{"id":8097,"date":"2018-03-23T12:19:28","date_gmt":"2018-03-23T16:19:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gastronomyatbu.com\/?p=8050"},"modified":"2018-03-28T17:48:56","modified_gmt":"2018-03-28T21:48:56","slug":"the-circus-of-the-senses-a-symposium-on-food-the-humanities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/2018\/03\/23\/the-circus-of-the-senses-a-symposium-on-food-the-humanities\/","title":{"rendered":"The Circus of the Senses: A Symposium on Food & the Humanities"},"content":{"rendered":"

Article and images by Ariana Gunderson<\/em><\/p>\n

The Culinary Institute of America hosted the Circus of the Senses: A Symposium on Food & the Humanities<\/em> this past Monday, a feast for both mind and tongue.\u00a0 The day-long symposium demonstrated the best of CIA\u2019s Applied Food Studies program, combining traditional academic papers, collaborative discussion, and a surrealist banquet inspired by Salvador Dal\u00ed.\u00a0 Here I\u2019ll share my experience and thoughts on the symposium.<\/p>\n

Upon arrival at CIA\u2019s immaculate campus, symposium attendees were served a light breakfast; I was quickly learning that at the Culinary Institute of America, food is the starting point. \u00a0The conference got started with two sessions of roundtables, in which conference attendees signed up for small discussion groups.\u00a0 The leader or leaders of each roundtable presented some of their work or media to which the group would then respond in discussion.\u00a0 I attended and very much enjoyed \u201cTracing and Tasting Aromatic Images in Cinema,\u201d a roundtable led by Dr. Sophia Siddique Harvey, of Vassar\u2019s Film Department.\u00a0 Dr. Harvey shared a short film clip and her concept of an \u2018aromatic image\u2019 \u2013 when the audiovisual medium of film evokes the proximal senses.\u00a0 Our lively group discussion was shaped by the contributions of a food stylist, whose career is centered around the creation of such images, and academics from French, Philosophy, Creative Writing, and Food Studies departments.\u00a0 By starting the symposium with a discussion to which all attendees contribute, I felt invigorated and directly participatory in the rest of the day.\"\"<\/a>\u00a0Following a lunch break at any of CIA\u2019s many student-staffed restaurants, the afternoon consisted of two traditional academic panels.\u00a0 All presentations covered food and the senses (very relevant to the BU community!<\/a>) but from a wide range of disciplines.\u00a0 Chef Jonathan Zearfoss presented on Patterns in Tasting Menu Design, Dr. Yael Raviv of NYU spoke about food as a medium in avant-garde art, and Dr. Greg de S. Maurice gave a talk on multisensory taste and national identity in Japan.<\/p>\n

My favorite paper was presented by Dr. Andrew Donnelly of Loyola University\u2019s history department, \u201cRe-experiencing Rome: The \u201cNext\u201d Apicius.\u201d\u00a0 Dr. Donnelly spoke with humor and rich historical background on the ancient Roman diet and its reincarnation at a Chicago tasting menu, describing how in just one dinner his academic understanding of Roman history had been made sensorially experiential.\u00a0 Ted Russin, the acting Dean of the School of Culinary Science & Nutrition at CIA and flavor scientist, gave punchy closing remarks in which he presented on the interconnectedness of sensorial experience in eating.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Attendees were able to immediately put Dean Russin\u2019s presentation into practice in the final event of the symposium: the Circus of Taste, a banquet inspired by the surrealist work of Salvador Dal\u00ed and brought to vivid life by the students and faculty of the CIA.\u00a0 We kicked off the feast with 59 minutes of cocktails \u2013 guests swizzled their own signature cocktail of snow, ginger, shiso, and fresno chili and nibbled on passed hors d\u2019oeuvres as a large clock ticked away the minutes and swirling lights brought plastic lobsters in and out of focus.\u00a0 As I stood at a table with a centerpiece of apples in a basket (each apple bearing a fake Dal\u00ed mustache), I accepted round after round of such surreal delicacies as deviled quail egg, ros\u00e9 gel\u00e9e with caviar, savory cheesecake with strawberry pearl boba, and spicy avocado mousse on puff pastry.\u00a0 Once the 59 minutes (exactly) had passed, we moved into the dining hall, spritzed with a Dal\u00ed perfume as we did so.<\/p>\n

Once again, the dining hall was sensorially overwhelming.\u00a0 This feast was a celebration of Dal\u00ed\u2019s work and especially the cookbook he wrote to memorialize the lavish dinner parties he hosted with his wife, Gala. Recreations of Dal\u00ed\u2019s artwork filled each corner of the room, and Un Chien Andalou<\/em><\/a> played on three walls. Each seat had a placemat of a different material: tin foil, fur, bubble wrap, sandpaper.\u00a0 Spread down the winding table were musical instruments; guests were instructed to play different instruments when they experienced different tastes.\u00a0 Crawfish in consomm\u00e9, the first course, was the most impactful for my sensory experience.\u00a0 Dal\u00ed\u2019s love for crawfish resulted in several recipes boasting the crustacean in his cookbook, Les Diner de\u00a0Gala,<\/em> including a memorable Tower of Crawfish<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

In our first course bowls, a whole crawfish swam in soup, to be cracked by the diner.\u00a0 This was my first time eating a crustacean, and the sensorial impact of cracking open the exo-skeleton was quite powerful. Roquefort Pasta and Hanging Beef (accompanied by paired wines) followed, and the atmosphere in the room rose to a festive pitch as guests donned food fascinators and shook the noisemakers.\u00a0 My tablemate remarked, \u201cit\u2019s like a really weird wedding,\u201d in which the couple we were celebrating was Gala and Salvador.\u00a0 The final course, a dessert, was called BEETING Heart<\/em> \u2013 a beet mousse, molded into a heart-shaped beet drawn from the earth (represented by crushed cookies and chocolate sorbet).\u00a0 Walking the halls of the CIA, I had seen the students preparing various parts of these dishes, and I was blown away by the impression they left in the context of the banquet.\u00a0 The final touch on the evening was the\u00a0after-dinner coffee \u2013 delivered via espresso bubbles.<\/p>\n

This symposium brought together what excites me most about the field of Food Studies.\u00a0 The range of activities throughout the day demonstrate the multiple forms food scholarship can take: collaborative discussion, panel presentations, and creating and consuming food itself. The community of rigorously interdisciplinary food scholars represents the breadth and richness of food studies.\u00a0 I anxiously await the next symposium hosted by the masterful team at the Culinary Institute of America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Article and images by Ariana Gunderson The Culinary Institute of America hosted the Circus of the Senses: A Symposium on Food & the Humanities this past Monday, a feast for both mind and tongue.\u00a0 The day-long symposium demonstrated the best of CIA\u2019s Applied Food Studies program, combining traditional academic papers, collaborative discussion, and a surrealist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14625,"featured_media":8098,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[29,11,18,21,22,25],"tags":[932,227,933,332,357,934],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8097"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14625"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8097"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8131,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8097\/revisions\/8131"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/gastronomyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}