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Taste, Distaste, and Food

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Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics
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Synonyms

Aesthetics; Agency; Animals; Art; Aversion; Body; Change; Class; Desire; Disgust; Displeasure; Emotion; Experience; Gender; Imagination; Judgment; Literature; Market; Materiality; Meaning; Moral regard; Normativity; Ontology; Pleasure; Power; Race; Relationality; Senses; Social distinction; Value

Introduction

Taste and distaste are influential constituents of our relations with food. This essay describes their nature and interconnections and highlights their links with disgust. Reviewing difficulties that arise for the notion of taste (and hence for that of distaste, which has received far less attention), the article turns to literary and philosophical investigations of material life to suggest alternative ways of comprehending taste, distaste, and their bonds with food.

Theories of taste lie at the heart of the notion of the aesthetic in Western philosophy. Traditionally, such views evince an ambivalent stance toward food, one that deploys gustatory taste as a model for...

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Correspondence to Monique Roelofs .

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© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Roelofs, M. (2013). Taste, Distaste, and Food. In: Thompson, P., Kaplan, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_22-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_22-2

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