The intersection does show up in a joke about what not to say in a philosophy job interview: “Well, I'd like to finish my dissertation, but I just recently got into cajun cooking, and I want to explore that for a while.” The joke works because of a great incongruence, Philosophy and food should not mix.
But mixing them is just what an intrepid group of philosophers is doing (more on them in a subsequent blog). It’s an uphill struggle, but we’re making progress. My own contribution is the book after which this blog is named I Eat, Therefore I Think: Food and Philosophy.
What difference do food considerations make for philosophy? Let’s start with an important ideal, freedom, and a well-regarded philosopher, David Hume. Hume is a hero of mine because he always tried to be sensible and reasonable. (First philosophical aside: “sensible,” and “reasonable” are positive terms for food-friendly folks; the more typical, and exclusionary, “rational” is not). Hume also loved to cook and eat. He was one of the Western tradition’s two famously large philosophers, St. Thomas Aquinas being the other. But Hume lived in the 18th century, a century dominated by a particular philosophical assumption: everything starts out separate and isolated. The general grasp (i.e. philosophical take) on the human condition was built around an image of humans as essentially self-sufficient entities, an attitude still around today. (Second aside: yesterday’s philosophy is today’s common sense). This “we are fundamentally meant to be self-sufficient” attitude had been translated by an earlier philosopher, John Locke, into an understanding of freedom as meaning mostly “leave me alone.”
All of this makes perfect sense, if we forget the food dimension of our lives. How could anyone have envisioned humans as self-sufficient? That being left alone would bring about actual freedom to act effectively? Think about “I am free to speak Finnish”, a claim that means something only if I can actually carry on a conversation. Simply to say “no one is stopping me from learning Finnish” is a prerequisite to freedom, not its manifestation.
It took a lot of effort to arrive at the “we are self-sufficient and our highest ideal is to be left alone” position. That effort involved self-imposed amnesia: ignoring our need to feed. We enter the world hungry and dependent from the get-go. When it comes to food, we don’t want to be left alone. Hunger makes us both recognize connections and want to enhance them: with those involved in agriculture, in storing, transporting, distributing, preparing food and those who share it with us. It also occasions a recognition of dependence on natural factors, sun, earth, rainfall, bacteria, earthworms--the cluster that provides fertile soil.
It is true, that, every now and then, we like solitude. This is one of our aspirations. Still, It is only one and it arises in particular contexts. By contrast, when we think of ourselves as hungry beings, we don’t find it unusual to extend “hunger” metaphorically. Aristotle claimed that humans had a natural desire to know. The word translated as “desire,” orexis, could more accurately have been translated “appetite.” Aristotle could have added that we hunger for lots of things, friends, people we can depend on, vengeance, beauty, triumphs, peaceful coexistence, self-interest, challenges, wealth, etc. Our relation to food is thus typical in an important way: far from being self-sufficient and self-enclosed, we are appetitive creatures, bundles of tendencies, which, when well selected and channelled, as with a properly balanced diet, can enhance our lives. On the other hand, like an out- of-sync-diet, a badly combined bundle can be harmful. (Third aside: the word "diet" originally meant "way of life.")
If we wished to use fancy terms, we might say that returning food to its proper place in philosophy would help understand humans as “orexic,” i.e. as needy creatures driven to make connections. Neediness and dependence are not automatically pejorative; nor are the wants that accompany them. By contrast, “an-orexia,” seeking, not proper channeling, but rigid control and domination, is problematic. So is “pan-orexia” simply letting random appetites dominate our activities.
The ancient Greeks favored moderation, getting the balance right. When philosophers, and the rest of us (cultures are rooted in sedimented philosophy), forget the significance of food, other ideals, misleading ones, move to the center. “Just leave me alone and I will be free” is a prominent one today.
