The Flight From Food

A meal in a pill?  It’s been a lingering human dream for a long  time. It’s also been regularly contested.  L. Frank Baum created professor Wogglebug who had invented a tablet-meal.  His students were no fans. They hogtied and tossed him into a river.  

Recently, young entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley reversed the student sentiment.  They came up with, not a pill, but a drink, Soylent.   Why substitute Soylent for real food? Time, money, nutrition, according to their web site.   

Let’s face it, such considerations make a kind of sense, at least within a venerable philosophical trajectory.   It’s label is dualism: we are composed of two oppositional elements, mind and  body.  One (mind) is essential, i.e. our main defining trait. The other, (body) is accidental, i.e. an accompaniment, but not crucial to who we are.

As is typical for philosophy, once a general orientation takes hold, the real change is not initially with answers, but with newly invented questions. Some examples within dualism:  If a computer can think, does that make it a person?  Can minds (carbon-based thus far) be downloadable into a silicon based network? In other words, can humans, having moved beyond their limited bodily state, live forever?  A movement called “transhumanism” thinks this is within reach.

Dualism also occasions particular food-related questions.  Eating might provide pleasurable bodily diversions but as long as we get our nutrition somehow, why not move beyond traditional eating, especially if this saves time and money in the bargain?

Here, as we saw above, is where Soylent makes its  pitch.  Just as the transhumanist believes that minds can be separated from bodies, so the fans of Soylent believe that nutrition can be separated from eating whole foods. “Free your body,” says the Soylent web site. Real meaning: “free yourself from your body.” Or,  to push the point further, “free yourself from typical animal-like modes of feeding, and thus move to a higher, less contaminated, human level of existence.” 

Rob Rhinehart, pioneer in Soylent’s development, explicitly referenced the need to break from our animal dimension. He was 6 or 7 years old, eating a salad. "I was looking down at a plate with these leaves on it. I could look outside and see leaves on the trees, and it just seemed a little weird. It seemed a little primitive--like something an animal would do. On this nice plate, in this nice house, why would I eat this thing that grows on trees? I thought 'We can do better.'''
This last phrase, “we can do better,” can be understood in a number of ways.  It can be read, as Rhinehart does, oppositionally.  We must struggle against our physiological (animal) side.  But, “doing better” can also be read transformatively.  Cooking, an activity specific to us, is one way we live our humanity. Animals eat plants. We eat plants. Animals eat meat. We eat meat.  
The basic activity is similar, but with a twist. We cook. We flavor, we sit around with other people, we talk, we clean up.  Here, “we can do better,” means embracing the kind of creature we are; seeking the consummations proper to us.  We do not succumb to an old temptation: seeking to escape our condition. 

Philosophically, it’s about our general attitude toward how we understand ourselves.  Do we follow the bifurcated path that automatically opposes our physiological and psychological sides?   Or, do we embrace our psychological/physiological mix and the fulfillments proper to it?

 Soylent’s supporters embrace the former. When Rhinehart asks “why would  I eat this thing that grows on trees” he shows how much he has bought into the oppositional philosophy.  By contrast, when we focus on cooking, not as a detachable annoyance, but  as central to who we are, we can emphasize continuity with a difference. This represents neither a sharp opposition, nor a simple absorption into the realm of other animals.

The older philosophy privileged opposition.  It sought to break free.  Break free from the chores surrounding cooking for the Soylent crowd; from a bodily limit to life, for the transhumanists. In both cases, the deeper dream was an escape from who we are.   A better  philosophy would not seek an escape. Rather it would seek out appropriate consummations for the kind of complex creature we are.  It would embrace real food, not meals in a pill or in a glass.  

Cheese and Ethics

Philosophers often talk about “the” good, as if it were a singular thing.  Sometimes that gets thinkers in trouble.  Plato and Aristotle did pretty well. Some kind of balance among multiple elements was always at work for them.  Plato thought in terms of a good society, one in which “good” was to be defined by the proper arrangement of the diverse elements.  Aristotle invented a word, “eudaimonia,” to indicate “happiness,” or human “flourishing.”   A flourishing life involves multiple elements: proper organization of dispositions, good habits, friends,  some luck as regards things like health and a stable society, along with a general reasonableness and attention to what is learned from experience. Eudaimonia, as a result, was always a complex affair.

After Aristotle, Epicurus defined “pleasure” as the content of goodness.  As a philosopher, he asked a complicating question: what is pleasure? It turned out to mean “ataraxia,” non-disturbedness. A life lived in equilibrium, with minimal disturbances, is the most pleasant life.  The Stoics, often contrasted with the Epicureans, had a similar ideal, “apatheia,” absence of powerful emotional upheavals.  

These post-Aristotelian moves marked a major change: an inward turn.  Things to be avoided, e.g. disturbances, emotional upheavals, upsets to a life lived in equilibrium--all of these arose from what was outside us.  The less we involved ourselves, the less we made ourselves vulnerable, the greater were the chances of achieving a pleasureable, minimally disturbed, life.  The older ethics assumed that a good/happy life was not possible unless there were people on whom we could depend. The newer one followed the trajectory sung by Whitney Houston : “And so I learned to depend on me.”

Religion added another ingredient.   This arrived via the teachings of a Persian sage called Mani. The internal/external distinction became a sharp good/evil split.  Manichaeism  described a world in which good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter were irreconcilable.   

Evil and good had physical manifestations.  Matter was evil, spirit was good. Within this context it made perfect sense for large numbers of men, aspiring to a good life, to withdraw from the world and become monks.  Also encouraged was a tendency as old as humanity: identifying scapegoats.  Women labelled witches felt this wrath, as did heretics.  Later writers traced political problems to “parasites”, either the idle rich (Lenin lambasted them) or poor folks (Ayn Rand lambasted them). The Nazis treated their enemies as parasites and germs, agents in need of eradication.

I thought of all this when recently visiting an artisanal cheese-making operation, the Kennebec Cheesery in the Belgrade lakes region of Maine. This particular place is homey.  It’s a farmhouse, with lots of  land, goats, sheep, a delivery of manure the day I was there (good fertilizer).  Also, plenty of bugs, some visible, others invisible, still others in refrigerated packets.  The invisible ones are mostly bacteria.  Within the Manichean disposition, bacteria fall under the “evil-to-be-exterminated” category.

Newspaper headlines about the notorious E-Coli do not help, especially when they fail to mention that most strains are harmless and even beneficial.  Eliminating them would be disastrous for our health.  Better to work with them. This is where the refrigerated packets come in handy.  The packets house bugs with names that can sound foreboding like streptococcus thermophilus, or lactobacillus casei. Others, have more recognizable labels,  penicillium roqueforti,  penicillium camemberti. Instead of aiming at elimination, cheese makers actually welcome these “germs.”  The results: healthy, tasty cheeses.

The post-Aristotelian dispensation in ethics, i.e. the inward turn, was doubly problematic.   (1) A good life was to be achieved by insulating ourselves from the vagaries of existence.  (2) The dispensation encouraged a combat mode, that is, not just withdrawal, but attempts at purification through eradication of what was considered unilaterally and unequivocally evil.

Cheesemaking offers another model: streptococcus,  lactobacillus,  penicillium, we can work together.  We could, of course, go the radical antibiotic route. But it is better to reject the Manichean, purificatory move.  Instead of defaulting to a position which is hostile, start with one that is hospitable.  Viruses?  Not eliminate, but Integrate. (We call this vaccination.)  Bacteria?  Avoid blanket condemnations. Admit a good/bad mix.  Then, welcome, integrate, harmonize, bring to helpful fruitions. Make cheese.  Mary Douglas an anthropologist with an interest in food wrote an important book about  the drive to purification. The book was called Purity and Danger.  The ethics lesson offered by cheesemakers would suggest, as a life guideline, a different title: Purity is Danger.

Boston and New Orleans

Baked beans; Black beans and rice.  New England boiled dinner; Jambalaya.  Clambake; Crawfish boil. Submarine sandwich; po’boy.  This is a tale of two typical American cities.  Typical? Shouldn’t it be one typical (Boston) and one atypical (New Orleans)?  

Boston was there from the British beginning.  Its protestant citizens played a pivotal role in the country’s founding. Their

descendants took up abolitionism.  Crossing the Atlantic, one intrepid group heard a sermon outlining a wonderful we-take-care-of-each-other, we-will-be-a-model-to-the-world, vision for the new colony. Definitely typical.

New Orleans originated about a century later.  Residents spoke Spanish and French.  It was a major slave trading center. Religion meant Catholicism and voodoo. After the Louisiana purchase, the locals were none too happy about assimilating to their new masters. Definitely a-typical.

Maybe.  The country has not stagnated.  Major changes came with the Civil War, subsequent constitutional amendments, and waves of immigration.  As we enter the 21st century, it’s probably best to say that there are many “typical” U.S. cities, including Boston and New Orleans.

What does New Orleans bring to the mix?  Well, “mix,” specifically non-Anglo mix: Spanish, French, African.  As regards food, the mix shows up in Creole cuisine. “Creole” is a good label for these dishes since they emerge from blending and combining various food traditions.

Back in Boston, the food heritage was marked by the appearance of the “Boston Cooking School” (1879), an institution made famous by Fannie Farmer and her cookbook.  

 The Boston Cooking School movement was also associated with attempts to establish a single American cuisine.  As Donna Gabaccia put it: “By proposing a national cuisine, domestic scientists helped arm a variety of reform movements aimed at limiting, or even turning back,the tide of cross-over foreign foods and eating customs.”  (p. 125).  

The philosophical issue at work here is the question of the one and the many. At the extremes, there is simple opposition, one versus many. Either one model imposed on all, or, complete variety, ignoring any attempt at unity.  In the middle: the dishes of New Orleans. These draw on diverse roots, yet provide new points of unification. The unification is not based on something antecedent, but on what emerges from contact and intermingling.

New Orleans offers a positive model in another way. Some early Boston types, the Puritans, tended to be kind of earnest, if not dour, in their suspicion of whatever seemed frivolous.  Appetites were rigorously kept under control.  Nathaniel Hawthorne was merciless in criticizing such earnestness. His “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” imagines springtime,  young people.  They want to sing and dance.  Cavorting around the Maypole, they exemplify an exuberant joie de vivre.    

The celebrants, unfortunately,  are surrounded by dour puritans. These folks were marked by a “sterner faith,”  They were not interested “in keeping up the old English mirth.” By “festival,” they meant “fast days.” Their tongues were ever ready to scold “the youth or maiden who did but dream of a dance!”  

There was little joie de vivre  in the this “stay busy, don’t let idle hands be the devil’s helpers” kind of world. Some of us interested in food and philosophy, promoting sustainability, locavores, organic foods or vegetarianism can easily slip into Puritan earnestness.  New Orleans offers a counterbalance, a force

well exemplified in relation to food. Food is about beauty, taste, enjoyment, good times shared with others.  A crawfish boil with family and friends is its embodiment.

Contemporary New Orleans it is true, does not always resonate with joie de vivre.  Instead, exemplified by Bourbon St, a seemingly slight, but significant, substitution has taken place.  The pursuit of pleasure has replaced joie de vivre,  an undertaking, we might say, pursued earnestly.  

Joie de vivre indicates more than a balancing a utilitarian nose to the grindstone attitude with one that makes a similarly concerted effort at gaining pleasure.  It indicates a general attitude of gratefulness and joy at being able to savor existence.   Its ethical model involves a well-integrated life, following the ancient Greek principle of getting the balance right.

Our New England ancestors gave us many good things, notions of a caring community, ideas about a free republic, actions to establish that republic, abolitionism.  What it did not give us was an appreciation for mixture and a sense of joie de vivre.  Fortunately, ours is a big country. In addition to Boston, we can welcome New Orleans as a partner in our joint history.

Cooking and Philosophy

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

We’ve all heard the joke. What do philosophy graduates say:  “Want fries with that?”  Actually, philosophy graduates do well. They may not begin with the highest salaries, but they move up quickly.    

Just as importantly, there is more to link philosophy and food than humor.  No one has trouble recognizing the importance of food--we eat or we perish.  Plenty of people have trouble recognizing the importance of philosophy.  Critics complain of its irrelevance and predict its demise.  Lately, the physicist Neil Degrasse Tyson got on that bandwagon.   Prior to him came the blunt proclamation by  Stephen Hawking: “philosophy is dead.”  

Philosophy has a ready rejoinder: exactly what kind of claim is that?  It doesn’t emerge from a physics experiment, from a chemistry lab, from manipulation of genes.  Isn’t it a philosophical claim?  Doesn’t it articulate a generic take on things, provide some general orientation, give hints about getting our bearings as we navigate life?  Hawking is saying “philosophy is dead,” and “it takes a philosophical statement to articulate its demise.”  The inner contradiction “I’m doing philosophy at the very moment I’m pronouncing its irrelevance” is why Etienne Gilson was fond of saying that “philosophy always buries its undertakers.”

There is plenty of bad philosophy, plenty of highly technical “let’s-only-talk-to-ourselves-in language-no-one-understands-about-problems-of-concern-to-no-one-else” kind of philosophy.  Criticizing these is not the same as outright dismissal.  Philosophy provides a general orientation toward life. Since we all work from a set of comprehensive bearings, we all participate in philosophy, albeit mostly in an implicit, rather than explicit way.

Those who approach it explicitly root their orientation in some basic characterization of what it means to be human.  This often starts by asking how humans are different from other animals.  Some answers are flippant: we are the creatures who are always asking “how are we different?”  We are the creatures who plan out rest room stops. Plato suggested the “featherless biped.” A later thinker plucked a chicken, tossed it in the midst of Plato’s students and said “here is a man.”  Building on the plucked feathers theme, we might say that humans are those creatures who shave off their body hair; or, more accurately, those who force females to shave off their body hair.

More serious characterizations were typically built around the phrase “man is a rational animal.”  Because “rational”

tended to exclude our embodied, emotive dimension, i.e. it identified more Mr. Spock than Captain Kirk, alternatives were sought out.    Homo laborans and homo ludens, the animal that labors, the animal who engages in games, helped emphasize other dimensions of human life, as did “the story-telling animal.” Recently, thanks to Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human,  a new general standpoint  emerged: the cooking animal.

Not only is cooking unique to humans, it is an activity that is integrative where the older “rational” was exclusionary.  “Rational” encouraged detachment, aloofness and neutrality.  Cooking emphasizes involvement, interaction, dependence and concern.  For some strange reason, philosophers have tended to think of humans as outside spectators, dispassionate cogitators receiving, recording and processing data.   It’s not clear where they got this notion, but it has little to do with real people.  There was some pushback. The American Pragmatists, John Dewey, William James, Charles Peirce, situated humans within everyday, ordinary practices, the engaged, value-laden doings and undergoings of everyday life.

When our philosophical orientation works out of a context centered on ourselves as “cooking animals” the philosophical map  tends to favor the Pragmatists.  The Mr. Spock model, cold, hyper-logical, aloof, fades to the periphery, as does any sense that things around us are neutral, “just facts” until we bestow “values” upon them.  As hungry creatures, we are interested participants, not detached observers.  Such engaged individuals are led to ask about the best combinations of foodstuffs for good health.  They lean toward companionship (literal meaning: sharing bread) and enjoyment. They occasion reflection about how best to secure resources for a healthy, vibrant community.  In other words, they dispose us in new ways toward typical philosophical issues: the nature of reality (metaphysics), the structure of knowing (epistemology), questions about what is good (ethics), issues of political economy (social/political philosophy).

Physicists like Tyson and Hawking are reacting to a narrow understanding of philosophy.  The recent graduate asking “would you like fries with that” could tell them that physics will never answer questions about friendship, about beauty, about justice, or for that matter, how physics fits in to our overall understanding of things.  Like it or not, philosophy always buries its undertakers.

Eating (Donuts) Alone

Eating (Donuts) Alone

Did everyone celebrate “national donut day,” the first Friday in June?  During the last decade, I’ve savored exactly one doughnut. As age progresses, diet regresses.  Still, I can enjoy vicariously.  

Donuts are festive.  A box of donuts in the break room or the family table is an invitation to conviviality.   They manifest what I have called “vector objects,” shared platters which bring people together. The two pictures I chose for my book’s cover indicate different vector objects, a bowl of noodles, a plate of fries. A box of donuts could have served just as well, as could the more traditional examples of communion, the peace pipe, the stew pot.

The central serving container, still prevalent in “family style” eating, has faded in restaurants.  There, individual plating,  official name, service à la russe, dominates.  It was not always so.  Until the 19th century, the use of central serving dishes, service à la française, predominated.

Whether the history of cuisine and the history of philosophy move in tandem, I am not sure.  The move from service à la française to service à la russe does parallel the fading of a venerable philosophical position.  Aristotle said it directly: “man is a political animal.” He meant that we are inherently social and communal. In other words, there is no such thing as an isolated individual and, politically speaking, there is no kind of existence that precedes communal existence.  Today  this seems counterintuitive.  We assume there must first be individuals who then get together in some kind of communal existence.  But that’s because we live within a world dominated by philosophical ideas quite different from those of Aristotle.  In reaction to  oppressive dimensions that can accompany community life, philosophers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau overreacted. They postulated some aboriginal existence of isolated individuals. They even invented a pre-communal condition, the so-called “state of nature.”

Just as the Aristotelian emphasis led, because of excesses, to a counterbalancing move,  so now the emphasis on the individual has reached a point of excess.  Here is where donuts show up again.  Instead of the festive pile of donuts, or simply the shared box, we now have the drive-thru, the single donut in a bag.   Goodbye to both service à la française and service à la russe.  Hello “nutritional episodes,” isolated, solitary eating.

Nutritional episodes identify the food version of Robert Putnam’s important work Bowling Alone.  Putnam’s point was that the dwindling impulse to join social groups, i.e. the impulse to bowl individually and not in leagues, was both a bellweather of current practices and a danger to democratic life.  Such a life demands people in contact, conversation, deliberation and interaction in multiple ways.  Isolated, discrete units do not a healthy democracy make.

Eating alone, tells the same story.  Once this becomes prevalent, it’s time for a correction.  The early modern thinkers like Rousseau and Locke built their correction on  pure fantasy, the projected isolated individuals in a mythical “state of nature.”  Contemporary philosophers tend to be more tied to the concrete.  That is why Corine Peluchon, in Les Nourritures, philosophie du corps politique, can assert, in a provocative way, that we never really eat alone.

In one sense, of course, we are alone seated in the car dribbling donut crumbs.  What else, though, is going on?

The donut enjoyed by drive-thru patrons is not one for which they oversaw the growth of  wheat and sugar cane, central to its production. Nor did they transform these grasses into the finished ingredients, flour and granulated sugar.  Nor did they transport those products, sell them, purchase them, mix them together, cook the final product. The donut itself is already a nexus of intersecting and interlocking processes engaged in by real people.  It is possible to say “I am eating this donut outside the company of others.”  It is not possible to say, “I am eating alone” in the sense that this activity does not implicate me in a web of interdependence. Even the forager should recognize that without bees, bacteria, earthworms, ants, there would be no plants, and thus the solitary ingestion of even foraged food is not, strictly speaking, eating alone.

But, the philosophical trajectory within which we find ourselves not only occludes these very real dimensions, it also encourages a faulty understanding of who we are. That trajectory was built on an imaginative fabrication, the original state of nature. Better, with Peluchon to rebuild our awareness of interdependencies by a more concrete appreciation of the nexus embedded in Homer Simpson’s favorite treat.

Short Readings: Philosophy and Food

“Use your noodle,"  “ruminate,” "chew the fat," there are several food metaphors for the open-ended process of thinking.  In a related way, “eat drink and be merry,”  “one man’s meat is another man’s poison,” and “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” indicate some substantive philosophical positions: hedonism, relativism, economic conservatism.
Aristotle had no problem using food language.  He associated friendship with food, referring, quite rightly, to an ancient proverb that identified friends as those “who have eaten salt together.”  On the other hand, Ludwig Feuerbach, supporting a too-simple materialism, uttered the famous “man is what he eats.” (Der Mensch ist was er isst), a cute pun, but a misleading and thus false phrase.

Feuerbach’s example serves as a cautionary tale. Philosophers who are interested in food need not  be those who would reduce the complexities of human existence to minimal physiological procedures.  Cooking, feasting, sharing, along with associated rituals, provide a fuller picture of how the combination nature-culture must always be kept in mind. Attempts to separate them, to say, for example we are merely “what we eat,” should be avoided.  A more accurate phrase would be: we are how we eat.  The way we deal with our need for nutrition is one major marker of how we understand ourselves.

My own interest in the food/philosophy intersection emerged after a sabbatical year in France.  Upon return, with an inkling for something we had missed, we ordered some local pizza.  I went to to pick it up.  In front of me was a young man. He ordered two slices and

a can of soda, went out onto the sidewalk, turned the two slices over each other, swallowed them quickly, alternating with gulps from his soft drink.  After tossing the can into a nearby trash container, he moved on.  This was dinner.

It also represented a microcosm of meaning. It indicated a specific take on how the young man situated himself vis à vis the key relations that characterize human life: to the natural world, to contemporaries, to ancestors, to progeny, to transcendence.  His action reversed the “only connect” adage of E.M. Forster.  
The important point was that the “eat-alone-and-hurriedly” habit, i.e. “only disconnect,” spoke volumes about philosophical positions that have become commonplace: time is a precious commodity; food preparation and eating represent ways  of wasting such time; eating is not a sacred act that connects us in gratitude to the bounty provided by the natural world; eating is not a social act;  beauty and taste are expendables; much more valuable are convenience and efficiency.

There’s a lengthy philosophical trajectory behind all this. It is one that transformed flesh and blood humans into “thinking things,” (René Descartes) or “rational agents” (Immanuel Kant.) These “rational agents” tended more and more to be understood apart from the ongoing activities associated with our fuller flesh and blood dimensions.  Rodin’s “Thinker” became the iconic figure associated with the philosopher.  Plato had given us his Symposium, a dinner followed by a drinking party, and Luther had promoted “Table Talk” as suitable locales for serious deliberation.  

The dominant tradition went the other way.  The idea that a better image for exemplifying a fully human context would be a wedding feast or other shared meal, faded to the periphery.  “The Thinker” reigned supreme.  Michel Serres, a contemporary who does take ordinary food practices seriously, has the best response: “give that guy a roll of toilet paper.”

As I mentioned in my first post, there are some philosophers bucking the trend. Anyone interested in pursuing this newer take would be well advised to check out the website put together by David Kaplan. 

There are also many books,  but for for shorter pieces, I would suggest the following:

Michael Symons, "Epicurus, the Foodie's Philosopher," in Fritz Allhof and Dave Monroe, Food and Philosophy: Eat, Think, and Be Merry, 2009

Lisa Heldke, "The Unexamined Meal is Not Worth Eating: Or, Why and How Philosophers (Might, Could/Do Study Food," Food, Culture & Society, 9.2 (2006): 201-219.

------"Philosophy and Food," in Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies (2013).

Michiel Korthals, "The Birth of Philosophy and Contempt for Food," Gastronomica, Vol. 8, No. 3, Summer 2008: 62-69.

Raymond Boisvert, "Cooking Up a New Philosophy," The Philosophers' Magazine," Issue 61, 2nd quarter, 2013.

------"Philosophy Regains its Senses," Philosophy Now, 31, 2001.