ABSTRACT
As indicated in the Author’s Preface this chapter remains the least changed from the first edition of Strategic Questions in Food and Beverage Management. The main reason for this is that whereas, with the growth of the Internet, one can find online myriad journalistic contributions addressing to various degrees the chapter’s question, these do not in the most part add anything new in terms of content. In the field of hospitality management/food and beverage management whether food is an art form attracts at best cursory attention. Given the claims made for food as art by celebrity chefs, food journalists and miscellaneous hangers-on, this is perhaps surprising. At the same time, and as was articulated in the original chapter and is again here, to understand the issues to any depth of adequacy requires a certain amount of immersion in debates found in the disciplines of art history and analysis (in recent times a number of tourism scholars have sought to explore tourism/art relationships, succeeding for the most part only in demonstrating their ignorance of the second). Further academic enquiry into whether food is an art form has also been limited, confined mainly to the discipline of philosophy. Here, additional commentary has largely constituted responses to the work of Telfer whose 1996 book, Food for Thought: Philosophy and Food, was, at the time of writing the original chapter, perhaps the most comprehensive consideration of the ‘Is food an art form’ question. A number of responses to her work have been questioning of Telfer, often in terms of disputed questions of philosophical method. Some have sought more indirect approaches to the ‘is food an art form’ question. An effort has been made to capture the essence of these contributions in a short new section. Elsewhere, some new references have been added and commented upon and, in places, the text has been ‘tidied up’.
