an interesting fork in the road, as bugs as food has been suggested as a more sustainable food source. With the ever growing global population, as well as increased greenhouse emissions from mammal farming, insects are tapped as being the better option.

While there is a distinct aversion to insects, food advernturism has led many Americans to consume them as a mark of bravery or while trying to find the so-called "authentic" cuisine of a culture. This contained encounter with the other works as a form of cultural slumming, that is a taking part in something deemed to be part of a “lesser” culture than the dominant one the participant is from. While this has led to more people in the west trying insects, it does still have unfortunate implications of eating to “...confront the usual functions of disgust...and defy it, triumphing in the sordid accomplishment (Korsmeyer 759). That by accomplishing something others do regularly, they are achieving a better realization of a worldly experience.

Still, some people are working to try and change the perception of entomophagy in the West. People like the Bug Chef, David George Gordon , try to use the shock to educate others. Similarly, a few restaurants, such as Santa Monica’s Typhoon (a pan-Asian, though recently closed restaurant) offer insects as part of their menu. Typhoon, the restaurant where the main photo came from, had a section of its menu dedicated to insects that did not highlight it as an oddity. This type of attitude could possibly be emulated as a way of introducing more westerners to the possibility of consumption of bugs as everyday food. 

Bibliography:

Jansson, A. and Berggren, A. 2015. Insects as Food – Something for the Future? A report from Future Agriculture. Uppsala, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).

Korsmeyer, Carolyn. "Disgust and Aesthetics." Philosophy Compass. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 12 Oct. 2012. Web. 14 Mar. 2017. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2012.00522.x/abstract>.

#ASAM150 #entomophagy #insects #bugeating