To reflect on gastronomy is to call to mind great chefs who have dedicated their lives to the preparation of fine food. It is also to think of the famous people for whom culinary inventions have been named and those restaurants that serve meals so superb they become a topic of conversation for many years. When it comes to thinking about great food however, most people give little or no credit to the gourmet.

Everybody praises great chefs and it is true that without them there would be no great dishes. Lives dedicated to the preparation of fine food need, however, to be matched by equal dedication in its consumption. As if to demonstrate that this indeed may be the best of all possible worlds, gastronomy has developed the gourmet, a distinct species of people who give priority in all human affairs to the discriminate enjoyment of food.

It would be difficult to find a more logical description of the gastronomic arts than that presented by the great 19th century chef, Antonin Careme. "Dining has much in common with painting and music. The painter, by richness of colors produces works that seduce the eye and the imagination; the musician, by the combination of his notes, produces harmony and the sense of hearing receives the sweetest sensations that melody can produce. Our culinary combinations are of the same nature. The gourmet's palate and sense of smell receive sensations similar to those of the connoisseurs of painting and music."

What Careme neglected to mention is that gastronomy is the most selfless art because it is, by definition, perishable. What the sculptor Tinguely accomplished with his self-destroying machines is achieved by every great chef every time one of his dishes is brought to the table. Its function is to be consumed. Gastronomy is also the most practical art because it is the only one upon which physical survival depends.

There are those who would denigrate the importance of gastronomy as a driving force in human events, but such people are simply uninformed. Anthropologists and sociologists concur, for example, that gastronomy ranks with all of the other arts as a means of discovering the culture of a nation or a people. Anthropologists rely on the dining habits of societies in order to define them. The kitchen utensils found at Herod's pleasure palace at Massada in the Judean Dessert, reveal hidden corners of Roman consciousness. An analysis of the amounts and types of space given over to cooking and dining in the excavations of the city of Jerusalem at the time of King David say much about the social habits, mores and taboos of the people who lived there.

The stomach absorbs culture as much as the mind or the eye. In fact, a team of anthropologists examining the buried remains of a French city twenty centuries from now would conclude that theirs was a society which applied as much method and energy to eating as to thinking. They would find, for example, that in 1990 four out of every ten shops in Paris and fifty five percent of all the industries in France were devoted to filling stomachs.

Even in the study of history, gastronomy plays a critical role. A history of the world could be written from the admittedly limited viewpoint of the intestinal tract. It would mention that at least one person sold his birthright for a "mess of porridge". It would also recall how, after Napoleon conquered Egypt, he dined on a garlic stew and then suffered an upset stomach. Thinking he had been poisoned, he decided to return to France and called off his plan to conquer Jerusalem.

To the gourmet, gastronomy is also part of the humanist vision. Human beings are members of a superior species because we are the only animals who cook our food and because we are capable of eating when we are not hungry. What could be more gratifying than the satisfaction of the palate and what act more social than that of sharing a meal?

Gourmets are people who give priority in human affairs to the pleasures that are to be gained from dining. This can, exceptionally, be combined with other activity. Indeed, the gourmet's tragedy is that some other activity is often necessary to allow him to fulfill his vocation. As literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve observed when bemoaning the fact that he had to earn a living: "But rejoice my little stomach, for all that I earn is yours".

It is true that gourmets tend to exaggerate a bit. To the true gourmet, art means Watteau's Embarquement pour Cythere which shows 18th century courtiers picnicking and Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe Literature is James Joyce's short story, The Dead (in which the entire tale takes place around a sumptuously set table), Anatole France's description of the restaurant in Paris' Rue Vavin where the only dish was cassoulet, and Ernest Hemingway's description of the pommes de terre a l'huile that he ate at Brasserie Lipp. The wedding feast in Madame Bovary is more controversial, as discriminating diners have never forgive Flaubert for writing, in The Sentimental Education, that "bottles of wine were left to heat on the stove". Gourmets have a special place in their hearts for Chateaubriand, not so much for his poetry and diaries but because when he visited Dante's grave in Florence he plucked several laurel leaves which he carefully put into his pocket because "there is nothing better with macaroni".

Many consider Rabelais the first gourmet and, since 1522, when he listed sixty ways to cook an egg, there have been a dedicated band of men and women who have believed that everything important, from personal well being to the destiny of nations depends on what people are given to swallow and ingest. It is this band of hardy souls who have helped to keep up the standards of fine cuisine.

It is true that throughout the land fast-food outlets are multiplying beyond compare, but the situation of the gourmet is not so bad. So long as critics like Le Monde's Robert Courtine will enter a world-famous restaurant and give it bad marks because the tomatoes in his salad were not peeled or another critic makes a scene when his Crepes Suzettes are made with orange (instead of tangerine) peels, and as long as there are people who are genuinely afflicted by a bad meal and chefs who have nervous breakdowns over a sauce that curdles, the standards of fine cuisine are safe.

© Daniel Rogov