Bittersweet Food
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Abstract
Nostalgia and food are intertwined universals in human experience. All of us have experienced nostalgia centered on food, and all of us have experienced food infused with nostalgia. To explore the links between nostalgia and food, I start with a rough taxonomy of nostalgic foods, and illustrate it with examples. I argue that there is a psychological commonality to experiencing nostalgic foods: imagination. On my account, imagination is the key to understanding the cognitive, conative, affective, and perceptual aspects of experiencing nostalgic foods. In turn, the recognition of imagination’s centrality in experiencing nostalgic foods reveals how food can produce aesthetic experiences comparable to those produced by literature and painting.
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How to Cite
Liao, S.- yi. (2021). Bittersweet Food. Crítica. Revista Hispanoamericana De Filosofía, 53(157), 71–93. https://doi.org/10.22201/iifs.18704905e.2021.1246
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References
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Liao, Shen-yi, Aaron Meskin, and Joshua Knobe, 2020, “Dual Character Art Concepts”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 101, no. 1, pp. 102–128.
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Michaelian, Kourken, 2016, Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
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of Philosophy, downloaded from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/memory/ [accessed: 25/01/2019]
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Sedikides, Constantine and Tim Wildschut, 2016, “Nostalgia: A Bittersweet Emotion that Confers Psychological Health Benefits”, in Alex M. Wood and Judith Johnson (eds.), The Wiley Handbook of Positive Clinical Psychology, Hoboken, Wiley, NJ, pp. 25–136.
Shanton, Karen and Alvin Goldman, 2010, “Simulation Theory”, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 527–538.
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Stokes, Dustin, 2013, “Cognitive Penetrability of Perception”, Philosophy Compass, vol. 8, no. 7, pp. 646–663.
Strohl, Matthew, 2019, “On Culinary Authenticity”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 77, no. 2, pp. 157–167.
Telfer, Elizabeth, 1996, Food for Thought: Philosophy and Food, Routledge, New York.
Vettel, Phil, 2011, “Next Review: Childhood Menu Re-creates Aromas, Sights, Tastes of Youth”, Chicago Tribune, downloaded from https://web.archive.org/web/20190125191246/https://www.chicagotribune.com/dining/restaurants/ct-review-next-childhood-20160128-column.html [accessed: 25/01/2019]
Walton, Kendall L., 1997, “Spelunking, Simulation, and Slime: On Being Moved by Fiction”, in Mette Hjort and Sue Laver (eds.), Emotion and the Arts, Oxford University, New York, pp. 37–49.
Walton, Kendall L., 1993, “Metaphor and Prop-Oriented Make-Believe”, European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 39–57.
Walton, Kendall L., 1990, Mimesis as Make-Believe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Walton, Kendall L., 1978, “Fearing Fictions”, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 75, no. 1, pp. 5–27.
Bak-Geller Corona, Sarah, 2016, “Culinary Myths of the Mexican Nation”, in Ishita Banerjee-Dube (ed.), Cooking Cultures: Convergent Histories of Food and Feeling, Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 225–246.
Batcho, K.I., 2013, “Nostalgia: The Bittersweet History of a Psychological Concept”, History of Psychology, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 165–176.
Briscoe, Robert Eamon, 2018, “Superimposed Mental Imagery: On the Uses of Make-Perceive”, in Fiona Macpherson and Fabian Dorsch (eds.), Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual Memory, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 161–185.
Briscoe, Robert Eamon, 2008, “Vision, Action, and Make-Perceive”, Mind and Language,
vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 457–497.
Chang, May Yu-hsin, 2013, “Nostalgic Imagination: A Study of the Sweet Potato in Taiwan”, in Sidney C.H. Cheung and H.W. Chau (eds.), Foodways and Heritage: A Perspective of Safeguarding the Intangible Cultural Heritage, Hong Kong Heritage Museum, Hong Kong.
De Brigard, Felipe, 2018, “Nostalgia and Mental Simulation”, in Anna Gotlib (ed.), The Moral Psychology of Sadness, Rowman and Littlefield, London, pp. 155–181.
De Brigard, Felipe, 2017, “Memory and Imagination”, in Sven Bernecker and Kourken Michaelian (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory, Routledge, New York, pp. 127–140.
De Brigard, Felipe, 2014, “The Nature of Memory Traces”, Philosophy Compass, vol. 9, no. 6, pp. 402–414.
Debus, Dorothea, 2018, “Memory, Imagination, and Narrative”, in Fiona Macpherson and Fabian Dorsch (eds.), Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual Memory, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 72–95.
Debus, Dorothea, 2016, “Imagination and Memory”, in Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, Routledge, New York, pp. 135–148.
Debus, Dorothea, 2014, “Mental Time Travel: Remembering the Past, Imagining the Future, and the Particularity of Events”, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 333–350.
Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen, 2008, “Postsocialist Spores: Disease, Bodies, and the State in the Republic of Georgia”, American Ethnologist, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 243–258.
Friend, Stacie, 2017, “The Real Foundation of Fictional Worlds”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 95, no. 1, pp. 29–42.
Friend, Stacie, 2016, “Fiction and Emotion”, in Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, Routledge, New York, pp. 217–229.
Friend, Stacie, 2008, “Imagining Fact and Fiction”, in Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thomsen-Jones (eds.), New Waves in Aesthetics, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 150–169.
Gotlib, Anna, 2018, “Memory, Sadness, and Longing”, in Anna Gotlib (ed.), The Moral Psychology of Sadness, Rowman and Littlefield, London, pp. 183–205.
Hepper, Erica G., Timothy D. Ritchie, Constantine Sedikides, and Tim Wildschut, 2012, “Odyssey’s End: Lay Conceptions of Nostalgia Reflect Its Original Homeric Meaning”, Emotion, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 102–119.
Hepper, Erica G., Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Timothy D. Ritchie, Yiu-Fai Yung, Nina Hansen, Georgios Abakoumkin, Gizem Arikan, Sylwia Z. Cisek, Didier B. Demassosso, Jochen E. Gebauer, J.P. Gerber, Roberto González, Takashi Kusumi, Girishwar Misra, Mihaela Rusu, Oisín Ryan, Elena Stephan, Ad J.J. Vingerhoets, and Xinyue Zhou, 2014, “Pancultural Nostalgia: Prototypical Conceptions Across Cultures”, Emotion, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 733–747.
Hopkins, Robert, 2018, “Imagining the Past: On the Nature of Episodic Memory”, in Fiona Macpherson and Fabian Dorsch (eds.), Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual Memory, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 46–71.
Howard, Scott Alexander, 2012, “Nostalgia”, Analysis, vol. 72, no. 4, pp. 641–650.
Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 2019, “A Tour of Senses”, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 59, no. 4, pp. 357–371.
Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 2016, The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink, 2nd ed., Bloomsbury, New York.
Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 2002, “Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 60, no. 3, pp. 217–225.
Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 1999, Making Sense of Taste, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 1975, “On the ‘Aesthetic Senses’ and the Development of Fine Arts”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 67–71.
Liao, Shen-yi, Aaron Meskin, and Joshua Knobe, 2020, “Dual Character Art Concepts”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 101, no. 1, pp. 102–128.
Liao, Shen-yi and Tamar Szabó Gendler, 2019, “Imagination”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, downloaded from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/imagination/ [accessed: 25/01/2019]
Locher, Julie L., William C. Yoels, Donna Maurer, and Jillian van Ellis, 2015, “Comfort Foods: An Exploratory Journey Into The Social and Emotional Significance of Food”, Food and Foodways, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 273–297.
Meskin, Aaron, 2013, “The Art of Food”, The Philosopher’s Magazine, no. 61, pp. 81–86.
Meskin, Aaron (manuscript), “Eating, Drinking, and Imagining”.
Michaelian, Kourken, 2018, “Episodic and Semantic Memory and Imagination: the Need for Definitions”, American Journal of Psychology, vol. 131, no. 1, pp. 99–103.
Michaelian, Kourken, 2016, Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Michaelian, Kourken and John Sutton, 2017, “Memory”, The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, downloaded from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/memory/ [accessed: 25/01/2019]
Noordhof, Paul, 2002, “Imagining Objects and Imagining Experiences”, Mind and Language, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 426–455.
Rea, Naomi, 2017, “For Her Latest Feat, Marina Abramovi´c Has Transformed Herself Into a Macaron”, ArtnetNews, downloaded from https://web.archive.org/web/20190125191122/https://news.artnet.com/art-world/marina-abramovic-macaron-1102277 [accessed: 25/01/2019]
Robins, Sarah, 2020, “Defending Discontinuism, Naturally”, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, vol. 11. no. 2, pp. 469–486.
Schacter, Daniel L., Donna Rose Addis, and Randy L. Buckner, 2007, “Remembering the Past to Imagine the Future: the Prospective Brain”, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, vol. 8, no. 9, pp. 657–661.
Sedikides, Constantine and Tim Wildschut, 2016, “Nostalgia: A Bittersweet Emotion that Confers Psychological Health Benefits”, in Alex M. Wood and Judith Johnson (eds.), The Wiley Handbook of Positive Clinical Psychology, Hoboken, Wiley, NJ, pp. 25–136.
Shanton, Karen and Alvin Goldman, 2010, “Simulation Theory”, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 527–538.
Shelley, James, 2017, “The Concept of the Aesthetic”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, downloaded from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-concept/ [accessed: 25/01/2019]
Stern, Barbara B., 1992, “Historical and Personal Nostalgia in Advertising Text: The Fin de siècle Effect”, Journal of Advertising, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 11–22.
Stokes, Dustin, 2013, “Cognitive Penetrability of Perception”, Philosophy Compass, vol. 8, no. 7, pp. 646–663.
Strohl, Matthew, 2019, “On Culinary Authenticity”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 77, no. 2, pp. 157–167.
Telfer, Elizabeth, 1996, Food for Thought: Philosophy and Food, Routledge, New York.
Vettel, Phil, 2011, “Next Review: Childhood Menu Re-creates Aromas, Sights, Tastes of Youth”, Chicago Tribune, downloaded from https://web.archive.org/web/20190125191246/https://www.chicagotribune.com/dining/restaurants/ct-review-next-childhood-20160128-column.html [accessed: 25/01/2019]
Walton, Kendall L., 1997, “Spelunking, Simulation, and Slime: On Being Moved by Fiction”, in Mette Hjort and Sue Laver (eds.), Emotion and the Arts, Oxford University, New York, pp. 37–49.
Walton, Kendall L., 1993, “Metaphor and Prop-Oriented Make-Believe”, European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 39–57.
Walton, Kendall L., 1990, Mimesis as Make-Believe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Walton, Kendall L., 1978, “Fearing Fictions”, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 75, no. 1, pp. 5–27.
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