Serve It Forth

“Serve It Forth” will examine the intersection of attention and taste. Participants will reconsider fundamental questions about food and sensory experience while sharing a multi-course meal under heightened conditions of mindful awareness. With each edible item, guests will engage in a new “protocol” of taste, focusing on a unique aspect of perception. One course, for instance, elaborates the conditions for examining taste as pure flavor, while another highlights how features of the external environment affect eating. In discussions at the tables, individual and shared discoveries will overlap as well as deviate.

The trajectory will echo the writings of the great American food thinker, M.F.K. Fisher. For her, communicating taste to others is difficult, because taste is so abstract and ephemeral — but, when shared, taste must be narrativized. Telling a personal story of taste thus resembles unearthing, and conveying, a secret. “There must be someone who understands what I mean,” she writes in her book Serve It Forth. “Probably everyone does, because of his own secret eatings.”

Food will be variously sourced from individual chefs as well as members of the Jersey City restaurant community.

All concerns regarding food allergies should be sent to serveit4th@gmail.com. Registration here is required.

This event participates in the Being Human Festival 2019 of the Humanities Council.