Foundations for an analysis of the gastronomic experience: From product to process

In the professional field at least, cooking has shifted substantially. From being an activity that could only be framed in the service sector, considered in terms of mercantile competition and measured in terms of its product (GDP), it now constitutes an expert system open to intra- and interdisciplinary processes of innovation and the exchange of know-how. This new institutional configuration is a challenge to those who, in the belief that the product is the central dimension of high cuisine, continue to be comfortably installed in that common sense equation that states: “a chef provides food to a diner in a restaurant”. The challenge consists in being able to imagine contemporary high cuisine as a process that transgresses the physical and mental barriers of the restaurant, to cook something that is not immediately recognisable as “food” in the parameters of common sense, employing for that purpose disruptive codes and devices extraneous to the utensils of a kitchen and whose receiver is a diner who nourishes her/himself equally from both food and experiences. Gastronomic experience is the concept that articulates all these changes.