Carolyn Korsmeyer on Taste

Thought About Food Podcast

This episode we spoke with Carolyn Korsmeyer about taste and the aesthetics of food, replicating ancient meals found in tombs, leaving sticky fingerprints on cookbooks, writing fiction novels as a philosopher, and a lot more in this wide-ranging conversation.

Show Notes:

• Follow us on Twitter at @FoodThoughtPod, and you can drop us a line at ThoughtAboutFood on Gmail. Leave us a review! It helps people find the show.
• Carolyn Korsmeyer is an author of numerous books, and Research Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
• One of the important early works on taste that we discussed was by David Hume. You can check out a version of this very interesting and influential work here, prepared by Early Modern Texts, which adapts important older texts to an easier, more modern version of English.
• The recipe Carolyn brought for this episode is for gingerbread. As we discussed this episode, cookbooks with all their material reality of notes and stains connects us to the past, and are aesthetic objects in their own right. So rather than transcribe the recipe here, I've uploaded the scan of her cookbook as this episode's image.
• The intro and outro music is "Whiskey Before Breakfast" which is both a great traditional song and a good way to set the stage for some gingerbread in the morning. It was performed and shared by The Dan River Ramblers under a Creative Commons license.