Food as Art: Jiro Dreams of Sushi

"I'll continue to climb, trying to reach the top...but no one knows where the top is."

I stumbled upon this trailer, by chance, on the Apple website and thought the title sounded cool. I think this is actually one of the best trailers I have ever seen. And it draws on the connections between music and food, which I am obviously very fascinated with. It's no coincidence that the trailer is paired with Beethoven. I read something (I think it was by Schoenberg or maybe Kandinsky, but I can't remember) which put composers in this pyramid of striving, like a caste system with Beethoven at the top. The lower tiers of composers were striving to approach Beethoven's greatness; and Beethoven was striving, but towards no goal but greatness, since he was already at the top. By pairing Jiro's story with the music of Beethoven, the filmmakers are trying to say that Jiro is to sushi as Beethoven is to music. Which is a pretty big claim, but it looks to me as if Jiro is quite the true master!

Food and music are two art forms expressed through different media. Food is just unusual in that, while music and visual art try to deny this, it is made to be consumed, literally. But like all great art, food has form (do we recognize this as a soup or a sauce? sonata or ternary?) and technique (sets of skills acquired by both professional chefs and musicians and artists).

Food and music share the odd problem of being passed on in a means very different from the original art form. For food it is the recipe, created by a chef and passed on to be recreated without the presence of the chef. And although the chef tries to be as detailed as possible, the cooks who recreate the recipe might yield a slightly different result, even if they followed all the directions. For music, it is the score: a bunch of dots on a page with no real sound. It is the musician's job to interpret the composer's directions in order to recreate the music. And just like food, the musician can follow all the directions and still yield a unique interpretation.

Ingredients are like notes, with different shapes, sizes, characters, and pitches which don't mean much on their own; but when they combine with other ingredients/notes via techniques set down by the chef/composer, they become meaningful.