f Towards an Ontology of the Food Artwork: On Heston Blumenthal’s “Bacon-and Egg Ice Cream” and Taste in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility

In Jacques Rancière’s essay “The Distribution of the Sensible,” Rancière basically argues that any object may be used to make Art inasmuch as Art in the 21^st century is no longer subject to essential criteria that condition how an object ought to be represented. While admittedly Rancière has had a minimal impact on Food Studies, the idea that any food object is Art is a central aesthetic-theoretical supposition within Food Studies and the food world at large. Employing Roman Ingarden’s central thesis in Ontology of the Artwork, namely, that particular artworks are intentional objects conditioned by their particular intentional sensate structures, I argue one must understand the “food artwork” as an absolutely particular ontological object that is conditioned by the intentional sensate structures of the food object and not its representational aims. In doing so, I also question what is traditionally thought to be the relation between ideas and sense-perception as well as the hierarchy of the senses in 18^th century Western thought by way of an interpretation of Condillac’s Treatise on Sensations and a consideration of Michel Onfray’s La Raison Gourmande. To illustrate my argument, I consider two examples of what I deem to qualify as “food artworks,” namely, Chef Heston Blumenthal’s “Bacon-and-Egg Ice Cream” and, by way of considering Walter Benjamin’s writings on reproducibility and its relation to artworks, “Locavore dishes.”