L’arte del palato e la denaturalizzazione del cibo: momenti di una storia evolutiva

Abstract: The aim of this essay is to reflect on the meaning of the expression “art of the palate”, focusing on those aspects of our evolutionary history – a biological and cultural history together – that have made us the only monkeys able at cooking the food, to produce it in a systematic way, to choose it from a wide range of foods on the basis of different criteria, to give it a symbolic value, to taste it convivially and to celebrate it through language; reasons for which man can claim fully the invention of the flavors, a complex activity rich of aesthetic and artistic implications. Result of a long process of new elaboration of the nature, the art of taste is therefore the outcome of those processes through which we transformed a gesture of the most natural, that is the act of eating, in an artificial, cultural and intellectual activity, applying a knowledge, a practical knowledge, to conceive, to imagine and to develop new food items, new sensations for the palate (flavors), new opportunitiens of social interaction (conviviality).