Appreciating Food as Sensory Art

It's in the sweet, delicate crunch of a freshly picked carrot-- the way it smells of earth.  The pleasure of snapping it between your teeth, the twist of your hand, the little tremors in your cheek.


It's in the perfect amount of aged balsamic vinegar and grassy olive oil drizzled over sliced heirloom tomatoes and the gentleness of mozzarella against the heartiness of a toasted baguette.

It's in just the pinch of cardamom in a batch of warm beignets-- the sensation of biting into a fluff of powdered sugar as it melts together with lightly salted caramel atop the crisp softness of fried dough.

To enjoy the sensory pleasures of eating, to revel in the simple pairing of ingredients or to honor the complicated task of folding together perfectly chilled croissant dough-- it opens up another dimension of appreciation not only for the food itself, but for how food comes to be.


Thomas Keller writes about the first time he skinned and butchered a cage of rabbits and how it forever transformed the way he thought about cooking and our relationship to what we eat. "Respect for food is a respect for life," he says.  It makes one think twice about over-cooking a piece of fish only to toss it in the trash with nary an after thought.

How the combination of flavors and textures stimulate different parts of your lips, your tongue, the roof of your mouth or the back of your throat, all the way down to how it fills you-- well, you could say creating a memorable sensation through food is a practice of sensory art.  It's in the aroma, the after taste, the way the flavors can be accentuated with a sip of wine.  Consider a simple piece of nigiri and how you can change your experience with a piece of fish simply by flipping it over, the oily flesh of fresh hamachi the first to hit your tongue. 


On this Earth Day, I think about what food means. About the Chilean grapes I see in the supermarket, the pesticides that coat their skin, the long hours they spent in a cargo container.  Versus a fresh local apple and how we live together throughout the seasons-- our summer is its summer, our winter is its winter-- and ultimately how that apple will taste when it's delicately sliced into a mixed green salad we can eat at its peak today rather than treated with chemicals for easy packaging and shipping across the world.

I think flavor, texture, taste and the very art of cooking and eating, of creating an incredible, genuinely fulfilling sensory experience has everything to do with how we treat our food, the land its grown on, and those who handle it with care.

So I guess on this Earth Day, I only want to say this: that if we respect our food and respect our earth, we receive that respect in return.