When a life and a death are commemorated in a taste.

• Position: Philosophy

The next time you are about to pop a chunk of moldy Gorgonzola, lamb's lung, aged beef, or urine-scented kidney into your mouth, consider its meaning. "Part of the experience of this sort of meal," theorizes Carolyn Korsmeyer, professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo (N.Y.). "involves an awareness, however underground, of the presence of death amid the continuance of one's own life."

Korsmeyer, author of Making Sense of Taste: Food & Philosophy, did not come to this conclusion easily, She has spent years analyzing recherche tastes--the appeal of peppers so hot that they have been used as punishment; the poisonous sections of food that surround succulent and edible parts; blood puddings; overripe fruits; meats and vegetables whose toxins require careful flushing before they relinquish edible substances; decaying cheese....

Usually, when we consider "terrible" food, we are talking about the diet of the "Other"--China's lizards, dogs, bats, and fruit rats; Asia's reeking durian fruit; Japan's neurotoxic puffer fish; Australia's giant Bogong moths; to name a few. However, in the U.S., "We have our own examples of transgressive foods. These are foods that actually retain a bit of danger, or insist on reminding us of the animal death that produced them. By understanding what they represent, we can learn much about our own deeply rooted sensibilities."

While not addressing the Weight Watcher's recipe for "Fluffy Mackerel Pudding," Korsmeyer asks us to consider the penchant of some Westerners for haut gout--the "high" taste of rotting animal flesh; our craving for putrefying cheese; for fowl that is butchered, plucked, roasted, stuffed with its own organs, and presented in the form of the original bird, sometimes with claws intact; fish served with its head still attached; suckling pigs; and boars' heads.

She relates the notorious "last supper" that the dying French Prime Minister Francois Milterand served to more than 30 guests--dozens of ortolans, small migratory birds said to represent the soul of France, whose consumption not only is against the law, but considered a sin First, the birds are fattened, then drowned in Armagnac brandy.

"It seems to me most improbable to account for the development of such terrible cuisine simply in terms of the search for a really good taste pleasure" She argues that such foods have the capacity to fulfill the kinds of symbolic functions normally reserved for art--the transformation of an aversion...