I asked an AI this exact question. The response is very interesting and I really think this could be a fun class. Just make it somewhere between Provo and Santaquin, because I want to come.
Here's the response from the AI:
Fun question — and my honest answer is: yes, but the crime isn't neglect, it's snobbery with a paper trail.
The humanities didn't overlook food; they deliberately showed it the door. Kant ranked the senses and decided taste — the tongue kind — was too bodily to produce real beauty, merely "agreeable," like a warm bath. Hegel kept only sight and hearing as the "theoretical senses" fit for art. The great irony is that aesthetics stole the word "taste" for judging paintings while evicting the actual thing. And look at what food was: necessary, perishable, domestic, and for most of history women's work — four disqualifications in an academy that prized the optional, the permanent, the public, and the male. Food wasn't forgotten. It was blackballed.
Meanwhile it was quietly doing everything the humanities claim to care about. The most famous bite in literature — the madeleine — powers the greatest novel ever written about memory; Proust knew the tongue reaches the past faster than the mind does. Religion, which the humanities take dead seriously, keeps putting meals at the center: Passover, the Eucharist, the iftar — apparently when humans need to touch the sacred, they set a table. Cooking is arguably older than language and, per some anthropologists, the thing that made us human at all. A cuisine is a civilization's memoir written in ingredients: every dish is history, geography, trade routes, famine, and grandmother, plated.
The best objection is the necessity argument — art is what we do beyond need, and food is need. But we let architecture into the canon, and shelter is need too. The art was never the calories; it's everything past the calories, which is most of what happens in a kitchen.
Here's my twist, though: food may have won by being ignored. The arts the academy canonized got wrapped in velvet ropes and grew audiences that feel unqualified to have opinions. Food kept its audience — everyone, three times a day, no credentials required. It's also the most wabi sabi of the arts: the masterpiece exists for twenty minutes, then it's gone, and the proper response to it is gratitude and dishes.
So: yes — and the correct format for defending this thesis is obviously a class where everyone eats the argument. Whoever leads that one should expect a full living room.