Aisthesis and Nourishment

We don’t automatically experience aisthesis when we consume. The philosopher Corine Pelluchon, for example, analyses how nourishment from food does not equal mere nutrients but also includes an aesthetic experience. In her book “Nourishment,” she talks about losing aisthesis in our eating habits. 

“Why are lunch and dinner, with the exception of major occasions, going out to restaurants, or banquets at which we celebrate an event, so rarely anything other than taking in of foodstuffs, as if one needed an exceptional event in order for the meal to be a feast as if the meal should not be a feast in itself? Is not such mutilation of the act of eating, snacking in front of the television, or swallowing a sandwich at the office the symptom of an amputation of taste, reduced to its physiological dimension alone? Far from revealing the elemental essence of things, our sensations would themselves be turned from the register of enjoyment and reduced to the pure and simple satisfaction of a need that is experienced as an emptiness or as an absence to be filled.”