What is the Pensee Sauvage and is it still alive in Modern society?

The culinary process has changed somewhat down through the ages but not to any great extent. The raw materials are still similar but innovation and creativity has been applied to them to give the finished product varying degrees of taste, texture, sensory and aesthetic pleasure. Fundamentally the tools which we use to interpret or rate our food are the very same apparatus which animals use to define theirs. The anthropology of sensory perception is essentially the same for animals and man in an evolutionary perspective (Pasquet, Simmen & Pagezy, 2000). It reflects the capacity of the animal or primitive human mind to differentiate or detect simple odours and aromas such as esters or aldehydes present in food. Given these physical constraints we are therefore limited in how far we can develop our dining pleasure as our receptive tools cannot be replaced. Scientific knowledge is now being applied to dining in the realms of Haute Cuisine by which pleasure can enhance dining appreciation through the use of complementary systems, parings and electronic devices. Humans also exercise discretion in what we do and do not eat from a practical, nutritional or survivalist perspective but for conventional reasons, every society has done so. Creativity and innovation represent an area of culture where we have developed a specifically human arena or process to reflect our apprehension of nature. This creativity has been consistently applied to our diet down through the ages; this application has been in a very cyclical fashion with trends becoming popular, disappearing and latter re-merging. Innovation in the gastronomic field has been a gradual process.