Commensality: please come back

Paradise News, a 1991 David Lodge novel, relates the story of a defrocked priest who visits the United States. American customs seem strange.  Particularly striking is the penchant for nibbling, gobbling, munching, snacking. “Americans seem to like to eat on the move, like grazing cattle.”  As if to vindicate Lodge’s observation, a recent article reports that “The days of eating three large meals a day have gone the way of the butter churn.”

The central term “meal” has actually shifted its meaning.  “There’s a changed definition of what a meal is.” Formerly,  “meal” would have been associated with a

plate of warm food cooked nearby, a table or other communal setting, and people sharing food in that setting.  Today, “I might have a piece of fruit and trail mix and call that lunch.”

National food guidelines in the US still suggest three meals, with perhaps one snack.  That pattern, as the news report suggests, is becoming an ideal more respected in the breach than in the observance.

The move away from meals to snacks is but another manifestation of a philosophical shift in self understanding, one that came to prominence after the Renaissance. It was a shift which tended to isolate individuals, to treat them as separated, disconnected from their social and natural settings.  The notion of humans as isolated units brought important corollaries that remain with us today: an emphasis on “subjects” as the source of meaning, while surroundings become mere “objects”; the transformation of “choice” from a term indicating “selection among options for good reasons,”

to a quasi-magical incantation “thus I will it”; “freedom,” the actual capacity to set a course and achieve it, a capacity rooted in discipline and cooperation, becomes “autonomy,” radical disconnection; finally,  the tendency to isolate leads to prioritizing purity and disembodiment.

None of these favors a meal in the traditional sense. A meal, after all, involves other people, some elements over which we have no control, cooking, which emphasizes mixture not purity, awareness of dependence (not autonomy), and an unbreakable connection with physicality/embodiedness.

By contrast the self-definition as “isolated units” favored

a new player in the industrialized world: advertising.  The older understanding of choice as electing among options was informed by social factors: tradition, family habits,  religious customs, the need to provide a reasonable account of one’s selections. Once these traditional guidelines receded, advertising, appealing to privatized selves prizing individual choice, could advance with hardly any hindrance.  

What we find today is that the new understanding of who we are, i.e. encapsulated selves, is conjoined to well-financed publicity machines.  Not surprisingly, one result has been a decline in shared meals and a concomitant increase in snacking, i.e. privatized nutritional episodes.

The main victim is not, as is often thought, the three-meal pattern. There is no magic about the number 3. Rather the real victim is the centerpiece of regularly patterned meals: commensality, eating in the company of others.  

Such eating both reflects and reinforces a multi-dimensional sense of who we are. The multi-dimensionality of the value landscape in which we find ourselves is reflected in diverse commensal occasions: lunch with friends, with colleagues,  a birthday celebration, a national day of commemoration, or a religious service. Each of these fosters a value-shared link: family affection, friendship, persons associated in a common purpose, special recognition for a specific individual, national pride, sensitivity to the sacred.  

Some historians of food suggest that the contemporary practice of three meals became prominent in conjunction with the rise of industrialization. Similarly, we could say that the snacking phenomenon is taking hold because persons now define themselves almost exclusively as consumers, i.e. as those whose main relationship to the natural world and to others is “buy something, use it up, discard it.”  For the consumer, in its fullest form, a single value dominates life.

Commensality, by contrast, keeps multiple values alive. As a result, it finds itself more and more marginalized in a world world in which humans define themselves primarily in utilitarian, consumer-centered terms.  The commensal and the festive go together. The festive, in turn, offers an important antidote to the consumerist attitude. It says: pause, thank, share, i.e. recognize more to life than the utilitarian side.

The French sociologist of food, Claude Fischler, has gone so far as to hypothesize that a major contemporary problem, obesity, waxes and wanes in parallel with the absence or presence of commensality.  Attempts to improve nutritional health, when aimed at privatized selves seeking to maximize their privatized range of choice, will, on Fischler’s perspective, regularly fail. They actually reinforce the anti-commensal bias which represents a major constituent of the problem.

Green Bean Casserole:Friend or Foe?

Green bean casserole.  Source of major disagreement. Side A: this is one of the great  inventions of the American kitchen. Side B: this recipe represents American cuisine at  its worst.

Why bring up green bean casserole? Well, Thanksgiving's coming up, and green bean casserole is a popular Thanksgiving side dish. Also, Dorcas Reilly, the woman who oversaw its development at the Campbell Soup Company has just died.

“The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a star.” This, at least, was how the

gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin saw it.  Examples reinforce the claim: the discovery of a new star has little impact on life; but, pizza, hamburgers, mac ‘n cheese, hot fudge sundae--now those make a big difference.

What’s the controversy over green bean casserole?  One the positive side, the recipe offers great possibilities for tinkering and customizing.  It need not remain “pour factory-produced cans into a casserole.” Fresh beans can be used, ditto with  mushrooms, and onions. The sauce can be a “bechamel” (French names are always a plus for epicures).

On the negative side, and it is a big one, the recipe encourages “assembling” over “cooking,.”  The word “cooking” now means a lot more (and a lot less) than it used to. Michael Pollan made the point most clearly in  Cooked,

a point well summarized in an interview.

The upshot: a lot of activities we call  “cooking” are really “assembling.”

If humans, as the anthropologist Richard Wrangham has asserted, are the “cooking

animals,” then our humanity, to an important degree, depends on keeping up the artistry of cooking. This needn’t mean fancy, complicated dishes. One of my own favorite recipes is for Carbonade Flamande whose ingredients are beef, onions, flour, salt, pepper, thyme and beer.  

If what defines us is the physical activity of cooking, the more we move away from it, the further we remove ourselves from our humanity.   The move from cooking is part of a wider trend: the desire to secure results without old-fashioned effort. If I’m sitting at a piano bench, with a sheet of music in front of me, I can only play the music if I have undertaken lots of preliminary toil and training.  The satisfaction of successful playing comes from the combination of effort-and-result. The preliminary efforts of time, practice and concentration are also important in revealing and shaping character. In our “short-cut, it’s only the results that matter” world, character development suffers, as does the satisfaction of achievement that results from struggle. “Combine the contents of three cans” may get us a quick result, but at an important price: chipping away at what makes for the fullness or wholeness (“holiness” in religious terms) of a life.    

Cooking does not just impact the aesthetic possibilities associated with life (cultivating talent, working in a way that leads to  satisfactory culminations). It is also related to another important constituent of full humanity: liberty. Someone who can cook is actually free, i.e. really able to engage in the activity of preparing meals.   “Assemblers,” and, even more, “microwavers” have

subjugated themselves, made themselves subservient. It might not be the kind of dependency that goes by the name “addiction.” Still, the constant requirement for products from a factory means positioning oneself at the indentured extreme of the  independency-dependency continuum.

So, green bean casserole. Should it be loved or loathed? Once again a continuum has to be considered. At one end: fresh green beans, real mushrooms, cream, onions, lovingly (even if not with epicurean finesse) handled by someone who does real cooking.   At the other end: mere assemblage: empty the contents of three cans into a casserole. The latter, not surprisingly, in diminishing our capacities marks us ever more as indentured.

Why? (1) The emancipatory effects, i.e. the liberation of capacities tied to effort, are marginalized, if not abandoned outright.  (2) Once this shift has occurred, freedom is diminished. The use of factory products becomes more a necessity than a free choice. Creating a dependency that is almost like an addiction represents  a real limit on freedom. Assemblers are simply less free than cooks. This increase in dependency and decrease in freedom is, of course, what the good folks at Campbell’s sought in the first place.

Food and Philosophy

Welcome to a blog devoted to an unusual combination: food and philosophy. Unusual in that both regular folks and professional philosophers ignore how food and philosophy intersect.

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.