Serve It Forth is a workshop and exhibition that examines the intersection of attention and taste. Participants are invited to 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 are asked to engage in a new “protocol” of taste, focusing on a new condition of perception. Following the meal, discussions at the tables form shared discoveries that intersect and deviate.

This event echoes the writings of the great American food thinker, M.F.K. Fisher, who believed that it is difficult to convey the experience of taste to others, exactly because it is so abstract and ephemeral—but who believed, further, that when the experience of taste is to be shared, it must be narrativized. Telling a personal story of taste is like unearthing a secret. “There must be someone who understands what I mean,” she writes. “Probably everyone does, because of his own secret eatings.”[1]

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

*All concerns regarding food allergies should be sent to serveit4th@gmail.com.

[1] M.F.K. Fisher, Serve It Forth, 2002

Photo: Emma Ressel, Boeuf Tartare, 2015