Dr. Natalie Jovanovski has reviewed The Taste of Art: Cooking, Food, and Counterculture in Contemporary Practices, edited by Silvia Bottinelli and Margherita D’ayala Valva, in the January 2020 issue of the journal Food and Foodways.
Food and Foodways is an interdisciplinary and international journal devoted to publishing original scholarly articles on the history and culture of human nourishment. It publishes work by anthropologists, economists, ethnobotanists, historians, literary critics, nutritionists, psychologists, sociologists, and others who use food as a lens of analysis.
“The Taste of Art, Jovanovski writes, “offers a compelling and persuasive discussion of the growing importance of the role of food art in contemporary countercultural discourses.” The book powerfully disrupts previous narratives, and advances “our understandings of the ‘subversive role of food in the art system’ (p. 3); emphasizing food as a protagonist, rather than an object, of countercultural discourses.”
Jovanovski concludes that “while the collection of chapters featured in The Taste of Art explicitly advance the knowledge of art historians in relation to the countercultural
significance of food throughout the centuries, other audiences that can benefit from this edited collection include sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists who are interested in the power and significance of both local and global countercultural food movements.”
The Taste of Art is part of the University of Arkansas Press’s Food and Foodways Series, edited by Jennifer Jensen Wallach and Michael Wise.