Gastronomy as an object of pleasure?

Dialogues with Psychoanalysis and Antropology

Abstract

The research aimed to provoke a dialogue between Gastronomy, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology aspiring to draw the origins of feelings of pleasure in the gastronomic pair – stemming from the gastronomic art and its effects on the subjectivities of those involved, the gastronome and gourmet –, as well as its individual historical baggage. To endorse the bibliographic work, we had these theoretical writers as keys: a psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud that emphasizes issues related to pleasure and displeasure in psychic functioning of the human being; in anthropology we approached the text from Lévi-Strauss – the raw and the cooked – which supports the idea that the act of cooking conferred the evolutionary characteristic of mankind in the passage of the natural man to the cultural man. The research brought to light some of the reasons why the Gastronomy is asserting iteself as science and expanding its social importance as a tool of human socialization, because the emotional charge that it includes as an object of pleasure of the involved subjects, reinforcing the idea that gastronomy is a science that transcends technique, which is not limited to the forms of cooking or serving well, but it is also an experience of subject-to-subject.