( The author is an editor for the Advocate.)

I.

"Food is more important than poetry."

Although I know I am taking unfair advantage of its implication. I attribute to Auden's statement a judgment of food based on more than biological necessity. Auden, surely, is also speaking of the aesthetic possibility of gastronomy; of the question of choice in selecting food: of color and texture: of the chromatic and compositional problems of preparing a meal, of arranging a plate. Auden's statement betrays an artist's eye for the forms of the physical world as well as a sensitive palate.

What is concealed in the quote is an exaltation of food as a visual, tactile, plastic, colorful art form. However, because food is also so functional, its aesthetic qualities are often overlooked. Edibility, food's singular characteristic which tends to divert our attention from its artistic nature, is precisely the element which makes it a unique, almost complete, art form.

Edibility. In the end, we consume the creation, take it into our own body. Its edibility not only brings us closer to the work by eliminating the awkward distances between, for instance, the painter and viewer or poet and reader, but the ability to internalize the object (the meal) places us in a position to be seriously, viscerally, even gastro-intestinally affected by it.

Imagine crumpling up the pages of The Wasteland into small paper balls which, when digested with all of its allusions, might produce cramps as a sign of incomprehensibility or, on the other hand, that satiety which designates good literature. Unfortunately, most of our reactions are not formed so spontaneously. We are kept from many objects of art by our own intellectual apparatuses and insistence on explaining the complexities of creation. It has become harder and harder for us to be intimate with art. When we look at a painting, even the closest scrutiny may leave us cold. Something as small as a stuffed nose may keep us from enjoying a trip to the museum. For irrelevant reasons, the impact of a whole gallery of paintings may elude us. We can envision ourselves, under certain circumstances, mistaking a bad poem for a much better one. Yet I doubt sincerely whether the most severe stultification of the senses would prevent one from protesting an indisputably bad meal.

Far more immovable than physical and temperamental obstacles to the apprehension of most art forms, excluding food, is our own intellect. In literature, art, and to a lesser extent music, the reacting human mind, even at its peaks of receptiveness, often confuses intellectual and emotive responses.

Take Icarus by Breughel, for example (Auden did). Do we like it for its mythological content or for its rendering of the scene, or for what mixture of the two? Do we like it because we are able to tell our museum date some background information or because there is something ineffably beautiful about the green waves? Our familiarity with Art History or Edith Hamilton's Greck. Mythology may get in the way of our aesthetic vision.

The Emotive/Aesthetic vs, the Intellectual Academic

Our ability to extricate the emotive/aesthetic from the intellectual/academic response is hampered particularly in dealing with literature. Needless to say, the aesthetician is today almost dispensable, even obsolete, in the verbal disciplines. Critic W. K. Wimsatt states rather bluntly: "The intellectual character of language makes literature difficult for the aesthetician." If this point needs elaboration, simply look at some college students' textual analyses to see how many are technicians for whom a judgment of taste or pure form requires non-analytic tools we have forgotten how to use.

Instilled by our education with a reverence for content before form, we tend to confront even the most visual, affective arts with an analytic mentality. For months after Picasso's enigmatic fifty-foot sculpture was uncovered in a downtown Chicago plaza, discussion centered frantically on whether it was a woman, a dog, or a bird. Newspapers covered the controversy greedily and people who finally felt they had identified it were at last able to react. When Dylan Thomas spoke at MIT in 1953, his lyrically eccentric speech was met with silence by an audience of what must have been tightlipped students and professors who seemed incredulous that the talk was witty, ingenious blasphemy-and nothing more. The misdirected arguments over the nouvelle vague in cinema, for a last example, almost constitute an affront to the cinematic art. It is no wonder some of us cannot distinguish between a Smoky Link and a knish.

From the Mind/Eye to the Eye/Nose/Stomach/Soul

Yet happily, most of us can, for food is one of the only arts which we don't, and can't, overintellectualize. Because we transfer our reactive mechanism from the mind/eye to the eye/nose/stomach/soul, our appreciation of the art is neither diminished by an inferior education nor a weak mind. There is room for the neophyte gourmet, the connoisseur, the glutton, the macrobiotic, the fat and the lean.

It would be foolish to suggest that food can be interpreted and enjoyed equally by everyone; it does require a cultivation of the palate and, less frequently, a durability of the system. But certainly there are fewer obstacles to the attainment of delicate taste buds than there are in the way of good literary, musical, or artistic critical faculties.

And food, unlike all other arts, is close to completely investigable to all. We can press our thumb through the skin of an orange and break it apart; smell it, taste it, hear it, use it, squeeze it, chew it, digest it, decompose it, excrete it, put it against our foreheads on hot days and in our pockets on the way to a show. We possess it like no other art. Unlike other arts, it doesn't conceal its etymology quite as completely. The orange is non-figurative, non-metaphorical. The orange, as food, does not stand for something else except an orange and the nutrients it contains. It is its own metaphor.

The sooner we acknowledge that both the preparation and the consumption of food are legitimate art forms, the sooner we may ?? recapture the innocent and life-giving delights of cooking and eating.

II.

" That is a thing you can't get in a chophouse-I mean; a spiced beef in which the jelly does not taste of glue and the beef has caught the flavor of the carrot. "