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In Praise of Dessert
Yujia Song
Abstract
Is there something special about dessert? Is it the sweetness or sumptuousness or something else? This essay explores the aesthetic layers in our experience of dessert. It will turn out that dessert promises much more than sensuous pleasures. As we savor our dessert, we reach outside the humdrum of everyday life for a taste of all the good things life has to offer. Although dessert is by its nature superfluous, it is precisely its being “unnecessary” that makes it necessary for us.
Key Words
aesthetic experience; imagination; leisure; philosophy of food; sensory perception
1. Indroduction
Of all the things we eat, dessert seems to occupy a special place:
Even the simplest baked treat can transform the most unexceptional event into an absolute occasion. Don’t believe us? We dare you to bring a plate of Crème Brûlée Cookies to your most boring meeting this week and see what happens. And if a dessert can raise the game on the everyday, imagine what it can do for those really special moments! [1]
One has good reason to doubt such grandiose claims coming from pastry chefs—of course this is what they would say to sell their cookbooks, or perhaps even to justify their raison d’être. But is there nevertheless a kernel of truth in them? Is it possible that something so frivolous as dessert does play a serious role in our life?
This paper explores the aesthetic layers of dessert. It turns out that dessert promises much more than sensuous pleasures. As we savor our dessert, we reach outside the humdrum of everyday life for a taste of all the good things life has to offer. Although dessert is by its nature superfluous, it is precisely its being “unnecessary” that makes it necessary for us.
2. The aesthetic experience of dessert
Although the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines dessert as “a usually sweet course or dish… usually served at the end of a meal,” neither feature gets at the heart of what dessert is. The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets does a better job: “Derived from the French verb desservir, dessert is what arrives after the table is ‘unserved’ or cleared, and after our nutritional needs have been met; it is, in that sense, superfluous.”[2] As I see it, dessert in its essence, is superfluous. It does not aim at anything other than itself, that is, the very experience of dessert itself. Having dessert is not so much a matter of what we eat as what we experience when we eat it although the two are closely related. Certain kinds of food, especially sweet ones, are called desserts because they are usually eaten for dessert, that is, they are particularly suitable for the dessert experience.[3] But what I have to say about dessert could apply just as well to other food items, all depending on whether they are enjoyed as dessert. Likewise, dessert need not be served at the end of a meal, though the post-meal timing is particularly suitable for the dessert experience. The fact that the crème brûlée cookies are brought to a midday meeting does not count against their presence as dessert.
If we eat dessert for the experience of it, one might locate the aesthetic significance of dessert in its capacity to afford aesthetic experiences. According to the French writer Alexandre Dumas, dessert caters to what he calls a third kind of appetite, “a final tempting of his sensuality,” after the need and desire for food have both been satisfied with a meal.[4] Indeed, if we follow Yuriko Saito’s call to uncover the aesthetic in the sensory qualities of everyday experience, we can easily see the aesthetic potential in the multisensory experience dessert is apt to offer.[5] While the early nineteenth-century French chef Antonin Carême regarded confectionary as a branch of architecture, Michael Krondl compares it with “decorative arts like jewelry making or fine cabinetry,” in Sweet Invention, which traces the history of desserts in various cultures.[6] Present-day desserts may no longer be as lavish as they once were, but their appearance often remains a key element of our enjoyment. For one thing, cakes lose much of their appeal without the presentation. I learned this the hard way when eating a half-slice of cheesecake that was toppled over in the plastic leftover box, already misshapen after being cut off haphazardly from the whole slice. Bill Buford writes of the French apple tart, “in its presentation a gift, like a painting.”[7] He goes so far as to say, “make it beautiful and you will make it scrumptious, because the eater’s sense of anticipation will insure that it is.”
True, dessert is not always a feast for the eyes. Grandma’s homemade toffee pudding can be just as enjoyable even if it looks somewhat messy.[8] Still, there is multisensory enjoyment in the sweet, buttery scent, a major contributor to its flavor, as well as the tactile qualities, like its warm and melt-in-the-mouth creaminess.[9] More generally, our sensory experiences of dessert go well beyond the visual and gustatory. Krondl introduces the sweetshops in Kolkata by the sweet, milky smell that “oozes” from them into the alleyways.[10] Cooking videos on YouTube customarily end with the YouTuber trying the food they have made; but with dessert, they know just what the audience wants—scooping up the custard to show its smooth, silky texture or breaking a piece of baklava so that we can hear its crispness.
It can be argued that attention to sensory qualities renders an experience aesthetic in the minimal, “classificatory” sense, as Saito calls it, but certainly does not exhaust the aesthetic dimensions of the experience. Grandma’s toffee pudding is a case in point. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to separate grandma’s love and affection, along with one’s feelings of gratitude and contentment, from enjoyment of its taste. These emotional qualities are in turn felt through imagination, whether one imagines grandma working in the kitchen, remembers their time together before, or only implicitly thinks of her. On Carolyn Korsmeyer’s cognitivist view of the aesthetic, foods are comparable to artworks primarily because our perceptual and emotional response to them involves understanding or insight into their “symbolic significance.”[11] We can see that in this context the cognitive activities are essentially imaginative, as they involve drawing connections to things that are not perceptually given to us. As Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei points out, “Whether in aesthetic reception, seeing-as, or other concrete imaging, imagination endows the perception of reality so that it is not merely experienced as informational data, but as meaningful or significant.”[12] Without denying the sensuous “core” of aesthetic experience, it can be said that imagination enhances it, imbuing it with emotional and symbolic qualities. Saito herself also recognizes “imaginative power” and “associative involvement” to be crucial for an engaged aesthetic experience, alongside “sharpened sensibility.”[13]
Grandma’s toffee pudding is far from an isolated example; dessert regularly appeals to our imagination and not just our senses. Sometimes it connects us to our past, as Proust demonstrates in his madeleine episode in Swann’s Way. It can also conjure up images of a possible future, say, an anniversary celebration or a dream vacation, when we can indulge without feeling guilty. To Diane Ackerman, the aroma from a vanilla bean “gives the room a kind of stature, the smell of an exotic crossroads where outlandish foods aren’t the only mysteries.”[14] Deborah Lupton compares the emotional intensity of eating chocolate with that of falling in love, claiming that “[b]oth experiences remove the individual from the everyday, mundane world.”[15] When a dessert is associated with a particular time of the year, it can remind us of times past and signal future recurrence. As Buford writes: “For me, a French apple tart is among our autumnal harmonies—falling leaves, logs in a fireplace, cold-weather smells of cinnamon—and is a favorite go-to dessert for the season.”[16] Finally, dessert can take us to a time and place we wish we could have been. In her article that explores the meaning of bubble tea[17] for young Asian Americans, Jenny Zhang suggests that this popular dessert drink symbolizes a home that never was.[18] Separated from their families’ home countries, but regarded as outsiders in the U.S., Zhang and fellow Asian immigrant children found the “closest approximation” to home in the bubble tea shop. This is not only because it is a space where they gathered with friends from similar cultural backgrounds. As Zhang explains, the bubble tea itself, combining milk tea and chewy tapioca balls (or boba), is firmly rooted in Chinese and Southeast Asian culinary traditions. While an actual community formed as young Asian Americans spent time together around bubble tea, it is the drink that connected them to their homeland—if only an imagined one—which is why Zhang sees the boba shop as “a ‘third place’ in both the literal and figurative sense.”
Furthermore, the experience of eating dessert may be considered multimodal, because while our imagination may run free, we are still very much anchored in the here and now. As Eric Schwitzgebel observes, dessert eaters fall on a spectrum between what he calls “wolves” and “savorers”—those who devour it quickly, and those who take their sweet time.[19] I find it hard to decide, as a rule, which is a better approach. On Bryant and Veroff’s theory of savoring, those who are mindful of their enjoyment do not just take more time, but also feel time passing more slowly, for they are “more embedded in the processing of their experience so that they sense more and attend more closely to details than if they perceived the world in their usual ‘mindless’ disregard for ongoing experience.”[20] Yet, on the other hand, the wolf is far from a “mindless” creature, and I think Schwitzgebel is right that there is no substitute for the “joy in not holding back.” As he writes, “What could be more childish fun than just diving in, biting the whole head off the Easter bunny or shoving a great spoonful of cherry, whip cream, and cake right into your mouth?” Each approach entails a distinct—indeed incommensurable —qualitative experience, but both involve whole-hearted absorption in it.
To the extent that the Wolf also attends to the pleasures of her wolfing and not just to the dessert, she would be regarded a savorer as well on Bryant and Veroff’s account, only that she chooses to intensify her experience through perceptual, sensory, or behavioral engrossment rather than reflection.[21] And to the extent that savoring, a second-order enjoyment, constitutes our experience of dessert, it further intensifies the overall experience. In that case, we not only have “an experience” as John Dewey would call it, but one that approaches his conception of aesthetic experience: a complete, intensified qualitative experience where perceptual enjoyment and interaction with one’s environment are unified through emotion and imagination.[22]
3. Dessert and leisure
However, its capacity for affording aesthetic experience does not yet distinguish dessert from other food events in its aesthetic significance. Philosophical writings on food and taste recognize that the pleasures of food go far beyond that of satiating hunger, and our experience of eating in general is shot through with aesthetic appreciation.[23] On the flip side, despite its potential for multisensory and multimodal experience, it is not uncommon for dessert to be so plain as to offer little of either kind.[24] If so, it seems like dessert is not that special after all, whether compared to the rest of our eating experiences or considered on its own. Indeed, this is the position Eileen John takes in her discussion of the British biscuit.[25] According to the anthropologist Mary Douglas, this unassuming, cheap, common dessert in British families is nonetheless meaning-laden, a “summary form” of the dessert courses throughout the day, the year, and even “wedding cakes and christening cakes through the life-cycle.”[26] John finds the suggestion plausible from the observer’s point of view, but doubts there needs to be anything special about one’s actual experience of the biscuit:
… I would not take this claim to be disconfirmed by the fact that British biscuit-eaters would deny that biscuits play this role, perhaps saying that a biscuit with cocoa on Sunday night is simply a nice treat. I think it is possible that biscuits in Britain are a desiccated, visually articulated symbol of more rich, messy and celebratory food events. But no one has to experience this meaning in dunking a biscuit in cocoa.[27]
While I agree with John that meals in general do not have singular meanings, I think our experience of eating is responsive to the meanings of particular food events—and dessert is one of them. Even if one does not find every dessert moment “special,” it is still enjoyed as “a nice treat,” as John imagines. And that is the meaning it shares with the cakes, puddings, and other desserts consumed at special occasions. Whatever else we get out of a dessert, we are treated to a taste of leisure. This, I will argue, gives dessert its unique aesthetic significance.
I borrow the notion of leisure from the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper’s work, Leisure: the basis of culture.[28] Following Aristotle’s thought that we are “unleisurely” in order to be in leisure, Pieper is emphatic about the importance of preserving a realm in our life outside of work: “can man develop to the full as a functionary and a ‘worker’ and nothing else; can a full human existence be contained within an exclusively workaday existence?”[29] Thus, leisure for Pieper is not a “break” or “distraction” from work, an indirect means for improving productivity.[30] For lest we forget, work is itself only a means to an end, and it is only in leisure that we can consider the ends we may pursue. Leisure is then fundamental to full human development as it orients one to the deepest values in life. But dessert is, by nature, frivolous. What does it have to do with such serious matters? It is important to recognize that Pieper does not restrict leisure to any specific activity but regards it as a state of mind.[31] Insofar as dessert must be experienced as “a treat,” explicitly or implicitly, it seems to me to embody the attitude of leisure, even if only for a brief moment. Let us consider the central features that characterize leisure:
(i) Non-instrumental. As we have seen, leisure is antithetical to an all-consuming, instrumentalizing approach to life that subordinates everything to utility.[32] The superfluous nature of dessert places it squarely outside of the utilitarian realm. The gratuity of the crème brûlée cookies is doubly delightful for the meeting attendees, for they are reminders of a world outside of work, but more than that, a world outside of their practical concerns altogether. Yet if the attendees eat the cookies in order to feel energized to continue the meeting, leisure would elude them, and so would the enjoyment of the cookies as dessert—as an experience enjoyed for itself. Similarly, if the biscuit-eater is merely looking to stave off boredom or for something to chew on while watching TV, she would be having a snack rather than dessert. Of course, we might still talk of both cases as instances of “having dessert,” but it seems to me to make sense only in the nominal or derivative sense of consuming a dessert item.
(ii) Receptivity. Paradoxical as it may sound, leisure on Pieper’s view is not a passive state but requires a deep and appreciative receptivity to reality.[33] For leisure frees us from the confines of work, from a narrow view of the world and of ourselves that fits only within a utilitarian framework.[34] Iddo Landau makes a similar point when he laments that our obliviousness to the value of things around us is a main reason why we struggle to find meaning in our lives:
Many of us, much of the time, are partly or wholly numb to the value in being alive; in being conscious; in our ability to breathe, sense, know, and care; in our continuous courage and perseverance in face of disappointment, hardship, and pain; or in the raindrops on the leaves near the window or the bird that hovers near the tree. We regularly ignore much of this worth, as if it hardly existed at all.[35]
Through its invitation to simply enjoy the experience, dessert opens us to the reality of the “little things in life” that too easily escape our attention.
There is also a deeper sense in which dessert exhibits receptivity. In his criticism of our obsession with work, Pieper writes, “man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift.”[36] He invokes the Christian notion of grace to illuminate the value of the gift, but we do not need to share his religious view to agree that much of what makes our lives good is not through our own making but given to us. The receptivity of leisure thus counters our tendency to strive for what we do not have by preparing us to properly receive what is given to us. The fun of eating dessert comes precisely from our openness to receiving something “extra.” Even though we sometimes feel “undeserving” of dessert, the experience is no less one of accepting the treat.
(iii) Affirmation. Pieper considers affirmation to be the heart of leisure. As Pieper emphasizes, leisure is at odds with work not because it occurs when we get off work, but because it focuses our attention on concerns with ends, not means. It is in leisure that we are oriented towards and “affirm” the whole reality and our nature, instead of evading them by, say, busying ourselves with work or distracting ourselves with mindless entertainment.[37] For Pieper, this affirmation finds its fullest expression in festivals, which must ultimately be grounded in divine worship, since the world, including us humans, was created and affirmed by God.[38] Here again, we need not embrace the idea of divine creation to agree on the significance of celebration; the deeper values and meanings in our lives are not only to be sought and recognized but affirmed again and again.
It is no happy coincidence that dessert is often the star of celebrations. True, almost all cultures celebrate with food, perhaps because of its life-giving power, but dessert is doubly life-affirming because it does not serve to sustain life.[39] First, its existence itself assumes, and hence affirms, the satisfaction of the basic necessities of living. Second, by offering a taste of what lies beyond those necessities, it affirms the richness of life, the limitless possibilities it offers for experiences that are worthwhile in themselves.
The feeling of indulgence surrounding dessert, far from being a source of guilt, is in fact quite appropriate for the affirmation dessert expresses. Regardless of whether we believe celebration consists in divine worship, Pieper is right in arguing that it must be a site of “genuine wealth, wealth which implies overflowing into superfluities, into unnecessaries.”[40] This is because, in celebrating, we are free to offer what we have, not constrained by utilitarian calculation.[41] Of course, this does not mean that every time we have dessert it must be part of a literal celebration, but it does mean a sense of affirming the goodness in life, to the point of feeling spoiled by its abundance, is inseparable from our experience of dessert.[42] Susan Wolf seems to agree with pastry chefs when she suggests that excess is quite fitting of dessert:
When a person complains that a dessert is “too rich”—a complaint, I confess, I have never been tempted to make—it is usually meant as an aesthetic description, but it is one that I suspect is often based subliminally on one’s beliefs about its effects on one’s physique or one’s circulatory system.[43]
The true aesthetic significance of dessert lies in the moment of leisure we experience with it. Even if the crème brûlée cookies turn out to be mediocre, their presence alone invites the meeting attendees to a very different kind of gathering, one that is more relaxed, friendly, and fun. Moreover, dessert-eating may be a more or less—or hardly—an aesthetic experience, but leisure is what makes aesthetic experiences possible in the first place. It is the state of mind underlying “all forms of human activity which are an end in themselves,” or what Pieper considers “liberal arts” to encompass, which includes but is not limited to aesthetic engagement.[44] Intellectual pursuits and communal gatherings like festivals are some of the examples he gives. Similarly, while receptivity and affirmation are key to aesthetic experience, they extend across other realms in life, manifesting in, say, appreciation of others in our social interactions or of the complexity of the universe in scientific inquiry.[45]
4. Some implications
Although, as mentioned earlier, food of all kinds is ripe with possibilities for aesthetic experience, the leisure account sheds light on the ways in which dessert stands out from regular meals in its sensory, imaginative, and emotional appeals. A further advantage is that it offers interesting implications for our experience of eating in general.
Consider again the multisensory enjoyment commonly found in our dessert experience. Even though not all desserts can distinguish themselves in this respect, dessert’s position as being orthogonal to utilitarian concerns incentivizes its creators and consumers alike to exploit its sensuous potential. And whether our enjoyment comes from its presentation or its taste, our interest lies chiefly, if not exclusively, with its form rather than its substance.
While dessert directly “channels” leisure as it falls outside of practical necessity, eating in general straddles practical necessity and possibilities for leisure. Despite our very practical—indeed, existential—need for food, eating itself is time spent away from work and other practical pursuits. This is why, I think, it can be such a potent source of aesthetic experiences in the first place. So long as the meal break is not taken solely to restore ourselves for more work, there is room to enjoy the meal leisurely. As a source of energy, the substance of the food is still important, but its form may become salient to us as we temporarily immerse ourselves in the joy of eating. This, however, does not require one to “elevate” the meal above the ordinary, or to forget its necessity for staying alive and healthy, for that matter. Thus I do not think the “pleasures of the table” are enjoyed only when “hunger begins to be satisfied,” as Brillat-Savarin claims.[46] Instead, I agree with Saito that “the enemies of the aesthetic are inattentiveness and mindlessness,”[47] and so aesthetic experience can be found within everyday practical activities such as feeding oneself.[48]
To see how dessert stands out from everyday eating in its emotional and imaginative qualities, let us take a brief detour through Korsmeyer’s discussion of the expressive power of food. Based on Nelson Goodman’s notion of exemplification, Korsmeyer suggests that food can be meaningful through two kinds of exemplification: it can exemplify properties it “literally” possesses or metaphorically possesses. Chicken soup is a classic example of both. It exemplifies properties such as its distinctive “flavor, saltiness, and a somewhat oily texture” that we can access directly through tasting.[49] It also exemplifies properties like “soothing” and “comforting,” because, as Korsmeyer sees it, we know that “it is a home remedy and means that one is being taken care of.”[50] What is remarkable about its dual exemplification is that the meaning of chicken soup is not a piece of information we happen to remember, but is felt. Its expressive properties are grounded in the sensory qualities and their effects on us: “The expression of care that soup exemplifies is supported by the literal properties that soup also has: a rich but not taxing flavor, ingredients that are easy to swallow, and so on.”[51] We do not come across this sort of dual exemplification very often in everyday eating, but dessert is a clear exception. It is not just that many dessert items are sweet, a quality at once literal and metaphorical. Or that many are sumptuous, literally in their presentation or flavor and also metaphorically. Even when what we have for dessert is savory or plain, it still exemplifies delight, just like any other dessert. This is because we are enjoying leisure when we enjoy dessert. While dessert is itself one of those good things life gives and is simply to be enjoyed in itself, it also symbolizes the abundance of life. This is compatible with the fact that specific experiences of dessert can have additional meanings of their own: the love in grandma’s pudding or the sense of belonging many young Asian Americans associate with bubble tea. It is also, I think, the reason why what we typically eat for dessert, that is, “dessert items,” tend to exemplify sweetness and sumptuousness.
As for eating in general, whether a food exemplifies literal or metaphorical properties, the extent to which we can experience its meaning depends on a leisurely attitude. Both sorts of properties require that we step back from purely utilitarian functions of food so that we can become more aware of what the food tells us about ourselves and our relation to the world. And whether a certain food acquires its metaphorical meaning in virtue of its place in personal or cultural history—grandma’s toffee pudding or Thanksgiving dinner—its meaning remains alive for us only because it is affirmed time and again when we have it. It comes as no surprise that the most profoundly meaningful instances of foods are found in rituals and ceremonies.[52]
5. Conclusion
As I have shown, dessert is not at all as superficial as it appears. Its superfluity is precisely why it is so important to us. By inviting us to enjoy a taste of leisure, dessert establishes itself alongside art, philosophy, and other “useless” things that we cannot live without. This peculiar fact is vividly illustrated in Colum McCann’s essay, titled “Dessert.”[53] In it, McCann describes a woman he saw relishing a piece of chocolate cake in New York City the day after 9/11. It was a striking scene; what would otherwise have been easily overlooked in the city’s “unrelenting pursuit of the present” now stood in stark contrast with its lifelessness and despair. At the end of the essay, McCann seems unsure of what he witnessed:
I still have no idea—after almost two decades of wondering—whether I am furious at the woman and the way she ate chocolate cake, or whether it was one of the most audacious acts of grief I’ve ever seen.
While it is all too easy to dismiss the woman’s enjoyment as a failure to take important matters seriously, McCann suggests an alternative view. Could it rather embody the recognition that there is still more to living than survival and so the best way to defy death is to live an ever richer and joyful life?[54] The fact that no other food would have the same effect here confirms dessert’s natural connection with leisure. Yet, the cake alone would not suffice for the extraordinary audacity McCann possibly saw. It must be eaten. As infants, lovers, and believers at the Eucharist show us, eating is, at least in certain contexts, the most direct and deepest form of acceptance and union.[55] Hence the woman’s eating the cake and not just looking at or even tasting it, completes her affirmation of life in the face of death. The proper way to have a cake is no other than to eat it.
Yujia Song
ysong@salisbury.edu
Yujia Song is an associate professor of philosophy at Salisbury University. Her research explores the connections between the ethical, intellectual, and aesthetic dimensions of our lives. She has published on empathy, open-mindedness, and play, and is working on a project on the nature and value of appreciation in the context of interpersonal relationships.
Published January 20, 2025.
Cite this article: Yujia Song, “In Praise of Dessert,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 23 (2025), accessed date.
Acknowledgment
I am grateful for the incredibly valuable feedback I have received from the two anonymous reviewers for this journal and the audience at the 2021 ASA Rocky Mountain Division Meeting.
Endnotes
[1] Tasty, Tasty Dessert: All the Sweet You Can Eat (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2019), 6.
[2] Darra Goldstein, ed., The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 214.
[3] I consider such usage of the word, “dessert,” derivative. As noted in the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, “[In the U.S.] As in France, dessert has also come to include any sweet food that might be served at the end of meal no matter when it is eaten, leading mothers to reprimand their children about not eating ice cream, cupcakes, pie, and other ‘desserts’ before dinner” (214).
[4] As quoted in the Oxford Companion, 214.
[5] Yuriko Saito, Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
[6] Michael Krondl, Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2011), 5.
[7] Bill Buford, “A French Answer to American Apple Pie,” New Yorker, November 19, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/kitchen-notes/a-french-answer-to-american-apple-pie.
[8] I thank the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this point.
[9] Richard Shusterman empathizes tactile and other somatic pleasures of eating in his article, “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” in Body Aesthetics, ed. Sherri Irvin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
[10] Krondl, Sweet Invention, 15.
[11] Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press; 1999).
[12] Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 115-16.
[13] Saito, Aesthetics of the Familiar, 52-53.
[14] Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Vintage, 1991), 58.
[15] Deborah Lupton, “Food and Emotion,” in The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer, (New York: Berg Publishers, 2005), 36.
[16] Buford, op. cit.
[17] Bubble tea can be considered a dessert item and typically consumed as dessert much like ice-cream. As stated in the article, tapioca and similar jelly-like ingredients are common in Chinese and Southeast Asian desserts, as is the variety of toppings usually offered. I’d like to thank one of the reviewers for asking to clarify this point.
[18] Jenny G. Zhang, “The Rise (and Stall) of the Boba Generation,” Eater, November 5, 2019, https://www.eater.com/2019/11/5/20942192/bubble-tea-boba-asian-american-diaspora (accessed on July 13, 2021).
[19] Eric Schwitzgebel, “The Peak-End Theory of Dessert: A New Philosophy of Wolfing,” The Splintered Mind (blog), July 9, 2020, http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-peak-end-theory-of-dessert-new.html (accessed on July 19, 2020). Schwitzgebel writes, “Someone bakes brownies. Everyone in the family receives a brownie of equal size. My son’s is gone in a flash. My wife and I eat ours moderately quickly. Kate delicately saws off an edge and puts it on her tongue, waits a while, saws off another edge. Ten, fifteen minutes later, Kate is still enjoying her brownie while the rest of the family watches enviously.”
[20] Fred B. Bryant and Joseph Veroff, Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2017), 59.
[21] Ibid., 135-36.
[22] John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee, 1980).
[23] See Raymond D. Boisvert and Lisa Heldke, Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human (London: Reaktion Books, 2016); Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste; Or, Transcendental Gastronomy (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1854); Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste; Glenn Kuehn, “How can food be art,” in ed. Andrew Light and Jonathan Smith, The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 194-212; and Saito, Aesthetics of the Familiar.
[24] I want to thank the anonymous reviewers for this point. No doubt on Saito’s “classificatory” notion of the aesthetic, even the “plainness” of such a plain dessert can be felt and so registered as an aesthetic quality, but this example still serves to weaken the force of the line of argument given in the last section.
[25] Eileen John, “Meals, Art and Meaning,” Critica 53, no. 157 (2021): 45-70.
[26] Mary Douglas, In the Active Voice (Routledge Revivals) (New York: Routledge, 2011), 97.
[27] John, 49.
[28] Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009).
[29] Ibid., 39.
[30] Ibid., 49-50.
[31] Ibid., 46.
[32] “A break in one’s work… is still part of the world of work. It is a link in the chain of utilitarian functions. The pause is made for the sake of work and in order to work, and a man is not only refreshed from work but for work. Leisure is an altogether different matter; it is no longer on the same plane; it runs at right angles to work…” (ibid., 43).
[33] Ibid., 46-47
[34] Ibid., 50.
[35] Iddo Landau, Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 240.
[36] Pieper, Leisure, 36.
[37] Ibid., 48.
[38] Ibid., 49.
[39] Telfer attributes food’s role in hospitality to its life-giving power: “Because food is essential to life itself, giving it and sharing it seem to have a special significance. It is as though we are saying that we want to give the most important thing of all to the person we love, or to share the most important activity with them.” Elizabeth Telfer, Food for Thought: Philosophy and Food (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 38.
[40] Pieper, Leisure, 68.
[41] Ibid.
[42] What Claire Saffitz writes in her cookbook, Dessert Person, comes close to my view: “Identifying as a dessert person isn’t just about a love of baking and pastry and all things sweet. To me, it’s an attitude; it’s about embracing cooking and eating as fundamental sources of pleasure. This is a book about baking – most of it sweet, some of it savory – but, more broadly, it argues in favor of an approach to food that is celebratory, abundant, and at times a tad luxurious.” Claire Saffitz, Dessert Person: Recipes and Guidance for Baking with Confidence (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2020), 12.
[43] Susan Wolf, “The Ethics of Being a Foodie,” in The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics, eds. Anne Barnhill, Tyler Doggett, and Mark Budolfson, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 735.
[44] Pieper, Leisure, 37-38.
[45] It is worth noting that Dewey, like Pieper, emphasizes that true receptivity is not passive, but active: “The esthetic or undergoing phase of experience is receptive. It involves surrender. But adequate yielding of the self is possibly only through a controlled activity that may well be intense… Perception is an act of the going-out of energy in order to receive, not a withholding of energy… We must summon energy and pitch it at a responsive key in order to take in” (53).
[46] Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, 203.
[47] Saito, Aesthetics of the Familiar, 25.
[48] Given Pieper’s focus on non-utilitarian activities as constituting the realm of leisure, there seems to be some tension between his view of leisure and everyday aesthetics. I cannot fully address this issue here, but at the very least, I think his conception of leisure as an attitude and not any specific activity leaves open the possibility of leisure within a practical activity.
[49] Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste, 128.
[50] Ibid., 132.
[51] Ibid.
[52] See Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste.
[53] Colum McCann, “Dessert,” in ed. Natalie Eve Garrett, Eat Joy: Stories & Comfort Food from 31 Celebrated Writers (Catapult, 2019).
[54] Coincidentally, Pieper’s book was written at the end of WWII. As he argues in the opening chapter, the urgency of rebuilding Germany only underscores the importance of reflecting on the foundations on which the country ought to be built. In other words, the urgency of practical necessity does not preclude leisure, but demands it.
[55] Korsmeyer calls taste “a profoundly intimate sense” (ibid., 101).