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.